Are Tech-Driven 'Career Meltdowns' Hitting Generation X? (nytimes.com) 141
"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:
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..."
That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:4, Funny)
Re:That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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> 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
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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
Re:That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Substantial replacement not total abolition (Score:2)
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.
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jury trial can't be replace by AI but you may end sitting in jail for years waiting for that trail.
Throw out the old assumptions (Score:2)
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
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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
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"Vegetable and fruit pickers are being replaced by robots"
I live in orchard country. Not a robot to be seen.
Re: That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:2)
Probably because the farmer still have access to to cheap labor in that area.
In other places, including Europe there is a trend to use robots. One benefit over manual labor is that the robot might actually do a better job at picking fruits at the correct ripeness over a human that is pressured to go fast.
Robots should be able to work 24/7 and pick fields in less days.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/f... [foxnews.com]
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My eldest son is an oysterman. As long as his health holds up, he'll be okay. Pays well, but the hours are tidal.
Enjoying your posts and hope you stay around! (Score:2)
Options I put together for when a society wants them: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a g
Go look up what life is like in Russia (Score:2)
The ruling class kept us in a constant state of horrifying poverty for thousands of years. We have had a middle class and a decent quality of life for most people for a little over a hundred. Why is it so far fetched that the ruling class might want to go back to what for them was the good old days?
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It's not that it's so far fetched that it couldn't become that way again, but at this point in time, I feel the American public would push back, violently. I think we are more likely to turn into Mexico then China. As in, cartels really run things and the government is, at best, on equal footing with the cartels but not strong enough to dismantle them.
Frankly, the whole country will fall apart before that happens. We'll end up as numerous countries instead.
Besides, for the rich, it's still the good old days
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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?)
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Won't add up ... (Score:2)
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 ...
Re:Won't add up ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. There is a whole world in between the financial security of the Boomers and homelessness. Us GenXers are good at living with compromise.
We will be fine.
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"There is a whole world in between the financial security of the Boomers and homelessness"
There is a whole world between them *so far*.
It's not just Gen X (Score:3)
... 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.
Re:It's not just Gen X (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
Re: So the problem is we are facing the change (Score:2)
Democrats didn't invent service economy nor did they have any way to enforce its creation.
Corporations made these decisions on their own without feedback from any political party. Because the power structure runs opposite of what your post implies.
Tech isn't immune (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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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
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I'm betting that social security gets cut in one way or another.
That's actually already baked in. If Congress does nothing, social security cuts of $325/mo start around 2033. You can go find that info on both NPR and Fox... But the thing is, they can start sooner if the trust fund runs out early.
T
Re: Tech isn't immune (Score:2)
I don't worry too much about SS, but i do worry about the collapse of the economy. If the US dollar goes south, we're all in for it.
This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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
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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
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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
I'm not worried (Score:2)
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)
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.
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"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.
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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
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Only "modern" implementations of COBOL, such as those by MicroFocus, have such concepts. The legacy code used by SSA has no such niceties.
Re: I'm not worried (Score:2)
Re: I'm not worried (Score:2)
Funny, if there is fraud you would usually assign investigators from the DOJ. Find the culprit and prosecute them.
If it's only politics, you make a post on social media.
Why do you guys keep falling for this kind of pageantry?
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DOJ has 116,000 employees. If there are 20 million people doing a fraud, you have 172 cases per DOJ employee on top of their normal work. Do you think they could do that much extra work and would it be even worth it from the government money point of view? That work is not free and there is no guarantee that the criminals can ever pay back what they have stolen.
I think DOGE has pretty good plan of connecting different databases to make sure people who are dead in one database, are also dead in another datab
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I think DOGE has pretty good plan of connecting different databases to make sure people who are dead in one database
That's because you don't know what a forensic accountant does.
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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]
Full employment (Score:2)
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)
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.
No more strippers (Score:2)
Golden Age (Score:2)
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.
Luckily (Score:3)
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Re: Luckily (Score:2)
And you all will be sorry if we ever start.
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I always said... (Score:2)
...Cultivate general skills which are used as basis for most specializations.
A scaffolding, if you will.
Gen-X'ers aren't as pliable to AI Theft (Score:2)
Why is this news? (Score:2)
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.
The Great Plateau (Score:2)
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.
Obsolete skills? I'm more in demand than ever. (Score:3)
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.
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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
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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 :)
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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
The Internet turned things to shit (Score:2)
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
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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
Do you think at my age (Score:4, Funny)
Have they tried adapting ? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
So what? (Score:3)
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.
Re: Lamp lighters say... (Score:2)
Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:2, Interesting)
Remember that the baby boomer generation larger than Gen X until the millennials grew larger than the boomers.
Gen X had the following trends preventing it from establishing itself as the the largest part of corporate leadership:
Giving the baby boomers 10 extra years in leadership of corporations, government, etc. preventing Generation X from rising economically as fast as the boomers did (declining lifetime earnings for Gen X)
1. Declining birth rate from the ~1956-~1962 baby boomer years
2. Birth control ava
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It sucks to be on the trailing edge bulge as it goes through the demographic snake. You want to be on the leading edge of the bulge.
This even apples to the boomers. The boomers on the leading edge of the bulge got cheap houses and retirement pensions, those boomers on the trailing edge got high mortgage rates and defined benefit plans.
The problem is there was no recovery after the trailing edge of the bulge passed through the demographic snake. This was because people didn't fight for something better, and
Re:Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:5, Interesting)
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Yes, I minced words and got that wrong. But I meant "contribution"
Re: Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:5, Funny)
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"are you being sarcastic, dude?"
"i don't even know anymore"
Re:Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:5, Informative)
You have your dates wrong. If you'll take a look here [wikipedia.org], you'll see that the Baby Boom after WW II is considered to go from 1946 to 1964. I know this because I'm an early boomer, having been born in 1949.
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i don't think the commenter was saying the BB generation was from 56-62. he was saying that during those years of the BB generation there was a decline in the birth rate
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They will die and many will pass their properties on to their children. This covers it nicely https://retirely.co/the-greate... [retirely.co]
Sure, some will sell the homes, move into assisted living, etc. I'm hoping that's what my mom eventually decides to do when the time comes because I'd rather she get the best end of life care we can afford then to just transfer that wealth to me.
For the rest, they will be passing homes onto their children and grandchildren. Not overly helpful if you don't have any family or if they
Re: Also boomers benefited from unions (Score:2)
Between reverse mortgages, assisted living, and health care costs. The much of the assets of the older generation are being transferred to corporations and not to heirs.
This is all by design. Mining the middle class for wealth has been part of a broader strategy of the rich to undermine decades of effort by socialist leaning politicians.
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They will die and many will pass their properties on to their children. This covers it nicely https://retirely.co/the-greate... [retirely.co]
Sure, some will sell the homes, move into assisted living, etc. I'm hoping that's what my mom eventually decides to do when the time comes because I'd rather she get the best end of life care we can afford then to just transfer that wealth to me.
It is interesting how different folks have different outlooks. If I'm ever in a state to suck up my estate money just to keep me in a home, my plan is to do a self checkout. It might be old fashioned, but what I can provide for my family is my final legacy.
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Oh, I agree with you if it was *me* but I selfishly want my mom in the world for as long as possible, so long as she has good quality of life. I don't want her to ever suffer needlessly. If that means selling the house, so be it. How could I live with myself if I made any other choice?
When I pass away, whatever I have will pass to nieces and nephews. Of course, if no one calls it will just go to whatever charity I think could do the most good.
To be fair, I also do not know my mom's thoughts on the matter. S
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Oh, I agree with you if it was *me* but I selfishly want my mom in the world for as long as possible, so long as she has good quality of life. I don't want her to ever suffer needlessly. If that means selling the house, so be it. How could I live with myself if I made any other choice?
When I pass away, whatever I have will pass to nieces and nephews. Of course, if no one calls it will just go to whatever charity I think could do the most good.
To be fair, I also do not know my mom's thoughts on the matter. She may very well feel just as we both feel, that it's best to save the resources for those who can use it.
Yup, I understand completely. My mother passed away from a massive heart attack, my father it took a year, and passed away at home. My MIL on the other hand, took ten years to pass away from dementia in memory care. The MIL experience was horrifying for us, I always considered the exit that my mother had, as sort of "Winning" Maybe 10 seconds of pain, and that's it. Perfectly healthy, then boom.
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Or pivot to management. That's what I did as a successful network engineer. It has been 3yrs, and a lot of growth, training and learning new social skills and techniques to successfully manage highly intelligent people across different generations and from new to multi decades of service. Not to mentioning managing a high visibility and important portfolio for the organization. Even if management isn't for you, people staying in the technical field need to be flexible, and willing to be life long learners and good at information sharing with colleagues.
Exactly +5 informative
Pivot to something as trends develop and change. Yes, to remain gainfully employed, you cannot engage in career stasis. I'm a dreaded Boomer. But even back in the 1970's the best way to become redundant was to try to inflict stasis on your career. I've been many things, indeed only after over 35 years am I working in my education's field. "Not My Job" is not in my work vocabulary.
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I can code and my career has been plagued by layoffs and long stints of unemployment. I guess its my fault for not playing the startup game or going to a FAANG company and making bank doing souless work. I guess it was silly to think that staying in VFX because the work was more fun.
Re: Lamp lighters say... (Score:2)
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Pay is varies directly with the amount of risk the company you work for is exposed 2 and the difficulty of replacing someone in that position.
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remove health insurance from jobs.
The perfect job (Score:2)
To be paid for doing your hobby. That's what most academics get paid for...
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Social Security has been lurching towards insolvency for some time now. You should have expected it.
Social Security will be saved (Score:2)
Once the trust fund's imminent collapse finally becomes headline news the politicians will finally find a way forward. Until then they enjoy frightening older people into contributing to their candidate's campaign fund.
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All they gotta do is pull another O'Neal/Reagan compromise, which means raising the retirement age again.
Right solution of course (Score:2)
But the people aren't going to like it. Social Security was intended to ensure that ill and decrepit elderly people were not left in extreme poverty. It has morphed into a racket to transfer money from one generation to their elders so they can indulge themselves and not work whilst having very adequate health. This is, of course, because medicine has resulted in far longer life spans and years of good health after retirement. But it's not going to be popular - not least because the USA doesn't give adequat
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They'll like insolvency less.
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If you say anything connected with technology I have some news for you
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People are making a big mistake when they focus on jobs and work. There is and always will be lots of jobs and work for humans to do. If you want to wash your clothes on a riverside by hand, you can do that (unless your city laws prohibit it).
We are not out of jobs, we are out of customers. What is the end result of your work-team that will be bought by a customer? Food? Housing? Security? Education? Entertainment? People have limits on how much food, housing and security they need. Education and entertainm
Re: Imagine if the TFA was written 100 years ago (Score:2)
Other than the mountains of manure in the cities. The buggy era created fewer problems than the automotive era. How many times have we fought wars for oil, or found micro plastics from tires in our food, or cities so polluted with smog that it causes respiratory risks?
Not suggesting we become Luddites. But there are consequences to technology that we rarely consider before pivoting to them.
As for individuals lacking basic skills in futurism. I think most people received advice that lead them towards their c