The rest of the team will end up having to go out of their way to accommodate you, your accomplishments won't be as visible, and you'll be passed over for performance-based compensation and/or promotion.

Though I guess that's fine if it's a job you plan to take for a year or whatever and move on.

Then a promotion raise that constitute only 2 years of yearly base raises seems pretty lacking to me since a promotion generally comes with increased responsibilities and higher standards.

I've worked as a developer for companies outside of big tech who complain all day long about the fact that they can't compete with big tech on compensation while they hemorrhage engineers to big tech. I'm sure NYT does the same. No amount of moaning about this will change the fact that they are directly competing with these companies for talent.

I'm not anti-union at all and see them as necessary in certain types of jobs (I hope the Boeing Machinist's Union guts Boeing), but I have no interest in being a part of a union as a developer because it seems like collective bargaining just ends up locking everyone into the level of salary/career progression of the lowest common denominator.

Neither Sony nor MS are doing strict console exclusivity anymore, with MS going as far as to put out their own IPs on Sony consoles.

MS claims there's going to be a next Xbox, but I honestly wouldn't be surprised if it's basically a computer with some custom version of windows with a console-tailored UI.

So in some ways, PC gaming is healthier than it's ever been as it is gaining a growing market share as the console market share shrinks.

I think what's happening in the PC space is that we've reached a kind of Moore's law for graphical fidelity where we're deep in the diminishing returns part of the curve. Look at Read Dead Redemption 2 for example. It's 6 years old and still goes toe to toe with games coming out now. By contrast compare Crysis (2007) to anything that came out in 2001. Halo, for example. It's a night and day difference. So yeah the highest end hardware (specifically GPUs) has gotten crazy expensive but it's also gotten crazy overkill. A lot of new games are playable on low to mid settings on older and/or more budget hardware, and low settings still look fantastic on many games.

Add to that there's a general distrust right now of AAA studios to actually make a decent product, really great stuff coming out of AA/indie studios, and a lot of people playing only one or two live service games like CoD or Fortnight instead of playing lots of different AAA games and there's less dollars to get thrown at every new 100 million dollar budget game that comes out.

I think we're close to the point where the AAA publishers wake up and realize that it's not tenable for every game that comes out to have 100+ hours worth of content and cost 100+ million dollars, and the industry will be better for it.

I work in an environment right now where feeding proprietary code/docs into 3rd party hosted LLMs is a hard no-go, and we don't have any great locally hosted solution set up yet, so I haven't really taken the dive into actively writing code with LLM assistance. I feel like I should practice this skill, but the idea of using a tool like Cursor on personal projects just seems so antithetical to the point that I can't bring myself to actually do it.