Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
First you assume that being "interested" in the work is a requirement. I'm guessing 90% of people are doing work that doesn't interest them. But assuming that it's a requirement for you the question becomes, what are you interested in?
Second you want well-paying work. I understand. Programmers got well paid. They lived above the standard of most. It's not surprising you'd want to keep that. But "well paying" is a spectrum. It depends on your life-style, location, eating habits and so on.
And finally, lots and lots of jobs don't require a formal certification. Or one that isn't trivial to get. Ask the people you see everyday (including the software programmers, hardware designers, receptionists, assistants, book keepers, marketing and advertising people, sales, support, your vehicle mechanic and so on.) I suspect if you asked every dingle person you met in a day the ones that actually had this requirement would be a rounding error.
My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
This is Denver rent actually, and increasingly most urban centers.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
That’s been how humanity has always worked, human migration is probably the largest single driver of social change in human history
Millions of people migrate every year today, I’m not sure what you think the alternative is
> Millions of people migrate every year today
A just society that doesn't force them to.
We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
That colonization happened when there weren't other humans there. Later colonizations were either unsuccessful or led to very nasty events.
Also, today jobs are concentrated in places where things are expensive.
Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.
And I suspect disaster to have correlated chances of killing parents or grandparents or children. i.e. if you've become a parent there's a good chance your parents did too.
Our own lived experiences are likely outliers, since developed countries have different outcomes than the past.
1300 sq ft house with a big yard for the toddler.
My HVAC contact in FL needs a $100 just to sniff the AC/boiler closet. That is, if I can get him to show up. I don't even know if he's licensed here, but he's definitely very experienced.
It wasn't urban enough for me, for someone working remote at the time, and few growth opportunities for my wife, but I regret moving to FL. Miami has become the least affordable city in the US relative to income.
Excuse me, but what could you possibly do with a ~360sqm house than one half the size wouldn't do? A family of 4 for sure fits in even a smaller one.
Those graduating today have plenty of buffer to reskill tomorrow. Those of us who graduated 20 years ago, have no chance.
Healthcare is another growing field that's easy to get into with only 1- or 2-year certification programs for some positions.
Good pay, low barrier to entry, pleasant. Pick two.
However the number of professions that require a formal degree is very small. (And notably, programming is not one of them.) If you take any large group of random people and asked them, you'd find close to all are not required to have a formal certification.
Generally yes, people with (any) degree are more hirable to (any) job. The skills getting a degree are generally useful, and make a candidate more employable. But if you already have one, you already have that.
If someone's degree is in computer science, they're not going to be a good fit to be, say, an accountant or a nuclear engineer.
There was a saying where I went to high school: “the language programme students are not better at languages, they’re just worse at math”.
But to further the GP question there are lots of examples of people not working in their degree in both directions. The entire computer industry was built by people without a Computer Science degree. Today huge numbers of programmers have no degree at all.
To refer back to the original post about the farrier turned mechanic. Most comments seem to miss the point. Change is coming. You can lean into the change and prosper. Or fight the change and vanish. Those with enough vision, creativity, adaptability will continue to thrive.
Then the call centre jobs offshored (and now are being replaced by AI).
In my case that’s mathematics in academia so I’m going to be starving to death.
I'd say (not a teacher myself, but related to several) teaching is a lot more difficult than people give it credit for.
Whereas many of us can’t take a loss of income for months while we retrain.
Even if you've saved enough for 1 to 3 years of university, there's a risk that you won't get a job especially if you're getting towards 40+.
Drawing down savings is a very high risk move, since you could easily never recover those savings because you may struggle to get a job that has a better ability to save as much.
Of course there are exceptions, but I don't expect those to apply to anyone commenting here.
It’s plainly true that for a significant number of people, even those who satisfy your moral sensibilities around money, they won’t have had sufficient time at sufficient incomes to have enough saved for a significant period of unemployment to retrain.
I would even recommend against going back to college unless someone has an extremely compelling case for a career change that requires it and the conviction to see it through.
I'm hesitant to give examples because I know every example I give will be met with objections from "But I don't want to do that job" or "What if that gets replaced by AI too?". Look around you and you can should be able to identify some adjacent roles where you at least have an understanding of what the works like and you could learn the rest by taking on gradually more responsibility.
There are a lot of jobs out there that aren't exciting, don't pay SWE level salaries, but nevertheless pay enough to support a family as evidenced by all of the people doing those jobs who support their families. Not every company or industry is interested in squeezing maximum efficiency out of their employees. I have friends in highly bureaucratic roles who care about their jobs and do it well, but their work is amazing simple and easy. It requires nothing more than being a responsible adult who can show up to the office and get things done. These jobs are everywhere and I don't think they're going to disappear.
I don't think SWE is going to disappear either, but it will look a lot different in years to come. If you can't or won't adapt to the new normal, one of those boring alternative careers might be worth pursuing.
That was possible pre-2022 during the famous developer labor shortage. In the current market, companies expect seniority/experience in that specific stack they use for that, no more career changers.
They either take you as a senior/expert to contribute from day one, or as a young and cheap newgrad/junior out of uni they expect to train on the job, but no more in-betweeners switching careers as they're not as experienced as the seniors on the market, nor are they as cheap and malleable as newgrads/juniors.
Sure, in theory every developer can learn at home to do anything new related, but in the current job market, companies expect X-years of proven on the job experience with their stack, no more bootcampers, and no more self-taught-at-home types. The entry bar has risen significantly. At least where I live.
Like I just saw on linkeidn a job posting from a large bank that was an hour old and it already had 100 applications, which probably means most applications are now AI botted, meaning yours will get lost in the noise and getting a call back for an actual interview is like rolling a dice.
Not saying it's impossible to change(I did a couple of times), just that's it's much more difficult than in the good times, and will most likely also come with a paycut.
Everything is commercialized now. Even the discard pile of resumes can be sold for pennies. A job application isn't a job application anymore: it's a desperation signal alerting predators to come extract some value.
I think these jobs are actually the most likely to be replaced by AI. They have resisted automation to date because there's too much fuzz in the inputs/outputs to make it feasible to computerize. LLMs solve exactly that problem.
Not really sure what I should be doing on the side since AI seems to be automating a lot of work that I do as an analytics engineer. Maybe in 10 years all I'm doing is feeding in markdowns and project specs to an LLM and reading test outputs. At what point are you just a technician?
He works at Best Buy now.
I’ve never met you but based on your last 10 HN comments I think the world would be worse off without you in it.
That hardly seems like it would be satisfying.
Where is the satisfaction in that?
If you jump from a bridge, all it does, is that relatives of yours will receive the bill for cleaning up the blood and remains (on top of funeral etc).
Nowadays you'll be spending $40 (same price after adjusting for inflation) for something definitely not made in America, and probably of inferior quality too. Since the domestic garment industry has shrunk so much, the supply chains an economies of scale don't exist anymore to buy domestically-made garments of decent quality at those prices.
What I'm more concerned about are the younger generation where all the learning tasks have been automated. I have faith that the strong, naturally curious engineering types will still learn to do great engineering, and honestly without some of the mental blocks and calcified assumptions that us greybeards have. But how do they get in the foot in the door and the reps needed to develop senior-level judgment is another question.
In some sense we need the current mania to die down and the long-term maintenance implications of heavy AI assistance to become more apparent. Basically I think we need the AI bubble to pop and then 1-2 years for things to stabilize, and then we'll recalibrate on hiring expectations and best practices for AI usage. The current AI maximalist and doomer views I think are both basically driven by capitalist incentives and wishful thinking from investors and a reality check is going to come in some form (whether technically, socially or politically).
The older I get the more time I heard this. Never actually true. But always used by somebody asking for power, to protect me - of course.
Unfortunately most well paying jobs do.
That's for anyone joining the trade. Out-of-work middle-aged programmers with soft keyboard hands and little or no experience hanging dry wall? Why pay them any more than the 24 year old guy. AI may automate us out of our desk jobs, but the downward pressure of us transitioning to trade jobs, even at the bottom level, will only make those jobs less lucrative.
Whatever cushy career path you think is safe now will probably not be so safe by the time you go to university, train, land a job in it etc. The job of the future is nurse, diaper-changer, cleaner, prostitute for elderly retirees. Welcome to the aging fascist AI technoutopia.
https://soj.ooo/p/positivevibesonly/post/f467feb1453208a492d...