Have any of these articles actually addressed HOW software developers are supposed to retrain for good jobs? Personally I have neither the money nor the years to go back to college to get a livable job.
So obviously each college is different. And your experience is not mine.
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
Did you graduate yesterday? Have you actually lived in the world?
My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
If you're unemployed, you won't need to pay 2 grand/month for someone else to watch your children, and you don't have to pay San Francisco rents if you're not working there.
I don't think "just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option. That defeats the whole point since at that point the retraining isn't allowing you to maintain your quality of life.
It is a viable option. "Quality of life" is a luxury and programmers no longer belong to the class that can afford it. Do what everyone else does and go wherever the jobs are and live at whatever quality the market decides that you deserve.
I think you are missing the point of the discussion. The idea behind "just retrain" rhetoric is effectively "new technology won't destroy people's quality of life because they can just retrain!". If quality of life isn't maintained, then there is no reason to retrain at all, people can just get a minimum wage job and live in poverty.
The rhetoric was a lie. Capitalists lie. That new technology always creates a surplus of newer, better jobs and quality of life always improves for everyone was a lie. That you can "just retrain" and everything will remain the same was a lie.
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
I wonder how many sectors this will have to happen to until workers realize that nobody's safe. I was shocked to see journalists at major firms peddling the 'just learn to code' line a few years back, given how much their industry had contracted in the decades before.
Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
San Francisco is where the jobs are, and dropping your entire social network on the floor at exactly the moment you need it the most to help you is not good advice.
Former tech workers can ask for advice from non-tech people who previously had to leave because they could no longer afford rising costs that happened due to influx of well paid IT jobs.
No, it isn't. This is an incredibly modern phenomenon. We see examples of peoples moving en masse throughout history, yes, but the idea that everyday individuals should expect to leave their community is an incredibly recent one. Such would have seemed monstrous to people even a few hundred years ago. Fun fact: Socrates wasn't actually sentenced to death, he was sentenced to death or exile, and chose death over having to leave his home behind.
The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise
We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
Some humans moved their families from somewhere that they weren't safe, to somewhere that they could be safe, with the intention of settling there and building a living space their great-grandkids could be proud of.
Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
Migrating is one thing, having to migrate another.
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
-- from "Home" by Warsan Shire, <a href="https://www.amnesty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/home-by-warsan-shire.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.amnesty.ie/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/home-by-wa...
I'm assuming you're talking about people born in SF? Because the rest have already demonstrated a willingness to give up their community once in the pursuit of quality of life.
Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.
harimau777 · · focus · HN ↗
bruce511 · · focus · HN ↗
But my college did not train me to get a job the first time. Indeed they explicitly explained to us that that was not their goal. That was helpful because up to then we did think they were doing job training.
What they actually set out to do was make us "smarter" people. In the sense that they taught us to analyze problems, work in teams, find creative solutions. They taught us about research and critical thinking, and logic and so on. How to hypothesize, test, evaluate, adapt.
You don't need to go back to college to learn all that again. You already know it. Skills are easily, and quickly taught and learned. That's the easy part. The hard part is approaching a job as a problem to solve- how and where to add value. Value people will pay for.
Look around you. See unmet needs. Figure out what you need to do to meet those needs. That's the real challenge we face going into this next era.
dmkolobov · · focus · HN ↗
My unmet needs are $2.5k rent and $2k childcare, per month. Then there's food, healthcare, car payments. There is pretty much zero wiggle room for us.
ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
harimau777 · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
harimau777 · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
Even if you "retrain" your quality of life will go down because the market value of your life will go down as automation and AI improve, unless you're a member of the capitalist class. Which, if you need to work for a living at all, you aren't. No matter what you do unless you're personally wealthy your quality of life will go down. That's just what an efficient market does to most people, and AI is going to make the market brutally efficient.
achierius · · focus · HN ↗
akoboldfrying · · focus · HN ↗
Quality of life during the Industrial Revolution dropped considerably for most of the working population, but afterwards saw big improvements. You seem to be implying that life now is worse than before the IR. Are you? If not, in what way was the loss of jobs to mechanisation then more acceptable than it is now?
TeMPOraL · · focus · HN ↗
The overall quality of life improved through and thanks to IR. But the quality of life of the people most affected, and their children, and their children's children - did not do so well.
Technological progress automating away jobs lifts humanity as a whole, but it absolutely fucks over the people whose jobs got automated away, and the families of those people, and the communities they live in.
munificent · · focus · HN ↗
flaunf221 · · focus · HN ↗
krapp · · focus · HN ↗
munificent · · focus · HN ↗
AndrewKemendo · · focus · HN ↗
That’s been how humanity has always worked, human migration is probably the largest single driver of social change in human history
Millions of people migrate every year today, I’m not sure what you think the alternative is
achierius · · focus · HN ↗
> Millions of people migrate every year today
A just society that doesn't force them to.
AndrewKemendo · · focus · HN ↗
We’re physically built to be mobile - the extent you can take your community with you has always been relevant
I’m sitting in Virginia USA with 50% of my neighbors being migrant families of 5+ people usually across three generations
I’m not sure what data you’re working with. In fact there a whole lot of ignorant politicians that want to stop migration precisely because of how valuable of a tool it is.
marcus_holmes · · focus · HN ↗
Some humans lived nomadically, moving all the time, as a way of life.
Being forced to do the second because nowhere is stable enough to do the first is what we're talking about.
oblio · · focus · HN ↗
That colonization happened when there weren't other humans there. Later colonizations were either unsuccessful or led to very nasty events.
Also, today jobs are concentrated in places where things are expensive.
jplusequalt · · focus · HN ↗
You're talking about time scales on the order of several thousand human generations.
Take any human over the course of the last quarter million years, the chances are they didn't migrate away from their communities.
customguy · · focus · HN ↗
bruce511 · · focus · HN ↗
Equally, if you are in SF you're about to feel the pain you've caused to the locals by moving there. Somewhat harshly, I could suggest that you didn't care about their existing community when you priced them out of their neighborhoods.
So here's the rub. SF is somewhat different. It is a company town. If you don't work for the company you're moving. Sorry. There's certainly nothing else that can pay you the same money.
On the up side, there are lots send lots of cheaper places to live. And chances are you can find a good job there doing something that adds value to that community.