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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

As if economies only exist to provide jobs for everybody, whether those jobs make sense or not. It's much more the situation that the world economy is evolving.

But is there a breaking point in the system? Across the board, industries are becoming more efficient through technology, and require fewer workers. At the same time, the birth rate is increasing. What is the end game here?

* Spend more time getting experience and learning strategies you can put on a resume and less time taking silly courses and waiting for the tooth fairy to come along.*

That's very easy to say when you're employed. I suspect that a lot of people out there would love to pick up some experience, but have no means to do so. Especially when you rule out "silly courses", too.

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In developed countries the birth rate is negative. But you can pick up more relevant skills getting a $35 raspberry pi board and bringing up a Linux kernel on it then building a app for it than taking a "how to market yourself to techies" class.

Work skills are like other possessions though where, when it comes time to sell them, you have to know how valuable they are to the market which may be different than what you think they should be worth.

According to the U.N. statistics cited in Wikipedia, the population of the U.S. is growing by 0.97% per year, and there are only a handful of major industrialized countries that have negative population growth (e.g., Japan and Germany).

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population...

I'm pretty sure you are both right. The US population is growing by immigration, as are many other industrialized countries.

Bringing up a Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi is not a relevant skill. Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn do not need kernel engineers.

https://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=enginee...

(A Facebook job advert for Kernel Engineers.)

See also: https://github.com/facebook/flashcache/ - a write back persistent block cache for Linux, written by some of the Kernel Engineers at Facebook.

(I work there.)

I can't speak for Zynga or LinkedIn, but if you think Facebook runs on a stock kernel without a lot of internal tweaks you are sadly mistaken. If you are a hard-core kernel hacker looking for a new job then Facebook would love to chat...

Are you saying that Facebook, Zynga, and LinkedIn are the only employers? In the future all restaurants are Taco Bell.

If it takes n workers to create a widget, which before took x*n workers, then with a more effective system we can create x widgets with the same workers.

There isn't a hard limit on how much wealth can be created (at least not until everybody has everything they could ever want), so more workers are a good thing.

The secret is to have a skill that somebody is willing to pay for -- and to keep looking for new things all the time.

One possible, interesting and visible way to gain experience today is to contribute to an open source project. Or even create your own...

And volunteering as well. But these things take time and being able to spend this time requires income or savings which people may or may not have.

I guess that an unemployed software developer could find time to work on an open source project. I think that, on the other hand, it could be more difficult to find the motivation to do so (and not feel like you're wasting time), but it could also be considered an investment in your future - and probably a demostration that you're really an active/passionate developer.

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