Some industries are so backwards and difficult to disrupt that many companies can just continue operating this way for many generations of staff turnover.

Yup. I'd never blame someone for taking a better job elsewhere.

When does the market for engineers turn into a buyer's market?

If the economy goes into recession or worse, do those playing hot potato get stuck out in the cold?

Once the talent pipeline fills up (not likely) or leadership realizes that technology is a mixed blessing and may not be worth the complexity. Right now you have to have technology to compete but eventually mid sized companies will realize it's not worth the millions a year it takes to try and keep up with the Joneses and keep the technology as simple as possible.

However, it's also difficult to find unskilled labor so the only alternative is automation. Just look at all the companies that won't answer a phone anymore and force you to do everything through an app.

So IMO tech wages will remain high for quite some time.

It's a cycle, like anything else. Tech was largely spared during the last recession. Who knows what's going to happen during the next?

Cycles of arbitrary periods are nearly indistinguishable from a random walk. My guess is the latter.

What does this mean? Can you please rephrase?

Many people look at a chart that goes up and down and imagine they see cycles. It's popular to speak of business cycles, for example. Unfortunately, it is not clear that anything in the economy oscillates such that it's appropriate to describe the system as having cycles.

You might have heard of Fourier transforms. Any time-series can be transformed into its sinusoidal components, even if a composition of waves is not a good model.

It's possible, and in my opinion more likely, that the business cycle is not a cycle at all.

I mean, this is pretty much the explanation for share price movements, so, yeah it should be for everything else.

Consider my mind blown - thank you !

Here's what I think he means.

If you look at trends over an arbitrary period, they may look useful.

If you look at the similar trends over a larger period, they look different.

Therefore, the smaller periods are just random variations relative to the larger periods.

Close. It's more a comment on the structure of those random variations, and whether it's appropriate to describe the system as periodic at all.

For example, sometimes it rains, and sometimes the sun shines. Is the weather cyclical? Depends on the place, time, and time-scale you're considering.

Maybe a better example is roulette. If you watch the "cycles" of red and black, you might imagine you could make predictions. Gamblers are often fooled by this randomness.

This is a good observation that I upvoted because it's very relevant. A lot of things look like cycles but have no oscillating dynamic, it's true.

But you could suppose that business cycles are caused by a build-up of bad debt. Things to well, debts can be paid, collateral gets worth more, more investment, etc. This can't go on forever and the reverse cycle then occurs, often as rates come up. Soros store about this and called it reflexivity.

Of course I'm not saying business cycles are definitely caused by this, there's probably more to it than that. But it's a common explanation.

> caused by a build-up of bad debt

Why does it build up? A generalized autoregressive model explains that just as well as an oscillator does. The key difference is how predictable the periods are. The more waves you're composing to force the oscillator model to fit, the less likely it's appropriate.

ELI5: "Who knows?"

Yes who cares

Take the risk or don’t

How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better? Is it not the case that the majority of open job opportunities are ones other people have recently left from unhappiness?

I think there's a lot of "grass is greener" moves happening. Unless you have trusted friends working in a company, it is very hard to tell if it actually is better than your current situation until you've tried it. None of the sources of information available to an outsider (including Glassdoor reviews and HN posts extolling the virtues or sounding off about the horribleness of a given company) are particularly predictive of what your individual experience will be, from what I have seen. There's just too much variability, and too much bias in each narrator.

Not only that, jobs seem to have a "honeymoon" period after which you start to notice more issues you might have originally ignored (so things seem fine for the first few months)

> How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better?

Several of us exited a toxic company semi-recently.

For what it's worth, it was common for people to take minor cuts to total compensation. The old, toxic company had evolved to pay well because it was the only way they could retain people (however briefly) through the obvious toxicity. We just didn't talk about it publicly much.

But it didn't matter. Huge quality of life improvement and I don't really miss the extra money.

It seems like many companies are more willing to offer high salaries to new hires than to give incumbent employees competitive raises.

I just ask if they do daily standups, and see what they say. It's a pretty good indicator. The more clueless the more religious they are about them (imho)

In addition to the other comments, better for one person may not be better for the next person.