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Comment by mssundaram | Hacker News Reader

Hot take: if you're a mediocre dev, maybe be worried; if you're in a niche and have deep expertise you'll be fine.

This has a flywheel effect where once you start gathering critical mass in a place, the original experts lose their edge eventually. See what happened to manufacturing, where China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western nations.

> See what happened to manufacturing, where China is leaps and bounds ahead of Western nations.

Wait, no they aren't. They do a lot of labor-intensive, non-specialized manufacturing but other countries are still way ahead where it matters.

You haven't seen any european factories did you? They are proper high-tech in comparison to your average chinese one.

What people might not realise that manufacturing is still going on in Europe and US. It's just that less people are working in factories. Output is 'more' than in decades before. Automation and all that.

> less people are working

i think that's kind of his point

Not in this case though as unemployment in the last decade is at its lowest in developed world.

Lot of that employment is under-employment like Uber/Doordash/Instacart contractors and nowhere close to well-paying manufacturing jobs of the prior generation

That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :)

From Wikipedia In some countries, such as the UK, horseshoeing is legally restricted to people with specific qualifications and experience

> That’s what barrel makers told the horseshoe fitters :)

I'm not following - can you explain the analogy?

OP said "if you're in a niche and have deep expertise you'll be fine". The analogy apparently means that deep expertise in a particular field won't guarantee your employment when that field is not in demand anymore.

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