In mid to large cities in the US it was and still is depending on the situation. Historically, during hype cycles in tech, starting salaries can be crazy. Mostly at the FAANG companies, but even smaller companies would do this sometimes too.

During Covid, my spouse knew a guy who got hired right out of college, didn’t even complete his 4 year cyber security degree. Starting salary was 95K, with zero experience, and this was a mid-sized city.

And even if you weren’t getting six figures right out of college, you could land a job still making 65-85K starting as a junior dev, and within 18-24 months, jump ship or get promoted and be making 100K+

Also remember that depending on the city, 100K salary isn’t “that much” money, and places that are typical tech hubs in the US (San Francisco, Seattle, NYC) are also some of the most expensive places to live in the country, and often literally in the world.

Tech pay is wild in the USA because of the Silicon Valley culture and the massive government subsidies that the industry has gotten for decades to artificially pump its growth.

This is one of the reasons why tech workers have made almost no progress getting unionized, it’s a deliberate tactic by the industry. Pay super high salaries, sprinkle in some healthy American Individualist propaganda, and most people won’t have any incentive to unionize, they can always get a job that pays well to very well.

That’s finally starting to change, as enshitification takes over and tech companies begin to treat tech workers just as shittily as other kinds of workers. This AI bubble has already resulted in a ton of layoffs in the tech sector, when it finally pops, it will be absolutely devastating. Painful for millions, but probably will be the catalyst for a real unionization effort, and not just of tech workers, but workers in general.

Of course, that’s what I said; in this Capitalist world, sometimes you have to compromise and choose a worse license in order to support FOSS.

MIT makes sense in a Capitalist world where corpos want all the advantages of FOSS without having to give up the massive amounts of money generated and protected by IP laws.

Copyleft licensing scares them away, and anything that scares mega-corps away is probably good.

Don’t get me wrong, MIT is still better than proprietary licensing, but not as good as strong Copyleft licensing like the GPL.

MIT is the most popular Open Source Permissive license. It’s permissive vs Copyleft like the GPL, meaning it doesn’t require the same license to modifications/forks. That means new contributions to MIT licensed code can be made closed source at any time, which is why it’s so popular in the Silicon Valley corporate Open Source space.

Companies love having the ability to start out Open Source so that can rapidly develop and get free code contributions from the community, then when their application gets super popular and deeply integrated, they change the license to something more restrictive to lock in customers/vendors/users and start getting more money.

That’s why some folks in the FOSS community don’t like it. It’s still better than straight up proprietary licenses, because the old MIT version can still be forked and remain open if there is a large enough community around it, (this happened a few years ago with Terraform and Open Tofu). Best though to just start out with a Copyleft license like the GPL.

Same for me. I clearly separate my “experiemental” machines from my “just works” machines now.

My laptop runs LMDE, my servers are mostly Debian 13, a handful of Ubuntu Server in there. My gaming rig is Nobara Linux, which is just Glorious Egg roll’s gaming-optimized Fedora build. When I first set it up a few years ago, I had everything all customized, themes, fonts, icons, fancy desktop/window effects, etc.

I actually considered just going with something vanilla recently, not because I have had any major issues with my current set up, but just because I don’t feel like tinkering with it anymore.

My tinkering desire has shifted more and more towards server/enterprise infrastructure and DevOps automation.

I’m older now, my career has taken off, and with that comes more responsibilities and mental energy required during the workday, then family obligations through the week/month, etc. I find myself with less time and mental energy to just tinker and play with tech. So when I do find myself with a bit of free time, I want to maximize it and work on stuff that both helps with my actual career, and helps me get more stuff self-hosted for myself and my family.

Way back in college, I used to spend more time tweaking my PC’s overclock than actually gaming xD

Ryzen 7 5800 X3D Radeon RX 9070XT 32GB of DDR4 system memory.

What local models have you been using? And what hardware are you running them on? I’ve been playing with local LLMs a bit for exactly your use case.

I have zero interest in vibe coding or full agentic workflows. But having a local LLM generate a Bash script to help me automate parts of my home lab infrastructure would be nice.

Awesome!

Oh great, they’re already preparing the next industry grift mania…

Lol, awesome. 🎉🌈✊🏳️‍🌈🎊 FOSS is for everybody!

Nice, I’ll have to give it a try.

Thanks for the feedback!

I’ve been super happy with Bitwarden for years now. But with their new CEO being a big Private Equity guy, I am wary of the enshitification risk.

I’ve been looking for an alternative that works on both Android and other platforms. I use my phone for a lot of random stuff, so my password manager working on my phone is essential.

Has KeyPassDX been good? Does it work with the same password database as KeyPassXC?

Classic enshitification arc. They were a fast growing startup that engineered really good printers and software. People, especially newbies flocked to them because their software was easy to use and their initial print quality was very good without any tweaking or tuning.

But they were backed by private equity, and had to start showing higher and higher returns, they started locking in users with their proprietary cloud services.

They’ve been locking users in more and more recently, and just a few weeks ago, threatened a user with legal action for posting AGPL code up on their own repo. The code enabled users to use their Bambu printers without needing to sign into Bambu’s cloud.

Now there is a big community backlash and Bambu is having to do PR damage control.

My Jellyfin server goes, “Burrrrrrr!”

Never been so happy to sail the seven seas! 🏴‍☠️🥰🏴‍☠️ Jellyfin FTW

I can’t speak for other fields, but I’ve worked in IT as a sysadmin for about a decade at a bunch of different companies, big and small.

I’ve never worked at a place that was close to “overstaffed” nearly every place I’ve worked we’ve needed at least 2-4 additional people.

Everybody was overworked, overwhelmed with tickets and projects, working 50+ hours a week constantly.

But upper management and executives love claiming that staffing is maxed out and needs to get more lean. Like, dude, our IT team is handling dozens of tickets a day, running 5-10 different infrastructure projects simultaneously, and keeping near-decade old equipment alive because we were denied our third budget request in a row.

Aaaaaand example #99999… Of why tech sovereignty is so important. The moment you start outsourcing your control, you become vulnerable to this exact kind of action by a company.

Everybody got sucked into the cloud “magic” for years, but now we are seeing the monster emerge more and more as proprietary technology enshitifies.

Luckily, there is a boom happening across the FOSS world, more and more people are finally waking up to the principles of software freedom and actual ownership.

May it continue to grow, as the corpos struggle and wither.

Lol, the poor suckers who ever paid for premium in the first place.

So true! Also, productive screentime has been nice. Instead of doomscrolling or mindlessly zoning out to video essays, I’ve been programming, doing some 3D modeling for 3D printing, working on some simple games, and reading long form articles from my own curated news feed.