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Comment by _cenw | Hacker News Reader

> because we’re all going to become managers of coding agents whether we like it or not

I will join the woodworking people before that happens, thanks.

A career change that left me as a recent graduate in a decimated marketplace missing the bottom ten rungs on the ladder and no interest in getting back into the software world has led me to advanced manufacturing as a metal worker. I code a little, move heavy steel pieces periodically which is a nice way to break up the standing/sitting but not nearly as much as a general laborer, solve lots of problems, keep my trigonometry muscles toned, am forced to take breaks, get paid for my overtime, there’s a union that the company ownership is totally willing to work with, and when I’m not at work, work isn’t with me. There’s something very satisfying about leaving work with exercised muscles, smelling slightly of cutting oil. The money sucks comparatively so early in my career, but the rate increases more for performance than seniority so its rising quickly, the benefits are good, the career trajectory is pointing upwards, and longevity-wise, it’s certainly a whole lot better than gig work.

There’s a huge crisis in US manufacturing: we’re bleeding craft knowledge because off-shoring let companies hire existing experienced workers for decades, so they never had to train a new generation of tradespeople. Now all those folks are dying and retiring and they need people to pick up that deep knowledge quickly. Codifying and automating is going to kill jobs either way, but one factory employing a few people making things for other factories with local materials is better than everything perpetually shifting to the cheap labor market du jour. I’m feeling much more optimistic about the future of this than the future of tech careers.

I think over the next few years, a very large percentage of folks in tech will find themselves on the other side of the fence, quickly realize that their existing expertise doesn’t qualify them for any other white collar jobs where vibe coding experience is a bullet point in the pluses section, that tech consulting is declining even faster than salaried jobs, and that they’re vastly less qualified than the competition for blue collar jobs. Gonna be a rough road for a lot of folks. I wouldn’t invest in SF real estate any time soon.

There’s 1,000 established industries that don’t offer the rapid growth and pay outs of the modern tech ecosystem. I’m excited to see some of the current industrial backwaters soak up technical talent freed up by the SV AI brain drain.

To think we’ve handsomely paid our best and brightest the last few decades in pursuit of.. advertising?

Hopefully the exodus from the tech industry won't kill demand for too many job markets that are close comfortable cousins to the tech world.

> To think we’ve handsomely paid our best and brightest the last few decades in pursuit of.. advertising?

I think "efficiency" is more accurate there. Even post-Google/ad-tech-boom the overall trends that started decades earlier continued to be: (1) faster turnaround time on communications, (2) faster delivery of result artifacts, (3) faster knowledge of changes in the market and faster response.

Advertising is a particularly visible field with lots of money to throw at those things (active investment trading is another). But practically every other industry has chased those same things as well, all the way down to things like parking meters.

Personally I'm not convinced that this is such a great thing anyway - does anyone enjoy their boss messaging you at 11PM on any day they want whenever they get the fancy? - but that's the larger reason so much brainpower has been invested into it.

> don’t offer the rapid growth

How are these industries going to absorb new headcount without the revenue to support it?

I'm curious, hoping you might shed some insight.

I'm not in tech per se, but in education with a seasoning of tech.

Would you have any insight into what the field for education or training might look like for your new field?

I think (perhaps feel is better) that manufacturing will make some sort of comeback and that the gratification from it is actually quite beneficial for the human condition.

So, I'm interested in trying to glean what I might pivot into from the perspective of training and education.

I don’t know exactly what educators roles are, but there are lots of training programs out there sponsored either by government job placement programs or industry associations. In Chicago, JARC is one example. Also, a lot of the larger companies have big training programs to onboard inexperienced workers into skilled trades. Most of the classes themselves seem to be taught by people in those trades rather than teachers, but surely that isn’t always the case, and the curriculum development probably involves professional educators. Some of the things are pretty techy— automating industrial robots for example — but in don’t have any direct knowledge of that.

You will always be able to produce artisanal hand-set code, same as how artisanal woodworking exists alongside industrial manufacturing. There will be a lot less demand for it, and compensation will align accordingly, but it won't go away.

Either the crap truly works and nobody is needed or it does not work. Where is this half-arsed human-agent hybrid vision coming from? The land of plateaued LLM gains?

Yes

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