How will these people mentally cope with the coming realities of having to trade their $300k comp (some of which didn't require a lot of work during their tenure) for making $80k writing CRUD apps and line of business software at some local shop 40hrs a week. The job market isn't great right now, not to mention oversaturated with programmers, it's not like they will all move over to Google tomorrow. Even if they have plenty of money, it's an ego hit to slash your comp by 2/3 just to stay employed. Not to mention they have the stink of layoff on them, even if you were a top performer it's the very first question recruiters ask incredulously. These people had a golden ticket but fell into the vat of chocolate.
Let your ego die and realize your golden ticket can run out at any time. You are not a software engineer; you are a person who, for some amount of time, pays the bills performing software engineering work. What you do and who you are after the golden ticket runs out is up to you.
I really worry for the ones who bought inflated real estate and are looking at a 50-pct salary reduction. That will hurt hard. Not to mention the work from home people with long commutes being asked to RTO at a lower pay.
In managing contractors, I've seen the ones what were able to jump on a well paying <12-month contract and think that is their next level of compensation and it will never be below that level. It always seemed to reset to a mean salary.
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