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Are Tech-Driven 'Career Meltdowns' Hitting Generation X? (nytimes.com) 136

"I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over," a 53-year-old film and TV director told the New York Times: If you entered media or image-making in the '90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there's a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That's because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand... When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn't seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields. "My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s," Mr. Wilcha said. "The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it's just gone. It's startling." Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It's as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted...

Typically, workers in their 40s and 50s are entering their peak earning years. But for many Gen-X creatives, compensation has remained flat or decreased, factoring in the rising cost of living. The usual rate for freelance journalists is 50 cents to $1 per word — the same as it was 25 years ago... As opportunities and incomes dwindle, Gen X-ers in creative fields are weighing their options. Move to a lower-cost place and remain committed to the work you love? Look for a bland corporate job that might provide health insurance and a steady paycheck until retirement?

The article includes several examples of the trend:
  • One magazine's photo studio director says professional photographers have been replaced by "a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500."
  • The article adds that "When photography went digital, photo lab technicians and manual retouchers were suddenly as inessential as medieval scribes." (And "In advertising, brands ditched print and TV campaigns that required large crews for marketing plans that relied on social media posts."")
  • An editor at Spin magazine remembers the day its print edition folded...

And besides competition from influencers, there's also AI, "which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry's work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester."

Meanwhile the cost of living has skyrocketed, the article points out — even while Gen X-ers "are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys..."


Are Tech-Driven 'Career Meltdowns' Hitting Generation X?

Comments Filter:
  • by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:00PM (#65268461)
    or maybe a steel mill. Something that will never become obsolete.
    • by hwstar ( 35834 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:06PM (#65268483)

      Other jobs which probably won't be going away anytime soon:

      1. Electrician
      2. Carpenter
      3. Plumber
      4. Car Mechanic
      5. Vegetable and fruit picker
      7. Nurses assistant
      8. Prison guard
      9. Police officer
      10. Politician [hehe]

      All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.

      That is, until they successfully design robots to replace them.

      • South Park comes true. Again.
      • > All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.

        I can't tell if you're joking, but Electrician, Plumber, and Nurse Assistant all require on-the-job training, and you have to pass license certification in the US and Canada. I'd hardly call those "brainless" jobs. Do you want an unlicensed electrician to wire your home? How about an unlicensed nurse assistant monitoring your vitals after a heart attack? I've helped a plumber replumb a house I owned; it looks simple, but if you don't get the slopes and ru

      • by sosume ( 680416 )

        Carpenters are being replaced by prefab building systems.
        Car mechanics are becoming obsolete as it's cheaper to replace half the car than repair it
        Vegetable and fruit pickers are being replaced by robots
        Nurses assistant will be an AI assistant
        Prisons will be fully automatic without staff, guided by AI surveillance
        Police officers too will be replaced by AI surveillance
        Even politicians are using ai in budgeting and campaigning

        • by ksw_92 ( 5249207 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:34PM (#65268685)

          Carpenters are still used on prefab assembly lines and site placements of prefab modules. I have relatives that have been doing prefab stuff for 20 years now.
          Car mechanics still have to replace that half of the car that you mention.
          Harvesting has been heavily automated but field-tending is still very manual for some types of crops. That may get automated at some point though.
          AI can't wield a needle or empty a bed pan yet.
          Prisons do a lot more than contain prisoners. AI won't ever be the chaplain, the psychologist or the warden as they all require a human perspective that crime is uniquely human.
          Same with cops. Without empathy, something that is unique to humans, policing is reduced to the social equivalent to running "lint" on humans' behavior.
          AI does well in spotting trends, yes. But until AI comes up through the ranks, holding the coats, getting the doors for their bosses and knowing where the booze is in the cloakroom adjacent to chambers and when to bring it out, it won't be doing much, politically.

          If you're disparaging the trades, at least learn a little more about them.

          • The Generation X experience being referred is that the number needed for the skills has fallen so those with the skills are no longer able to charge a premium for them. On that basis a number of those careers will fall away, though you're right that others won't.

          • jury trial can't be replace by AI but you may end sitting in jail for years waiting for that trail.

            • We're only an Executive Order away from AI jury trials. Although it's simpler and less controversial to not have jury trials at all.

              It already seems possible to suspend that for people accused of simultaneously being in a notorious gang and of being in the US illegally. It wouldn't be hard to say that accused terrorists, such as the people who have been vandalizing electric cars, also don't get a jury trial. Members of the media, if they are accused of spreading false information, shouldn't get a jury trial

          • I picked up a CNA license and started working part time in order to diversify my skills and work with people a bit. I'm betting that if Nursing Assistance, as a job, gets replaced, we'll simultaneously be getting rid of the entire concept of jobs.

            It does not require a lot of the kinds of thinking we normally associate with "high IQ," but now that I'm doing the work, it's obvious that we typically devalue our main advantages as humans. The work basically requires hands, spacial awareness, the ability to infe

        • "Vegetable and fruit pickers are being replaced by robots"

          I live in orchard country. Not a robot to be seen.

      • by jlowery ( 47102 )

        My eldest son is an oysterman. As long as his health holds up, he'll be okay. Pays well, but the hours are tidal.

    • This is why I never really stopped cooking part-time. People will always need to eat, and there will never be a way to peel, dice and brown parsnips digitally in my lifetime.

      All else fails, I move to full-time. I never been on on a job search for kitchen work that's lasted over two weeks

      (and besides, is there a job that produces more happiness outside of prostitution?)
  • ... professional photographers have been replaced by "a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500."

    Meanwhile the cost of living has skyrocketed, the article points out — even while Gen X-ers "are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys..."

    It's going to be hard for Gex X-ers to handle the costs of living, and taxes, get/be financially secure and plan for retirement at $500 a pop, unless they work themselves to an early death or keep living at home -- taking advantage of their grand/parents ...

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:03PM (#65268479)

    ... and, while the pace of change has accelerated, this is something people have had to deal with since the start of the industrial revolution (at a minimum). For example: even before the current AI craze, those of us who make our livings in IT have needed to continually learn new skills if we wanted to remain gainfully employed.

    Regardless... why focus on Gen X? I mean, pity the late baby boomers (myself and my friends, of course!). The pace of technological change over the past 20 years upended many of their careers while they were still 10-15 years from retirement. Just trying to switch jobs when you're in your 50s is problematic - how about trying to completely switch fields? I've been fortunate, but I've seen a lot of my non-tech friends get blindsided over the past couple decades.

    • by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:41PM (#65268561)

      For example: even before the current AI craze, those of us who make our livings in IT have needed to continually learn new skills if we wanted to remain gainfully employed.

      TFA isn't postulating a world where you have to continuously develop your career. That is situation normal for most careers. They are postulating a complete and total loss of the entire career path. Your new skill that you learn in IT isn't how to drive a forklift (it sounds like an absurd analogy but compare that from darkroom retouching to digital photography and the phrase "like chalk and cheese" doesn't even begin to describe how fundamentally different the career paths are.

      • That was a poorly-chosen example on my part. What I was attempting to illustrate was that, largely thanks to the industrial revolution, we've already seen this to some degree over the past 150-200 years

        Like how automobiles ended most career paths related to horses, for instance (the old Slashdot meme "buggy whip manufacturers", grooms, stable boys, etc.). Or how mass production of small appliances and prepared frozen foods dramatically cut down the number of jobs "in service" (to use the old British term fo

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Tony Isaac ( 1301187 )

        They are postulating a complete and total loss of the entire career path

        This feels a bit hyperbolic to me. The "manual photo retouchers" job might no longer be in demand, but digital photo retouchers certainly are. That's a case of having to relearn your skills, just like we developers have had to continually do. I used to sling 9-track tapes around for backups, load cases of green bar paper into giant printers, and mount interchangeable plate-sized platters in hard drives. Who needs a "computer operator" any more? Guess what, I had to remake myself, to move on to "network admi

        • The "manual photo retouchers" job might no longer be in demand, but digital photo retouchers certainly are. That's a case of having to relearn your skills, just like we developers have had to continually do.

          Again, no it's not. It's a fundamental differently skill based on a different career path. It's not a new skill, it's learning and understanding whole concepts from from the basics of using computers, software and file management, how to represent colours on a screen (god forbid you introduce the concept of colour management which people who started their digital careers sometimes fail to undrestand).

          Everything you've learned and developed on your computer in your IT career has been confined to still includ

          • As has often been said on slashdot with regards to patents, doing something "on a computer" doesn't make that something fundamentally new. And you are wildly underestimating the vast differences between the mainframes of the 1980s, and computers of today. They are as different as manual photo retouching compared to digital photo retouching today.

    • Nope, it's not just them.

      My good paying job in mining (not coal) or more accurately mineral processing went away in the late nineties. It sucked. Changing careers is a bitch. It is doable though. Expect a lot of rejection letters.

      Since the Navy there was Company One, mining, out of business. Company 2, mining, out of business. Company 3, chemicals, still in business, but I didn't survive the post 9/11 downturn. Company 4, polysilicon, that unit out of business the year after I retired, another part of the c

  • Tech isn't immune (Score:3, Interesting)

    by siege72 ( 1795922 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:13PM (#65268499)

    I'm Gen-X and have had to make major career shifts within my tech career.

    The first piece of software I used in my software developer career was purchased by their competitor. It stopped being a viable career path within a few years.

    "Just learn a new product/language" is the /. mantra, but knowledge and certifications don't convey -experience-. Anyone searching for a tech job knows how much of a hurdle that can be.

    I made a pivot to something less hands-on... but the whole IT department was off-shored. The same thing happened at the next company after a few years.

    I'm now tech-adjacent in MIS. My developer skills are still useful occasionally, but if I'd started in MIS I'd have a resume dating back to the 90's, instead of just the past few years.

    • by jlowery ( 47102 )

      I'm glad I retired when I did, at 61. I had bleeding-edge skills at the time, but I was OLD and not near as cute as I once was.

      And, frankly, programming was getting a little bit harder each year, to the point it wasn't much fun anymore. I still do it, and contribute to open source, but I am grateful I don't have a deadline hanging over my head (I'm a very lax self-employer, and my wife appreciates it).

      My point is that I feel I got out just in time. I have all I need and my kids are all doing fine. Very luck

  • by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:22PM (#65268515) Homepage Journal

    If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.

    I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.

    Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.

    I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.

    Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.

    If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.

    • The problem is that AI wasn't even on the radar 5 years ago.
      Sure there were articles and work and ideas floating around, but someone who just picked his major in 2020 is probably looking for a job, armed with a masters degree, in 2025.
      Problem is, the world of 2020 was way different from the one 5 years later. Hell, you're saying that GPU design is huge right now, the big tech companies are building data centers right, left and center to accommodate all their GPU needs... And then the chinese dropped a model

      • by Slayer ( 6656 )

        The problem is that AI wasn't even on the radar 5 years ago.

        Trying to read up on AI things I was shocked to discover, that many books on this topic (Tensorflow, pytorch, ...) were written more than 5 years ago. The whole topic didn't get much media attention, which may explain, why media become more and more irrelevant over time, but AI was a big thing in research back then.

        The way to stay relevant in my field was to fine tune and better aim that radar. Don't expect SJ Mercury News or SF Chronicle to show you the next big technical topic of interest. Take risks, som

    • by mshieh ( 222547 )

      Getting into tech was a trend visible to late gen X, and if you chose it for your career it was probably a good choice. Certainly worked out for me. That's very different from saying that getting into well respected creative fields were bad career moves. Who knew that writing words was going to get so commoditized?
      Similarly, we've been banging the STEM drum for decades. Not everyone is suited for a STEM career, and we shouldn't try to force feed everyone into doing it. A lot of the fields in th

  • Elon Musk claimed that 20 million people aged over 120 are "marked as alive in the social security system", thereby implying (or wanting us to believe) that they are being sent checks by the big bad nasty Social Security Department whose employees are pigs. Anyway, it clearly means he's secured at least 200 billion dollars from social security funds already (temporarily to his own bank account for safekeeping I'm sure), I'm expecting that every US citizen will get a "DOGE savings" check (I'm sure it'll happ

    • Re:I'm not worried (Score:5, Informative)

      by Cyberax ( 705495 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @06:22PM (#65268661)

      Elon Musk claimed that 20 million people aged over 120 are "marked as alive in the social security system"

      That's because COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as the epoch ("zero date"). So anybody with "age undetermined" will be shown as being ~150 years old.

      • "COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as the epoch ("zero date")"

        COBOL does not have a native date type.

        In addition, there's no date type anywhere that uses "May 20, 1875" as its epoch.

        • by Cyberax ( 705495 )
          COBOL implementations have functions like "INTEGER-OF-DATE", with various starting epochs. IBM uses the Gregorian calendar epoch (1582). Julian Days are also a common approach, with the Modified Julian Date having an epoch at November 17, 1858. It's certainly plausible that Social Security uses 1875 as the epoch.

          Never mind, that Social Security likely actually has information about (dead) people who would be 150 years old at this point. The first payment went out in 1937, and somebody 100 years old at tha
          • Only "modern" implementations of COBOL, such as those by MicroFocus, have such concepts. The legacy code used by SSA has no such niceties.

    • by dvice ( 6309704 )

      US Treasure said 2 months ago that it has detected and stopped 31 million worth of payments to dead people during a 5 month period pilot.
      Here is the press release from the original source:
      https://home.treasury.gov/news... [treasury.gov]

  • A bland corporate job with health benefits? Sorry, those are disappearing fast too. Workers who have labor to offer are increasingly useless in our economy. It's only the capitalists who own the automated machinery that produces goods and services who are participants in the economy. Everyone else is scrambling to get by with gig jobs like driving for Uber. However, that misleadingly shows up as full employment in statistics, when the truth is we're witnessing the rapid disappearance of the middle class.

  • Yes. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:29PM (#65268543)

    Obviously.

    Example: 3D was a dream-job 25 years ago. It was very niche and very demanding in skill and experience and the tools costed a fortune, but if you set your mind to it you could make an OK living, if only doing specialized client work like visualization or architecture.

    Today we've reached a point where specialized Smartphone Apps can take a video rotation of an object and spit out an optimized textured 3D model in a few seconds. Blender is for free and there are services that can spit out 3D models of anything for free in a few moments. Even rendering services are dead. The last Oskar for that Blender animation flick was final-rendered on a standard deskop PC.

    Another example: Drone Pilot. A few years back you could make a living with high-quality aerial videos or drone surveying. Special software and some knowlege and experience was required, but you could make money with this highly specialized occupation. Today you toss a drone-bot that costs a few hundred euros into the air and watch the aerial maps, pans, fly-throughs and whatnot just pour into your tablet in real time.

    Same with media production such as DTP/Print or Video. AI will have 90%+ of that covered in 2 years or so but even today many processes have been shrunk and automated 90% of the way. It's turned into more of a cultural technique rather than specific jobs.

    The bots are taking our jobs. I do webdev, moved (back) to frontend a few years back and now I basically just consult, talk to people and clean up shitty or half-finished code. And it isn't really a classic full time job anymore, it's just my experience and my self-marketing that helps me transition. I still have my IDE subscription, but I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes totally superfluos in a few years time. ... I am using ChatGPT4o as a tutor and personal expert/code assistant though. Really helpful. And a sign of things to come.

    The bots are here and they're taking over. It's that simple.

  • In 1970s Los Angeles Times employment classified ads, there were a number of ads for strippers. Not that type, the graphic arts type, long replaced by digital pre-press.
  • Whenever you feel down, just remember Trump said at his inauguration and him and shadow president Musk have repeated that we're now in a Golden Age.

  • by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @05:59PM (#65268613)
    Gen-X does not give a shit.
  • ...Cultivate general skills which are used as basis for most specializations.
    A scaffolding, if you will.

  • Those who came after Gen-x people, were trained to give their privacy away, and now all of their intellectual property.
  • That certain occupations will become less needed or even completely obsolete is now new. This has been the case but just for generations but for centuries and millennia all across the world.

  • This is why hyping STEM as a career is a problem, especially in IT. You can make a lot of money after graduation, but that plateaus early. At least give students a disclaimer.

  • by MIPSPro ( 10156657 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @08:56PM (#65268929)
    We have more work right now than we can do. We could hire 3x the staff and still not keep up. I'm like 600 hours behind on consulting jobs we're in the middle of. We cannot hire C or ASM programmers to save our lives. I don't know if it's because folks are terrified of being offshored and thus never enroll or study programming or they fear AI will take their jobs, but neither of those "solutions" are really available to us. Sure, AI helps us improve our productivity a little, but nowhere near the levels the hype would imply (yes, we use it). We need real/live US-citizens coding in compiled languages (C, C++, ASM) and "experts" in trendy scripting languages, academic LISP or ML weenies, or hyper-political hornrimed Rust/Go/Swift acolytes fall (very) short in our technical interviews. Laughably short, ya'll, with serious Dunning-Cruger "unskilled and unaware" problems (they don't even know decent algorithms or design patterns, other than the a few of the LISP/ML guys, who cannot actually finish anything). We pay more than other companies in the area and advertise each job's salary and we've been continuously searching for folks for over 7 years.

    Bad advice, bad messaging, stupid predictions, ignorant academic advisors, and a terrible media hypo-osphere have made some really dumb predictions. Personally, I'd have been thrilled to make $160k in my 20's as a C coder in this area and I find it hard to believe current folks aren't applying for our C/C++ gigs because they are holding out for that amazing Rust coding job. I think it's because the talent just isn't there anymore. We've ceded it to the Chinese and the LLM bots way before either is ready to take over. At this point we are putting multiple EE students through college and teaching them ASM and other languages ourselves.
    • by ksw_92 ( 5249207 )

      You're not alone in the need but, believe me, most of the competent C programmers are laying low, doing what they want by being big fish in smaller ponds. It's like COBOL greybeards...most of them either have developed a fiefdom in the company they work at or have a good consultancy going and don't need to hire out further.

      I've found fertile ground in the Arduino hacker space if you're looking to do simpler things. Big enterprise projects take a whole 'nother mindset but smaller projects are what these self

      • Yep. The folks who have the skills we need are always doing fairly well somewhere else at the center of some company's development or operations. They aren't college kids (not that we wouldn't hire college kids, if they could actually code in something helpful, but they typically come out with nothing helpful). Something scared the pants off those kids and they are not interested in C/C++. They basically won't touch anything compiled (they will talk about Rust, but that's about it) these days unless they ar
    • by klashn ( 1323433 )

      I've always wanted to do C or ASM coding, but never have been good enough to pass an interview, so instead I moved into QA debugging C and ASM code.
      These days I've moved into system integration roles.

      C/ASM roles were not abundant in the mid-2000s either, and they're even more scarce now. Now my skills are even more rusty, but I did like playing around with the Zachtronics games like TIS-100 :)

    • It's interesting to hear about an under-served niche in what sounds an awful lot like what a lot of us were doing 20 to 30 years ago. I liked programming at that level. But if I were young now, I would be afraid, very afraid about the long-term prospects for that specialty. I believe you when you say you are thriving, but the total number of people employed industry-wide (especially domestically) in that work is a small fraction of what it was. I say enjoy it while it lasts, and put some money in the bank.
    • by kackle ( 910159 )
      ksw_92, below, is not wrong as that's my story. I'm probably the biggest fish in my small pond, but C periodically makes me feel like a hack, STILL making me learn things about it after 20 years of doing it professionally. My gig is low-pay, but also low-pressure because I'm highly respected there and the company is boringly stable. Jumping to an $unknown company with its $unknown flow is unsettling--I don't want to jump through hoops for someone else's (often misguided) "dream" anymore; and heck, I can'
    • by GrpA ( 691294 )

      I've been programming assembly since the 1980s... I got so bored waiting for work lately, so I solo wrote an entire operating system in the past few years, as well as writing three assemblers and building an emulator.

      The problem isn't that there aren't any assembly programmers anymore. The problem is that the market either doesn't pay them enough, or expects a high concentration in one location, which just isn't practical - and wasn't practical even in the 1980s.

      In fact, the market spent so long trying to

  • I just finished reading Move Fast and Break Things How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy [jontaplin.com] and it explains this.

    Google and Facebook promote "content" that people get gratis, and Amazon is a monopsony that can pressure its vendors to lower prices. In this environment, stupid cat videos are as much "content" as a lavishly-produced film, and nobody wants to pay for art because there's so much gratis stuff out there (notwithstanding that most of it is crap.)

    And the few cr

    • Artists have been screwed by technology long before now. It was never the same after the 1942–1944 musicians' strike [wikipedia.org], for instance.

      Artists have had to adapt for a long time, and this is no different. Technology has enabled just about everyone to make and record music who wants to. The result is classic supply and demand: more music was published last year than all of the 1970s, I recently read somewhere. To be successful, artists need to connect with their audience through live shows, swag, Patreon
  • by zawarski ( 1381571 ) on Saturday March 29, 2025 @11:57PM (#65269121)
    I enjoy having to understand every esoteric nuance of AWS? That I enjoy having to pop Viagra? No, of course I do not. But X was not raised to be a bunch of whiny pansy-asses. I do both without complaint cause we were raised like a bunch of animals in the 70s and 80s and we would not have it any other way.
  • When people ask me about working in tech I tell them it's great but you need to reinvent yourself every few years. So I have gone from
    Sun Solaris Admin
    Linux sysadmin
    Monitoring and Alerting specialist
    Devops engineer
    Cloud Ops Security
    Cloud Architect

    So had I stayed in my chosen profession of Solaris Sysadmin (oh to be the BOFH again !!) I probably would be feeling like these people are feeling.

    • by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Indeed. But you are a 1%-er (well, maybe 10%-er in the IT area). Most people find it exceptionally difficult to continue learning and to actually understand what they are doing in the first place. And these people get left behind.

  • by groobly ( 6155920 ) on Sunday March 30, 2025 @01:36PM (#65269977)

    In my first job -- in the semiconductor industry -- when you wrote something up, it went to a secretary to type up, and to a draftsman to make professional figures. Those jobs disappeared in the 1980s. Every era has this. But most of those who write about it think the world began only on the day they were born.

Real programmers don't bring brown-bag lunches. If the vending machine doesn't sell it, they don't eat it. Vending machines don't sell quiche.

Working...