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Comment by strikelaserclaw | Hacker News Reader

I think for most mid level guys the threat isn't AI doing their job. I think its the influx of people who will undoubtedly join the "coding" workforce once automation takes away many trivial jobs like driving trucks, cabs, or flipping hamburgers at McDonalds. All these people will be told to retrain themselves and go into the tech sector, and we'll get a huge influx of cheap tech people.

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I don't know if you know any working class people, but a lot of them simply don't have the intellectual capacity for tech work - which is often why they flip burgers.

You're being rather reductive. Just because someone is in a 'working class job' doest diminish their intellect. I've encountered many working class folks with a lot of knowledge in the fields they were in (electricians, plumbers, mechanics, etc).

Those aren't working class, they're tradesmen. At least IMO.

Working class to me means Walmart, Mcdonalds, and Jack Generic Construction LLC.

Why they're hardly even Scotsmen at all! Less humorously I'd say your definition of working class differs from that of the public. If you ask those tradesmen if they're working class, I'd wager upwards of 90% of them will say yes.

Working class to most people just means that they do manual labor. They work outside and in factories building and moving physical things be it burgers or buildings or balloon animals. The key seems to be that they don't generally sit at a desk with a computer on it for 8hrs a day.

You'd be surprised.

A huge number of "tech workers" today are from the same families that would be working class, factory workers, and so on just a generation ago.

There's no magical racial difference between working class people and tech workers.

And a lot of them also just didn't have the opportunity to learn it but are easily smart enough to pick it up when their ability to make a living depends on it.

Let's say 10% of these working class people just need a push to discover they're actually decent at coding/devops/admin/etc. 3,500,000 truck drivers means an additional 350,000 people competing for IT jobs. Now factor in all the other people employed in these sorts of jobs. There's going to be a huge glut of incoming "cheap" labor when these sectors become more automated. I don't expect them to be competing with people like Linus but they're sure as hell going to be competing with the neighbors kid that went to a public 4 year school for a CS degree because the job prospects were good.

Totally agree. People will do what they have to to not starve.

There are no doubt already 300k job openings for different kinds of tech work in the US. There's probably 30k jobs just in Seattle (endless local npr series about jobs at https://www.kuow.org/series/region-of-boom). But not everyone will make it as an programmer, we need so many jobs for different skill sets.

It appears you don't know any working call people either.

a lot of them simply don't have the intellectual capacity for tech work

Well, neither do most tech workers. Why’s there another high profile breach seemingly every week? Why is software generally full of bugs? Because the devs lack basic competence at their jobs. Maybe they should have been flipping burgers instead. But RoR, Node.JS et al dumbed things down so much we got brogrammers...

Lambda School seems to be doing quite well training a lot of them to program and taking a cut of their initial wages. This guy specifically mentions fast food as a previous job: https://twitter.com/AustenAllred/status/1083994585557127168

"All these people will be told to retrain themselves and go into the tech sector, and we'll get a huge influx of cheap tech people."

This was the fear with "India" in the 1990s, and how it was going to kill all of our wages.

I make a lot more money now than I did then.

The limiting factor there though is probably that it is currently 4am in India and they can't typically be brought into a US office to be trained by your core team.

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