What devs (especially American) need to realize in 2024

You are labor. Expensive labor, possibly on the level of a staff lawyer or some other kind of specialist. Most of your higher-ups don’t really distinguish much between you and the other devs that some recruiter pulled up on LinkedIn.

Anyone in a leadership position of any tech or even tech-adjacent company gets spammed dozens of times per day by teams from around the world who promise to do the same work faster and for a fraction of the cost.

Anyone in a leadership position of any tech or even tech-adjacent company gets spammed dozens of times per day by miracle products from around the world that promise to simplify things they are likely working on.

When it comes to the "Build vs Buy" question in 2024, the equation leans heavily towards "Buy". The market has funded so many tools, that there are tons of actually great options (including many “no-code” ones) out there that promise to do much of what they want and have a friendly UI on it.

Companies are less interested in investing in you long term and more interested in consuming your time and talents. They might see you as someone who can better handle the outsourced labor they found on a site like Deel, Turing, or Upwork. Perhaps they even want you to be some sort of “leader”, which often means cleaning up and patching together the AI-generated code that a lot of these places put out (which normally means logging in at strange hours so you can try to communicate in broken English to people in faraway places).

At the end of day, you are a cost center and a number that keeps going up. You are a human that will want to take the occasional vacation. Maybe you even want healthcare? When companies work set up some contract with a firm in another country, none of that is their problem. They pay a fixed price and (hopefully) get something that does what they asked for.

Some of my friends who are developers like to think that product managers actually care about their input. I have seen my well-intentioned friends put together beautiful wireframes and feature proposals for those to get completely ignored. I have personally delivered presentations that used data to make a compelling story or argument, just to have that ignored by product managers who had already decided how they wanted to see things.

The reality is that for many founders and companies, our ability to write code is just a means to their ends. Unless you are given a meaningful stake in the success, don’t let their stories get to your head.

And yes, the comfortable times of being a “software engineer” in the US are over and not coming back.

If you want to keep living the life you had before, you are either going to have to find something very well-funded and enjoy it while that lasts, or figure out a way to reinvent yourself.