TBH, it all feels like a huge gamble at this point. Neither skills, education, institutional ties, nor current employment can guarantee a stable foundation for life.
This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.
I felt a lot safer when I was a young grad than now that I have kids to support and I can't just up and move to wherever the best job opportunity is or live off lentils to save money or whatever.
Yeah, kids change the landscape a lot. On the other hand, if you don't have any personal ties, its easier to grab opportunities, but you are unlikely to build any kind of social network when chasing jobs all over the country/world.
Either way, there is very little to no path toward "family + place to live + stable job" model.
When I was single with no kids, I felt pretty comfortable leaving a good job to join a startup. I took a 50% pay cut to join when the risk seemed high, but the reward also seemed high.
It paid off for me, but who knows if I would have taken that leap later in life.
There must be "dozens of us" with this fear right now. I'm kinda surprised there isn't a rapid growing place for us to discuss this... (Youtube, X account, Discord place..)
I'm confused as to why someone who freely admits they have been broke & unemployed for 15 years feels they are qualified to provide "advice", make critical judgement calls about others and brag about their awesomeness.
>> My actual accomplishments in the world of computing ... are the stuff of legends
I don't have a college degree either. I am about 50. I have never been unemployed and have had high paying software dev jobs my entire adult life. Your claim that the lack of degree is the only thing holding you back is very much incorrect.
I suspect the problem is elsewhere and you are unwilling or uncomfortable to discuss it.
Protip: When you consistently present yourself as somebody with a massively inflated ego who will be a constant pain to interact with, nobody's going to hire you, skills or not.
> "going back to school" to learn what I already know pretty damn well already, given that I've been programming since I was 8
It's small consolation if sitting in a classroom is something you truly hate, but the guys who are programming pros before they go into a CS program are very often the ones who do really well and get the most out of it.
I left high school with average results and immediately got a job as a junior web developer, and I’m nothing special. I feel there must be more to this story… You don’t come off very well in your post, I imagine it could be the same in person and perhaps therein lies the issue?
> There is MUCH you still have to learn about life.
This response, along with your OP, it’s so pretentious and condescending. It seems you feel that you’re superior to everyone intellectually. I assume that you hold the same attitude in person and this is not helping your situation.
The irony is that I’ve done exactly this. I tried to start a business in my early 20’s and failed dramatically. I stopped developing altogether for a decade while I did minimum wage jobs and struggled to find a career. I started developing again in my early 30’s and half a decade later I’m running a software business.
You may well be intelligent but severely lacking in other necessary areas. It seems it is you who has much to learn.
I created my first Linux from scratch when I was a freshman in college in a third world country (not India). Fast forward few years later, I now write Linux kernel code for a living. Not sure what you did wrong, bud, to end up miserable like this.
I'm on the flip side of this - not exactly young but no dependants which is making me a little bit less nervous. Seems like the next 20 years will be a wild ride & it doesn't seem optional so lets go I guess
True. This is one of the best arguments for not having kids. I could never imagine putting myself in that uncertain situation. Much better to reduce those risks, and focus on yourself.
Having kids is a personal choice. The stress of having to support them is real and it might mean, at times, you sacrifice more than you would have without kids.
It's been entirely worth it for me and I cannot imagine my life without kids. But it's a deeply personal choice and I am not buying or selling the idea. I would just say nobody is ever ready and the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational. But not wanting them because of how it might change your own life is a completely valid reason to not have kids.
> the fears around having them probably are more irrational than rational
My $0.02 is that if anything, the fears people have about how much their lives would be transformed are significantly lacking, and a lot of the "it's not so bad" advice is post-hoc rationalization. I mean, it's evolutionarily excellent that we humans choose to have kids, but it's very rational to be afraid and to postpone or even fully reject this on an individual basis. And as an industry and as a society, we should probably do a lot more to support parents of young children.
Ya, this is a fair callout. I moreso meant fears around being a bad parent. If anything, people experiencing those fears will be fine parents because they've got the consideration to already be thinking about doing a good job for their newly born.
Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
If you are looking for any sort of hope, even a cursed one: there is the perspective that LLM generated code is legacy code as a service. LLMs were trained on a lot other people's legacy code. A lot of "vibe coding" is for what de facto are "day one legacy code apps". If my career has taught me anything, companies will always sunk cost fallacy throw new money at "fixing"/"expanding" legacy apps or the endless "rewrite cycle" of always trying to rewrite legacy apps but never quite succeeding.
Skills like Legacy Code Anthropology and Reverse Engineering will grow into higher demand. Like the worst legacy apps built by junior developers and non-developers (Access/Excel VBA and VB6 alone had a lot of "low code" legacy by non-developers), LLMs are great at "documenting" What was built, but almost never Why or How, so skills like "Past Developer Mind Reading" and "Code Seances" will also be in high demand.
There will be plenty of work still to do "when" everything is vibe coded. It's going to resemble a lot more the dark matter work a lot of software engineering is in big enterprise: fixing other people's mistakes and trying to figure out the best way you can why they made those mistakes so you can in theory prevent the next mistake.
It's a very dark, cursed hope to believe that the future of software engineering is the darkest parts of its present/past. As a software developer who has spent too large of an amount of my career in the VB6 IDE and who often joked that my "retirement plan" was probably going to be falling into an overly-highly-paid COBOL Consultancy somewhere down the line, I'm more depressed that there will be a lot more legacy work than ever, not that there won't be enough work to go around, and it will be some of the ugliest, most boring, least fun parts of my career, forever, and will have even less "cushiness" to make up for it. (That "dream" of a highly paid COBOL Consultancy disappears when good Legacy Code becomes too common and thus the commodity job. Hard to demand slicker, higher salaries when supply is tainted and full.)
Along those lines, one of the biggest areas completely left out of this article - and many I've seen like it - is operations, cost, incident response, etc.
Maybe eventually you'll want to trust your corporate credit card to the LLMs too, but that's gonna be one of the last things where humans get taken out of the loop. And once the AI is that general what even is the CEO, salesperson, or entrepreneur's role either?
That "programmer/archeologist" idea of Vernor Vinge's books is likely to grow as the piles of generated code get bigger and the feasibility of tossing increasingly-large piles into a single context window at once might not keep up (or probably won't be the best or most cost-effective).
I think what we're missing is certainty, not hope. You used to have more certainty that if you checked all the correct boxes your financial future would be guaranteed. Hope for the future is sort of separate and the most optimistic person could hold on to hope even now, and the most pessimistic person could lack hope even graduating with a CS degree in 2015.
You can have hope even if a positive outcome isn't guaranteed. In fact that is when hope is the most valuable (and maybe also difficult to find).
> Amen. It's hard to live with hope right now at all. Programmer or otherwise we're constantly told we're all going to be replaced and the economy is a mess (US). Definitely a depressing time to be alive.
BTW the whole plumber/electrician/whatever thing is ridiculous. I studied industrial automation before I joined tech. I checked the salaries for manufacturing maintenance engineer last month. The wages are a sad joke compared to the costs of living.
Also don’t forget the part where we’re told housing will never be affordable again in many areas, and don’t expect to be able to remote work to move to LCOL areas any more.
Don't forget large scale purchasers using property for tax evasion, money laundering or other such uses. They largely don't even care if the property is maintained.
(eventually properties collapse, but if they keep the values inflated this way, that won't matter to them)
If you want to know more, look into RCMP reports on high property prices in Vancouver BC/Canada circa 2010s+, for example.
If majority of housing is owned for profit by REITs or landlords they have such a leverage over ordinary person, that they can indefinitely hold the prices/rents at a level where they extract maximum of available resources from owning land while making sure people have enough processed food and cheap internet-provided entertainment that they don't rebel.
The prices will adapt, but the equilibrium will always be elite-oriented economy where accommodation of the masses is a second-tier goal.
I don't doubt this, however, the question is if AI will do this in our life-time. The industrialization has led to prosperity in the long term, but initially it led primarily to the proletarianization of the people. Are you willing to accept a devaluation of your skills and a decline in your prosperity so that in 50 to 100 years there is a chance that AI will lead to a better future?
Some people will answer without being asked. The most we will get out of that is that the word "saboteur" will get a more modern synonym (not sure what it will be, but the inventor of cheap EMP granades will have the biggest say in that). The future will, of course, steamroll over such answers, as it always did, but we'll all feel the bumps on the way.
Uncertainty is frequently a contributor to depression. Uncertainty is one of the most reliable stress triggers, which, over prolonged periods of time, especially when paired with low perceived control, is a direct path to increased depression. So if something is uncertain, it is often depressing as well.
I think we can assume it will create disruption, but by definition this is both positive and negative for different individuals & dimensions, and it is small solace if society improves while your life languishes or declines - this is just what's happened to a generation of young males in the US and is having huge repercussions. I think you're right to suggest the goal is to avoid letting the uncertainity make you depressed, but that does not automatically make it so of everyone.
Is that AI generated by any chance? Seems like an AI crystal ball that you're looking into.
It's fine to have that opinion, but please frame as an opinion or else give me the lotto numbers for next week if you can predict the future that accurately.
I say this without hyperbole: we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse.
We've had 50+ years of deteriotating worker conditions and a massive concentration of wealth to like 10,000 people. The 1980s crushed the labor movement, to all of our detriment.
The GFC destroyed the career prospects of many millenials who discovered their entry-level positions no longer existed so we created a generation that we're loaded with student debt, working as baristas.
A lot of people on HN ignored this because the 2010s were good for tech people but many of us didn't realize this post-GFC wave would eventually come for us. And that's what's happening now.
So on top of the millenaisl we now have Gen Z who have correctly realized they'll never have security, never buy a house and will never retire. They'll live paycheck to paycheck, barely surviving until they die. Why? All so Jeff Bezos can have $205 billion instead of $200 billion.
I'm reminded of the quote "only nine meals separates mankind from anarchy".
I believe we've passed the point where we can solve this problem with electoral politics. Western democracies are being overtaken by fascists because of increasing desperation and the total destruction of any kind of leftism since WW2. At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.
> we are (IMHO) on the verge of total systemic collapse. (...) At this point, it ends violently and sooner than many think.
This is, in a twisted way, an expression of hope. The expectation of a grand collapse is one that's shared by many, but can you explain what gives you that complete certainty that it's near or that it's coming at all?
The far bleaker possibility that I think is totally realistic is that things continue getting worse, but they never cross over the final line. Things are mismanaged, everyone is worse off, but that nine-meal gap is never allowed to happen, and any real threats are squashed at the roots. There's no singular collapse, instead of one definitive societal stab wound that's followed by long hospital recovery, we're inflicted with a thousand minor cuts to near-death.
The people who benefit from all this have been refining their knowledge and growing their power and influence. They're near-gods at this point. They may make a mistake, but what if they don't and the current situation is maintained for decades to come?
You’re focusing on the US. In Europe, worker protections are great. However, Europe has been lagging behind the US for a couple of decades and the gap has been growing. All tech giants are based in the US or China. Maybe things will collapse in the US now, but very unlikely to do so in Europe unless the impact from the US is so great it propagates to Europe, despite Europe itself not having done the things that caused such collapse in the US , which seems to be the result of prioritizing profit and greed above everything else, including people wellbeing.
Oh I couldn't disagree more. Europe is on the verge of full-blown fascism. Europe has Reform (UK), AfD (Germany) and National Front (France) as well as Hungary.
Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia. Interestingly, this is a (super) rare win for the first Trump administration: forcing Europe to build an LNG port in 2018 [1] and warning against the dangers of dependence on Russian natural gas. This warning has been completely vindicated.
Europe has stagnant wages, a declining social safety net (eg raising the retirement age in France), a housing affordability crisis in most places (notably exlucding Vienna and there needs to more attention on why this is), inflation problems and skyrocketing energy costs. It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Europe has the same rising anti-immigrant rise in response to declining material conditions that the US hass. In Europe's case it's against Syrians and North Africans. In the UK this also included Polish people.
France is really a perfect example here. Despite all the economic problems you have Macro siding with Le Pen to keep Melenchon and the left out of power.
All of this is neoliberalism run amok and it comes from decisions in WW1, WW2 and post-WW2, most notably that Europe (and the US) decided the biggest threat was socialism and communism. And who's really good at killing communists? Nazis. Just look at the resume of Adolf Heusinger, an early NATO chair [2].
Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO. And NATO is on the verge of collapse. There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO, as many in his administration want to do, but NATO could well splinter if Trump takes Greenland.
What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare? It was rumored that parts of the administration wanted the UK to privatize the NHS as part of a post-Brexit trade deal. 15 years of austerity has primed the population to accept this kind of thing.
Many Europeans (rightly) look down on the insanity that's currently going on in the US but at the same time they don't realize just how dire the situation is in Europe.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
While European military strength isn't in its prime right now, their capabilities without the US are often way underestimated. Not that most of the other issues aren't applicable - everyone appears to be more or less fucked in multiple ways - but losing a conventional war to Russia isn't on the table, barring unthinkable mismanagement or a world-changing event (preemptive use of nukes, etc). Russia has stalemated a war against a singular country that has a fraction of Russia's wealth, loads of antiquated equipment and a small sample of Western tech. The Russian economy has a massive hole in it largely thanks to said war, and is only propped up by existing savings - they're not in danger right now, they're rapidly approaching that point with no way of stopping. Even if the war never happened, they'd still be far weaker than the whole of Europe and likely some individual European countries.
> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.
It wasn't "given", Russia did it on purpose. There are SO MANY cases of politicians advocating for Russian natural gas or oil as an energy source who were later revealed to be 100% paid for with Russian money.
This is so depressing to read but I can't help feeling you are right. The feeling is quite surreal becouse if I turn off my computer I can't notice the difference locally in my county. It is like lunatics from "the internet" runs alot of things now irl.
> There's a lot of thinking that Congress won't allow Trump to withdraw from NATO
I wonder how that is supposed to work when the Executive branch has proven they can do whatever they want regardless of the other two branches. The rules are worthless if there are no consequences for breaking them.
Yeah, they don't really teach this part in history [1]:
> At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
And NATO [2]:
> The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr’s first two lieutenant generals... Heusinger, a POW until 1948, ...
> That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position
And it goes on.
Nazi links are well-established to Operation Paperclip [3] under Werner von braun.
And there are many others [4].
I didn't say all the non-communists were Nazi. I said the neoliberal and imperialist projects of the US and Western Europe post-WW2 sided with and gave haven to Nazis to fight communism, which is true.
Fascism in the US didn't begin with the Nazis however. You can trace back the roots to the white supremacy the US was founded on, the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction and even the Business Plot [5] that sought to overthrow FDR in 1933, probably labelling him a communist.
But the Nazis were very popular in the US, culminating with the German American Bund rally in Madison Square Gardens in 1939 [6].
Oh and let's not forget Henry Ford's contribution to all this, notably The International Jew [7], so much so that Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.
Personally, I'm of the view that a lot of this can be traced back to simply not stringing up all the former slave owners after the Civil War.
> Europe created the Russia-Ukraine problem by giving their energy security to Russia.
> This warning has been completely vindicated.
That's funny. The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion). It's almost like the US wanted to push Europe and Russia against each other, so that it could sell its way more expensive natural gas in Europe!? Perhaps they did not anticipate the Russians would be bold enough to go to war on that, but they were certainly willing to accept the risk.
> It's the same 1930s economic conditions that gave rise to fascism last time.
Please. Europe may have some issues , but it's not nearly as bleak as you try to make it... I live here, I go around a lot. Europe is as affluent as ever. People are having a good time, in general. In the 1930's some countries had hyperinflation... you're comparing that to 5% yearly inflation these days?
> Europe has also outsourced their security to the US via NATO.
On that we agree. It was a really bad decision, but understandable given how much the US soft power after WWII was absorbed by Europeans. Some Europeans act like European countries are US states. They take to the streets to join movements that are 100% American, like BLM. It's bizarre.
> What happens to Europe with an expansionist Russia and no US security guarantee?
It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe, rather than just Ukraine (and maybe Moldova and Georgia if you push it).
How can you justify that view? Russia has not drawn any red lines about anything related to the rest of Europe like it had with Ukraine and Georgia (which was thoroughly ignored by Europe, with the strong support and should I say it, advice of the USA), it has not said anything as threatening as Trump saying Greenland will be part of America the nice way or the hard way, yet you believe the US is not a threat, but Russia is. There's some serious dissonance in this line of thought.
> Oh and speaking of worker protections, what happens when the price of bailing out European energy or security issues is the privatizing of your otherwise universal healthcare?
Americans have been saying this for 50 years... they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time (though not as much for companies, as you can clearly notice it's much harder to make behemoths like FAANG in Europe, no doubt because without exploiting workers you can't really do that).
> The US warned Europe of dependence on Russia all the while promoting policies that antagonized Russia in Europe (e.g. NATO expansion)
I think there's a certain amount of historical revisionism going on with this. It is complicated however.
You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
Another noteworthy event is the 2014 revolution that ousted Russian puppet Viktor Yanukovych as the president of Ukraine, culminating in the Minsk Agreement (and Minsk II) to settle disputes in the Dombas and elsewhere.
Russia does have legitimate security concerns int he region such as access to the Black Sea and not having NATO on their border. And by "legitimate" here I simply mean that Europe and the EU do the exact same thing, most notably when the US almost started World War 3 over Soviet influence in Cuba (which itself was a response to the US installing nuclear MRBMs in Turkey). Also, in terms of the threat of a conventional land war, Ukraine is basically a massive highway into Russia, previously used by both Hitler and Napoleon. Not that it worked out well for either.
Whatever the case, having another Belarus in Ukraine was ideal for Russia and I think their designs on this long predated any talk of Ukraine joining NATO, which was DOA anyway. Germany, in particular, were always going to veto expanding NATO to share a border with Russia.
My point here is I'm not convinced that any promises of neutrality by Ukraine would've saved Ukraine from Russian designs.
> Europe is as affluent as ever
Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
> It shocks me that people like you think Russia is a serious threat to all of Europe,
It is a serious threat. Not in the conventional land-war a la WW2 sense but we're dealing with the world's other nuclear superpower (China doesn't have the nuclear arsenal Russia does, by choice). But Putin's playbook is oddly reminiscent to Hitler's playbook leading up to the war. That is, Hitler argued he was unifying Germans in Austria, the Sudetenland, etc. Similarly, Putin is using ethnically Russian populations in a similar way: as an excuse to intervene and take territory.
There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
American security and energy guarantees are really the only things holding Europe together right now. If NATO splinters, what's to stop Russia from seizing parts of Latvia?
This situation is precarious.
> they just can't accept that the system has been working well in Europe for workers for all this time
No, they don't care that it works. In fact, they've been doing everything they can to make it not work. We now have a generation of people in many European countries (and I include the UK here) who have never not known austerity and constant government cutbacks. Satisfaction with the NHS deteriorates as it's been deliberately starved for 15+ years.
This is a well-worn and successful playbook called starving the beast [3]. It's laying the groundwork for a push for privatization. It'll be partial privatization to start with and just creep from there.
I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
> You can point to George W. Bush opening the door to NATO membership in 2006 [1] as a turning point but NATO had been gobbling up former Communist bloc countries for more than a decade.
The 1990's Russia was a hugely struggling nation that could barely feed its population, but even then they opposed NATO expansion strongly!
> The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements and assurances made to us in 1990.
> Based on what? Personal anecdotes? The EU acknowledges a housing crisis [2].
The housing crisis is mostly limited to inflated prices in large cities and is itself evidence that people have a good purchasing power, since it's not being driven by foreign capital (at least where I live, in the Nordics).
Which statistics show the EU is NOT affluent?? If we look at GDP (+1.35% yearly in the last 10 years [1], not too bad for developed economies) and unemployment (currently around 6% for the whole EU [2]), it's not bad, especially if you consider the huge number of recent immigrants (unemployment among the native population is much lower than the total figures show, in Sweden, for example, native Swedes have near full employment).
But yeah, I think personal anedoctes are also helpful to establish whether a country looks like it's going down... and everywhere I go, I see only good signs: shops expanding, lots of new buildings, full bars and restaurants, people are driving the latest electric cars... what I don't see is things like businesses closing down, struggling local shops etc. which are normally very visible (I know, I've seen that) in economies that are in dire straits.
> There is a significant Russian population in Latvia who are stateless. IIRC it's estimated there are more than 200,000 of them.
Yes, I've been to Latvia and Russian is clearly spoken by a large percentage of the population (to my surprise, including the young generation). As long as they are not suppressed from speaking their language (as is happening in Ukraine right now and even before the war, and in some areas in the Baltic countries) and they're not made second-class citizens (as is happening in Estonia, where they can no long vote [3]), Putin will not have any excuse to do that, and those countries would be wise to not provide such excuses! Anyway, I think that regardless of that, NATO will survive even without the USA (as something else, perhaps, but the union between European states is extremely important to maintain) and I really belive Article 5 will exist even if NATO evolves into a Europe-only alliance.
> I'm not sure you truly appreciate just how much US foreign policy is designed to advance the interests of American corporations.
Not sure what you're referring to... I think I do appreciate it. The interview [4] Trump had with the American oil companies after the partial "annexation" of Venezuela couldn't be a better example of that.
At one point there will be enough people with no job or no hope who will do the math of "there are 100 million of us and 3000 billionaires" and hopefully have read enough history to learn about the French Revolution and the tools they used.
The only way to prevent this is to guarantee that people without jobs will still have a roof over their heads and enough calories and micronutrients every day to survive - and some entertainment.
I do wonder what will come next, it seems very unlikely that modern states can effectively be toppled and replaced by revolutions but maybe the nature of revolutions will change themselves. After all, it's not like the neoliberal paradigm was always so, it was systematically planned by elites in the 1970s and we're now proudly living in the society they envisioned (elites have wealth while everyone else struggles). The neoliberal establishment was definitely a revolution that impacted and destroyed many lives but it wasn't treated as such.
I guess the next turning of the wheel will be similar too.
at the dissolution and decentralization of empires feudalism in it's many forms historically seems to be the most common outcome.
i would say that we firmly live in the American Empire with techno-feudalistic tendencies, but a historical event of such magnitude as the complete dissolution of the American state will probably see a reversal to a more traditional feudal system. Think Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates buying up and becoming the Dukes of the PNW.
personally though i don't think we are at this stage yet or even close to it. until the federal government becomes COMPLETELY inept and the average citizen cannot buy food, this won't happen. yes market conditions are currently not the best but we are nowhere near starvation.
It's been a cause of mild background anxiety for me for the past 3 years. One part is financial and the other is a potential loss of a comfortable and relatively high status job that I can get even with below average social and physical skills.
I need about 4.5 years until basic financial independence, I wonder how does it feel to be at that point.
This is a fresh perspective for me. I'm around 25 and have been struggling with finding some kind of path towards making my career into something sustainable long-term, but never really considered the other side. I think the issue many have on my end is that they don't really have much of anything to stand on while they rebuild yet, whereas they might think that someone more experienced could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now. I know many people personally struggling to find work as it is right out of school, and many have student loans which exacerbate the situation. For a lot of people, starting from scratch is not realistically feasible in the near future unless they're content with being homeless for a while.
Of course labor jobs will always exist, and a 25 year old would (on average) be much more physically able for that than someone older, so it goes both ways.
A mortgage: if you were assuming a strong income that would continue, you very likely could be forced to sell your house and take a huge loss
A family, kids: people relying on you
Time: at this point you have retirement plans and financial deadlines you need to hit if it's to ever become a reality
God forbid you have any health issues that cost $$$ which tend to come as you age. Can you afford to lose health insurance?
If you think about re-skilling and starting off at entry level.. people don't really want to hire older beginners.
Of course that's absolute worst case scenario, but I guarantee there are a lot of people there.
I'd 100% choose living out of my car for a while. In your 20s you can upend everything and completely reinvent yourself. Time, minimal responsibilities and energy are priceless
> could pivot to business and people-oriented roles by leveraging what they have now
There's a reason that's really vague, right? Because who knows if it'll be available
I don't think AI is gunna reach this point but who knows. It's not off the table
If enough people have nothing left to lose, the French Revolution will most likely be the outcome. Or a working UBI. If programmers aren't safe, I can't imagine most other professions won't be on the chopping block as well.
There's a lot of this forum in exactly that position. The fear is real; there is a real risk this AI destroys families and people's lives in the disruption.
I understand this perspective, but it's like... I would like to have a house and kids and all those things you mentioned, even if it was hard. That's not an option, financially, for a lot of young people
I'm older, aware, decently resourced and really trying NOT to play but it is still hard to accomplish. I'm married with 3 kids and even though I sit out much of the nonsense, your friends, family and community will keep pulling you back in. It's hard to do"not playing" without "not participating" and I don't think anybody should do that.
I think we all need to respond by being very, very flexible and open minded about how to contribute to society going forward. I'm on the back end of my career but I imagine it's terrifying for newcomers. Stay agile! We're all in this together.
And not just SWE. If that falls then we're pretty close to societal upheaval because the difference vs other jobs is largely just better training data (github)
And yet the current administration, like every other administration since the mid 90s, still sets labor immigration policy on the testimony of the tech industry that there is still a critical shortage of tech labor so the doors must be remain open for the 30th year of the temporary program that's only going to be in place until the tech companies have time to train domestic talent. If you have a problem with this, you're a racist Nazi who should be excluded from society. Left, right, up, down, they all agree on this, as does the vast majority of posters here. Their defense for this is that little down arrow since they have no other legitimate defense for the 30th something year of the temporary program to give them time to train the talent they claim doesn't exist in the United States.
This hits harder depending on how much money, social capital, or debt you accumulated before this volatility began. If you’ve paid off your debts, bought a house, and stabilized your family life, you’re gambling with how comfortable the coming years will be. If you’re a fresh grad with student debt, no house, and no social network, you’re more or less gambling with your life.