Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need not be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are. It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know.
I do concur it is an individualistic strategy, and as you mentioned unionization might have helped. But, then again it might not. Developers are partially unionized where I live, and I'm not so sure it's going to help. It might absorb some of the impact. Let's see in a couple of years.
> Alternatives need not be better or worse. Just different. Alternatives need [not] be doing the same thing somewhere else, it might be seeking out something else to do where you are.
People have families to feed and lifestyles to maintain, anything that's not equivalent will introduce hardship. And "different" most likely means worse, when it comes to compensation. Even a successful career change usually means restarting at the bottom of the ladder.
And what's that "something else," exactly? You need to consider that may be disrupted at the same time you're planning on seeking it, or fierce competition from your peers makes it unobtainable to you.
Assuming there are alternatives waiting for you when you'll need them is its own kind of complacency.
> It might be selling all your stuff and live on an island in the sun for all I know.
Yeah, people with the "fuck-you" money to do that will probably be fine. Most people don't have that, though.
Being ahead of the curve is a recipe for not being left behind. There is no better time for action than now. And regarding the competition from peers, the key is likely differentiation. As it always has been.
Hardship or not, restarting from the bottom of the ladder or not, betting on status quo is a loosing game at the moment. Software development is being disrupted, I would expect developers to produce 2-4x more now than two years ago. However, that is the pure dev work. The architecture, engineering, requirements, specification etc parts will likely see another trajectory. Much due to the raise of automation in dev and other parts of the company. The flip side is that the raise of non-dev automation is coming, with the possibility of automating other tasks, in turn making engineers (maybe not devs though) vital to the companies process change.
Another, semi related, thought is that software development has automated away millions of jobs and it’s just developers time to be on the other end of the stick.