This is the man who knows. These companies have job posting length requirements/policies and shit too, they don't turn on a dime. ..but yeah any dev worth half a damn has never had to collect unemployment. You log on to linked in and get 20 messages the next day. The tech economy is held together with spit and duct-tape, the work is often frustrating, often tedious, you have to have a ridiculous IQ and/or a ton of experience in a given platform/codebase to be worth a damn for the real large scale/low level stuff. You have to be autistic enough to communicate effectively with a machine (the most autistic thing possible) and then also play inter office politics with people who can't understand anything you say to them but expect you rebuild the warp nacells with a spoon and some rubber bands. You're salaried but the companies want to work you like a dog because you are so damned expensive and the 'golden handcuffs' (though around here it's more like 'gold plated handcuffs') are real. I've lost it on a PM who didn't want me to take lunch, wanted to buy me lunch, go get the lunch for me, whatever as long as I kept coding his last minute shit (and I knew I was going to be there all night). The whole point of getting lunch is to take a break from you and your bullshit you asshole. I can afford my own sub sandwich. On the West Coast it's more competitive and the salaries are higher but the game is the same. It's cheaper to hire a bunch of middle mangers to poke you with a stick and say 'code faster' than it is to hire more devs. They also want to replace you with some foreigner who will work for half your salary and have you train them yourself. Same with the whole 'women in tech' push, they just want to widen the candidate pool so they can lower wages. You get mostly glorified button pushers/data enterers/paint by numbers types like in the 40's/50's. A few wind up on par with an average male dev, I've never seen one who can hold a candle to the real big brains though.