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Comment by pjdemers | Hacker News Reader

She is very right that the tech job market changed in 2001. I have a former coworker who lost his job in 2017. He had not been in the job market since 1995. He was shocked how things had changed. His direct quote: "It used to be easy to find a tech job. Now it is hard. I couldn't understand why in the last few years I was able to hire people who I thought were over-qualified. But I now see that I'm under-qualified".

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It was eerie how much of this post reminded me of my experiences in the 90s, and I lived over a thousand miles away from the author. I was relaxed & confident because I could always find an easy job that paid the bills.

I had no frame of reference whatsoever to even understand that things were changing at all, let alone how or why. I thought I would have time to wait until the 'perfect fit' came along. I was wrong.

The scariest part is that those of us who are abled bodied who think that if times got rough they could always go back and flip burgers or be a cashier are starting to get a rude awakening that even those jobs have lots of competition and, worse, some of those jobs are getting automated.

This is my nightmare: going out of date. Never lose the fear!

Never be complacent. Always be learning. We are expendable. Let's not give employers a reason to think this. I used to think that I just need to learn a couple of technologies, some back end scripting language, some shell scripting, some SQL and JavaScript and I'll be set. That was 10 years ago. How wrong I was.

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