I went through this in 2002. It took me a long time to accept that the good life in the years before wasn’t because I was so smart but because of a favorable market. It was quite a shock to actually having trouble finding something new and also to accept that my pay was significantly lower. Somebody told me at that time “now you see how job search always has been for most of us”.
Honestly, I'd rather this was all over and things went back to normal, but I do think that there's going to be a fairly hard reset of salaries for people that previously had a really sweet ride.
How much is that as a fraction of the value of an average family home in your location?
If there's a big fall in salaries, there's also going to be a big fall in property values.
I don’t think so. Rents will go up and housing ownership will be concentrated even more on wealthy people and big companies.
The amount of senseless applications and waste is staggering.
Technology is not going to contract any time soon. Quite the opposite. It's also really hard to build and distribute technology products well. Good software engineers and tech sector employees will continue to be in high demand for quite a while.
There might be an interim period of depressed income but that will also likely correlate with reductions in cost of living, as a consequence of the same macro factors. The key is that a good technology employee making wise career choices will continue to be able to live somewhere towards the front of the standard-of-living curve.
What might be lost for a while are some of the more extreme tail outcomes (in the many millions of $s) that had become a bit too easily realized in this latest iteration of frothy tech bubbles. Not a big deal. Most of us won't notice any difference.
"I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance."
Everyone? Not a chance. You and I who have previously experienced and survived the closest to it? Maybe.
I've never seen anything like COVID-19. I lived through the dot-com bubble, watching friends who want from an IPO party to crying and packing up their car back to Iowa within 6-months. Tech contracted and survived. Then there was the 2008 financial crisis. In that case, the damage was spread out beyond tech centers. Capital markets dried up and life seemed very uncertain for awhile.
With COVID-19, we went from extreme prosperity to an unprecedented shutdown of global economies with massive uncertainty as to how long this will last. Every business will be affected, the vast majority of them negatively.
I really wonder whether everyone is prepared for what it means to live in scarcity instead of abundance.