My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career; free flow of information over the internet and commodification of spreadsheets changed all of it. From my parents' generation, I know practical effects folks who became unemployable once movies went to digital effects; engineers who found their draftsmanship skills obsolete. Folks with near-photographic memories whose entire superpower was destroyed by computing. I personally grew up in a blue collar community that was income depressed because its labor became commodified, though that was due to mechanization.
The only thing I don't really agree with is where you say "My parents-in-law started their careers as management consultants. The job in their time was much higher prestige and much higher value than it was when I started my career." I still think of management consultants as some of the highest paid careers around, and getting a partnership track job at one of the Big 3 is one of the most desirable jobs (for MBA types anyway) there is, so I just don't know what you're talking about with this one.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that. I just meant that part of the unique feelings in the air for software engineers is that this is the first time we're facing this.
> I still think of management consultants as some of the highest paid careers around, and getting a partnership track job at one of the Big 3 is one of the most desirable jobs
There's plenty of other jobs the MBA type could get into these days which are also high prestige and there are now many more tiers of management consultants. The elite folks at McKinsey are still high prestige with high salaries, but your average Accenture or Deloitte consultant is both pay and prestige wise about the same as an average knowledge worker. Plenty of VCs, fund managers, and investors are high prestige MBA-types. The explosion of private capital means there's a lot of opportunity to manage private capital; private capital markets were just much shallower 50 years ago.
And? Who are these people that need all this sympathy from internet strangers? Grow the fuck up and go solve your own damn problems. I can’t stand these “I need internet strangers to tell me that my life is, in fact, hard” people.