If you are white collar then it’s going to “disrupt” your field.
I work in tech. I got laid off last year. I wasn’t at Alphabet or Amazon or anything. Much smaller company. But AI “optimization” has ravaged the tech industry and not just programmers. Admins, database specialists, network specialists, developers, you name it. Our job market is absolutely fucked.
In my county, a major metro area in the US (like, top 10) craigslist used to be the place to get real job postings. If it wasn’t a recruiter then your odds of getting a callback from a job posting there is pretty high. There are plenty of postings for other fields like mechanics and tradesmen and so on. For the few tech categories: nothing in the last month. Zero postings. Not even recruiter ads. Literally nothing. It’s a wasteland.
I’ve been told to “go back to school.” I’ll be 41 soon. I’m still paying off my computer science degree. It’s worthless. What else should I go for? Accounting? HR? These are going to be taken by AI, too. Will it be a mistake? Sure. They don’t care. They’ll do it anyways.
When I got my degree my wife and I were homeless. We just got back out of the hole in the last 10 years. I was finally building savings. It’ll be gone in 60 days. She was laid off on Friday. Her industry is in property finance. Another gutted industry. She has to change industries, too.
What is to be done?
I would have liked being a teacher or professor, as I understood the profession pre-cellphones, but CS had shinier career options, plus more introvert appeal, and almost every day since acquiring my degree, there is a new horror story about how bad teachers are treated, meanwhile, I’ve had weeks where 99% of my job was goofying off instead of doing real work and I still get a raise.
I guess I fell in with the wrong group of nerds, lol. I never did sort out my own issues with introversion (undiagnosed autism?), so in some ways I’m happy I didn’t waste more time right away trying to learn to swim by being thrown in the deep end. Maybe some day I’ll go back to school. There is a labor shortage in that area after all.