Ok, as a perennial voice for free markets I agree with your observations, but not your point. Having lived through it I see the damage it is doing to individuals who will take years to recover.<p>Too many engineers today, perhaps like sports players, take a big salary, project it across 30 years and then say &quot;Wow I&#x27;ve got millions headed my way, do I really need to bag my lunch?&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve watched as they became both broke and depressed as the wave that was supporting those salaries and the technology that was supporting their employment have broken (as they always do) and they are suddenly &quot;too old and too out of date.&quot;<p>Like the guy who was making $200K&#x2F;year as a SOAP architect for some package that managed really expensive enterprise server and storage gear. When the wave passed and people moved to cheap white box servers in abundance using things like Docker or Chef to run and manage them, this guy walked into a world at 45 years of age with zero applicable experience to your distributed server cluster based company. And he is slowly burning what savings he had because the only entry level programmer job he could get is paying him $85K and his take home pay doesn&#x27;t completely cover his burn rate (he optimistically expects to be promoted to a high paying job as soon as they see what he can do.)<p>If you are living the high life as an in demand engineer please don&#x27;t be that guy. Start planning to provide funds for your kids education, or if you&#x27;re not having kids ever then a fund to pay someone else&#x27;s kids to take care of you when you&#x27;re too old to work. Cut out recurring expenses in your life where ever you can and put excess money into savings or investment vehicles so that it can start working for you by earning more money. Understand that life is change until you die. Anticipate change to avoid having change drive your decisions.