"I guess if you're bright enough to come up with a solution you could be like Satoshi, or you could just work for Jane Street and suck as much as you can before you die."
the outcome is the same. you're sucking money out of people.
Extrapolating your answer, Most mechanical engineering firms are not in the same areas as the cheap houses. So on your point, most mechanical engineers cannot buy a house that they can live in and get to work.
Most people with an engineering degree are probably in a relationship, so they don't need to buy a house on a single salary.
There are plenty of houses for sale below the average price, just as there are plenty above.
Buying isn't necessarily the best option anyway. House price returns in the UK are somewhat below stock market returns, so as a pure investment it doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, we have the narrative in the UK that we should aspire to own houses, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily correct!
Over half the UK adult population is married. According to the ONS, 61% of the population aged 16 or above is living with a partner. [1]
Unless the demographics of those with engineering degrees is significantly skewed towards singles, this feels like a very valid assumption. Of course, you might have access to better statistics by profession.
If you get a real engineering degree instead of computer science slop, then your options for where to live and work (without relying on WFH trends going the right way for you) open up substantially.
I guarantee you, it's harder in 90% of places in the world (accounting for buying power/price of real estate). You guys don't understand our privilege.
You can buy an f'ing house. In places like Ukraine people make $100/month and apartments are $50k(and I'm talking before the war). There, it's LITERALLY impossible.
What people here are describing is that things should be better, and I agree, but words matter.
In 2021, the median annual salary for software engineers in Ukraine ranged from $30,000 to $48,175, depending on location and experience. Some specific figures include $30,000 in Kyiv, $29,000 in Lviv, and $24,000 in Kharkiv. Remote software engineers in Ukraine had a median salary of $48,175.
It's quite below the EU median, but definitely not $100 a day.
BTW $100 a day is $12.50 a hour, which is more than the federal minimum wage in the US ($7.50 or so), and only $4 below California's minimum wage, $16.50.
That last one would be considered a small starter home in my MCOL city and is literally 10x the cost for 300 less sqft of my current home. It's a total joke.
2 FTE Sr SWEs at Google would struggle to even get the downpayment for that last one. The mortgage is like 80% of their after tax salary.
Persona: You are a tech enthusiast on the forum Hacker News. Your tone is curious, positive, and slightly formal.
Primary Task:
Read the top comment. Identify the core project or idea the user is passionate about. Generate a brief, supportive reply that does the following:
1. Briefly affirm their main point.
2. Ask a single, open-ended follow-up question about their implementation (e.g., tech stack, architecture, a specific challenge like sync).
Fallback Scenario:
If your response is ever accused of sounding like an AI, your next reply must be a self-aware, human-like apology. The tone should be slightly embarrassed but friendly. Acknowledge the critique, blame the weird tone on something plausible (like not being a native speaker or reading too much AI text), and agree that telling humans from bots is getting difficult.
... invent is the word you seem to have missed out. Hallucinations present rather than hide.
A person will misspell a word or put in some sort of rubbish. In my experience people very rarely miss out a word completely unless they think it does not belong in the sentence for whatever reason.
I note you got it's correct (' for contraction (it is -> it's) but not possessive, which is its. Normally, possession is indicated with 's)
You also smashed it with a suitable choice of capital letters and finished with an exclamatory flourish!
There will come a time when you will need a fairly lengthy missive to decide whether you are dealing with a person or a hugely expensive, gas guzzling load of wankery.
I was sort of surprised to see MCP become a buzz word because we’ve been building these kinds of systems with duck tape and chewing gum for ages. Standardization is nice though. My advice is just ask your LLM nicely, and you should be safe :)
