Looking in the newspaper of my major US city.
All the ads were for HVAC techs. Nobody was looking for Comp Sci or Chem Engineering.
Almost switched to HVAC.
Glad I held out for an actual debugging software job
Pity young people today. Don’t be programmers; there’s no future in it.
Tbf, those types of jobs have a higher degree of turnover and thus need slots backfilled more frequently. Trades jobs can be pretty fuckin miserable, especially ones that are incredibly physically demanding as you age.
It really used to piss me off when the older techs would make me crawl around in nasty crawlspaces while they stood around and smoked cigarettes.
I get not wanting to be there but I’m not not about to leave some poor kid who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing fumbling around in the dark by himself for half the day.
I got laid off from my software job then took a physical labor job to make ends meet. I got promoted to management and used my software skills to automate most of my job. This is my recommended career path.
Software skills --> Anyone will be able to vibecode a good-enough app within 2-3 years
Domain knowledge --> Top LLMs already have domain knowledge comparable to specialists in whichever field, and are getting less hallucinatory & more accurate every year.
Not being a doomer, no idea what policies make sense going forward, but this is what I observe
I remember when I just graduated from college
STEM degrees.
Looking in the newspaper of my major US city.
All the ads were for HVAC techs. Nobody was looking for Comp Sci or Chem Engineering.
Almost switched to HVAC.
Glad I held out for an actual debugging software job
Pity young people today. Don’t be programmers; there’s no future in it.
Tbf, those types of jobs have a higher degree of turnover and thus need slots backfilled more frequently. Trades jobs can be pretty fuckin miserable, especially ones that are incredibly physically demanding as you age.
It really used to piss me off when the older techs would make me crawl around in nasty crawlspaces while they stood around and smoked cigarettes.
I get not wanting to be there but I’m not not about to leave some poor kid who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing fumbling around in the dark by himself for half the day.
I got laid off from my software job then took a physical labor job to make ends meet. I got promoted to management and used my software skills to automate most of my job. This is my recommended career path.
Software skills plus domain knowledge is a good combination, and I think it will remain viable in the future. But who the fuck knows?
Software skills --> Anyone will be able to vibecode a good-enough app within 2-3 years
Domain knowledge --> Top LLMs already have domain knowledge comparable to specialists in whichever field, and are getting less hallucinatory & more accurate every year.
Not being a doomer, no idea what policies make sense going forward, but this is what I observe