I graduated in 2001. My starting salary was 70K. I don't know anyone who started at less than 50.

There's dozens of unencumbered languages. C and C++ for a start. That isn't even remotely a problem.

That's a good point. And in reality no place is 100% safe- secondary effects happen, and it will cut down open jobs as the job market has more supply than it can handle for a while. Even safer jobs will see less money as raises slow or stop due to market conditions.

Another good area would be boring old line of business apps for established non-tech companies. Unless of course I'm wrong about where the bubble is forming, in which case this could be totally off.

I've avoided being the Peter one so far, one of the reasons why I'm still a coder and not a manager :)

First off, a television programmer isn't a computer programmer. (Normally television programmer means picking whats on TV, unless you mean you were a computer programmer for a TV station). Different fields, so I have no idea what your realistic expectations are.

But when they asked you to quit if you didn't like it, you should have. On the spot, no notice given, right then. "Then I quit" and walk right out the door. Odds are good you'd have the job back paying a lot more in 3 days. If not, either they'll grow to really regret you leaving or you'll find out you weren't really that good. But either way accepting that treatment is the worst thing you could do- now they know you're a doormat and will show you absolutely 0 respect.

As for a town with 10% unemployment- general unemployment means jack shit for specialized jobs. Unemployment for software engineers has been sub 2% (basically normal frictional unemployment from job switching) for years and in some areas is negative. So that's fear and ignorance talking. Not to mention even if it was that bad you can always move. It doesn't take that much (a cross-country move can be done for 5K) and most companies will pay to relocate you.

90K is a lot of money in even most big cities. I made 90K for a few years in Seattle. I had my car (paid off), a downtown condo (not paid off), my utilities paid and was still saving 20K a year. With a family I'd have been living in the suburbs and paying half the housing cost. Re-evaluate your spending. The only place it would be even remotely tight would be San Francisco or New York- and even then its quite managable. Not to mention those are entry level wages for programmers in either city. Nor is 90K anywhere near the top of the scale in Seattle- good senior programmers there make at least 120.

Then don't be a single income family. Then don't have kids. Those are choices you made. The tradeoff of making them is that you lose flexibility at work. Obviously you thought that's worth it.

Its also not as hard as you think it is. Go back to basics. Don't eat out- ever. Don't by gizmos and gadgets. Don't go on expensive trips. My family lived on a single teacher's income in the 80s. And we still managed to save money. My father's income then would have been less than 40K, that equals about 80K in today's dollars. If you're making less than that as a programmer you're fucking up majorly.

I have a decade and a half of experience, I've been tech lead at 2 successful startups that sold for large profits and a principle at a 3rd. I have CEOs and VCs who would go to bat for me, so no I have 0 worries that I personally will be unemployable. Nobody with experience should have that worry- if you're any good you have former coworkers who will vouch for you.

And your fear of gaps is overwrought. I've also had multi-month gaps in the past- in 2009 because I decided I'd rather not work for the assholes who bought one of those sartups any longer, even if the economy sucked and in 2012 because I took the profits from the sale of the 2nd and decided to travel for 6 months. After the second one I ended up making 30K more a year than I was before. I've never had more than a casual question on either gap. Nobody gave a fuck.

Because they pump in water from non-desert areas. Not all of CA is a desert, but much of it is. Nor is "dry barren area" the definition of a desert- a desert is defined by the amount of rainfall a year. Most of southern CA qualifies.

The bubble isn't really tech. Its some aspect of tech. Just like the .com bust was caused by too much money in startups without legitamate ways of raising revenue and the 2008 collapse wasn't a banking collapse, it was a ssubprime mortgage collapse. Figure out what the cause will be, and find a company that is not in that subfield and has minimal reliance on it. This won't allow 100% avoidance, but will limit your exposure.

FWIW I expect the eventual burst to be due to an advertising collapse- someone has to actually sell something at some point. Established companies that sell physical goods should be immune, firmware would be a good call.

Also, the best way to be bubble immune- cash in the bank, so you can ride it out. I don't need to work this decade, so a few months without a job won't hurt me.

Then save some money. We make a ton of it as programmers, there's no excuse not to have at least 6 months, preferably more, in your emergency funds. I have enough I don't need to work this decade. If any employer wants to abuse me, I say "no". If they threaten to fire me I say "go ahead"- it will cost them tens of thousands of dollars to find my replacement, and I'll have a job inside 3 weeks. Hell it would be a nice little surprise vacation.

From the dead? Sure, why not? Prioritize from areas that would be covered at burial.

Better solution- make all organs automatically donated upon death. The owners don't need them anymore. Then no money needs to be involved at all, and we'd have a ready supply. The family can get what's left of the body after any usable organs have been harvested. Bonus- a system that's actually fair, rather than making money the determining factor.

lol, wouldnt that be upsetting.

It goes to show that the land and sea based measurement is as reliable as each other. Once heat islands are identified, language is written to say what an should algorithm do to correct this (drop temps after 1960 for land, for example). The output of the algorithms always seem to demonstrate that we cant measure temperature in the past, but we're 99% confident we can measure them now.

Its a shame we could send a man to the moon but cant measure temperature "properly".

The RSS and UAH satalite data agree with the weather balloon data. So as long as the warmists don't find a reason why satalite and balloon data is unreliable, its hard to prove AGW is happening at all while we don't adapt to both warm and cold, dry and wet conditions. Isnt that what a modern society would do?

But a slower moving car is less likely to cause injury in a crash and a rear collision is less dangerous than a side crash. Given a choice of those two, I'd risk being rear ended. But it sounds here to me that either approach alone may have worked, the switch in the middle failed miserably.