> Structural unemployment is usually high when there's a rapid change in demand for skills, as of course there is in tech. It results in crazy high salaries too. People with machine learning experience are getting 7-figure offers, while people with jQuery experience can't find jobs.
Another cause of structural unemployment is workforces aging into retirement, and again there's stacks of money to be made filling this gap.
This applies to Cobol developers. There are a ton of "too big to fail or rewrite" applications written in Cobol, particularly in finance. The people who wrote them are retiring. Finance is generally a great industry to have your hand in the pockets of anyway. A friend of mine has been doing this since shortly after he graduated college in 2010. He was able to start freelancing a lot earlier than I was, and his billing rate in 2012 was something like $125/hour (only slightly less than my current billing rate). Last time I talked to him he was billing $300/hour and had a 7 month backlog of work. I'm not good at keeping up with people, so we haven't talked in a few years, but it would not surprise me if he's billing $350/hour now.
I've largely prioritized time/freedom over stability/money in recent years, but if I ever had a kid and needed stability/money again, I'd be transitioning toward that.
Another cause of structural unemployment is workforces aging into retirement, and again there's stacks of money to be made filling this gap.
This applies to Cobol developers. There are a ton of "too big to fail or rewrite" applications written in Cobol, particularly in finance. The people who wrote them are retiring. Finance is generally a great industry to have your hand in the pockets of anyway. A friend of mine has been doing this since shortly after he graduated college in 2010. He was able to start freelancing a lot earlier than I was, and his billing rate in 2012 was something like $125/hour (only slightly less than my current billing rate). Last time I talked to him he was billing $300/hour and had a 7 month backlog of work. I'm not good at keeping up with people, so we haven't talked in a few years, but it would not surprise me if he's billing $350/hour now.
I've largely prioritized time/freedom over stability/money in recent years, but if I ever had a kid and needed stability/money again, I'd be transitioning toward that.