The author doesn't appear to have any industry experience whatsoever, which might have contributed to the post being a series of baseless assertions, followed by a non sequitur.
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Dissing someone as a "HTML jockey" is just rude. People need to start somewhere, and the class of 20 and 21 had a horrid job market because of early COVID hiring freezes - it recovered for class of 22 but tanked immediately afterwards.
I don't deny that I dislike his opinion on "fake work", but you are falling into the same trap as well. All work is equally important, but wages are a result of a skills arbitrage, so demeaning any kind of work is just plain dumb.
And luck does play a role - class of 08 never recovered financially, unlike class of 07 and class of 09. If you miss the train, it sucks.
> you don't think anyone from the class of '08 got hired at Nvidia or whatever
1. I'm not saying no person from 08 would have been hired at NVDA. I'm saying statistically, it would have been harder simply because new and early career unemployment in all majors was at it's highest. If you miss the train or fall out (eg. layoffs or getting fired) it's very difficult to hop back on.
2. NVDA only became hot recently. I myself passed on an NVDA offer in the mid-2010s because their stock was essentially a penny stock and base salary was low by Bay Area standards. I kick myself to this day for that decision :') - and that gets to the crux of the failure of the author's argument.
Tech employment only became "hot" for barely a decade. The rest of the time, salaries weren't much different from other white collar roles. It was BigTech that made SWE salaries enticing.