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The last time my family was replaced by technology

339 points · 641 comments · megalomanu

  1. harimau777 · · focus · HN ↗
    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.
    1. bruce511 · · focus · HN ↗
      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.

      1. dmkolobov · · focus · HN ↗
        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.

        1. ForHackernews · · focus · HN ↗
          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.
          1. harimau777 · · focus · HN ↗
            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.
            1. AndrewKemendo · · focus · HN ↗
              > just give up your existing community and move" is a viable option.

              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

              1. achierius · · focus · HN ↗
                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.

                > Millions of people migrate every year today

                A just society that doesn't force them to.

                1. AndrewKemendo · · focus · HN ↗
                  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.

                  1. marcus_holmes · · focus · HN ↗
                    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.

                  2. oblio · · focus · HN ↗
                    > The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise

                    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.

                  3. jplusequalt · · focus · HN ↗
                    >The entire colonization of the planet by humans from 250,000BC to today would argue otherwise

                    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.

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