This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yep. Been saying it for years because I was laid off over and over. Do not enter computer science.
Become an welder, electrician, etc. ANYTHING but a computer scientist
The trades will ALWAYS be in demand. No matter where society goes, as long as it doesn't collapse we will need running water, electricity, toilets, transportation, etc. I went to college for bio, switched to CS, graduated with business management degree and now I'm a mechanic. The hope is one day run my own garage perhaps, but untill then I love comfortably enough and know I can walk out tomorrow and find another job before I make it home.
Also consider a healthcare career. As a teenager, I wanted to do computer science/engineering, and sometimes I do wish I had stayed on that track. But now, as a nurse, I could get a job in any state in the US by tomorrow. I dare you to try to find a hospital that doesn't have open nursing positions. Even when the economy goes down, people still get sick. Even if society collapses, the knowledge/skills will be useful.
And if you don't want to change diapers or deal with blood, there are still options; I'm in psychiatry and rarely have to deal with either.
In the 1970s companies started "Stack Ranking" all their employees and firing the bottom 10% in order to replace them or simply using their wages to pay CEOs more.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
Now the media will jump past all this to blame anything but the CEOs and failure of Government to reign in the wage gap via the force of law.
Companies used to provide workers a pay related sense of justice, a career for life.
.... There was a period from the 1940s to the 1970s when this was more common-place. But historically this kind of cut-throat wage squeeze was very normal, particularly in the industrialized American north.
One of the driving forces behind improvements in the American capitalist model, wrt pensions and professional job security and a regulated relationship between business and labor, was European Communism. The allure of the revolutionary communist reconstructions (and less revolutionary socialist rebuilds) drove some significant number of Western professionals into the waiting arms of Papa Stalin and a fair number more into large labor unions and socialist political ideologies.
Without the USSR as foil to the capitalist system, there is less urgency among the capitalist class to negotiate with labor and less optimism among American workers to achieve some kind of superior economic position.
That, combined with an absolute tsunami of corporate propaganda to brainwash civilian workers, a swelling pustule of a police state to cow the lumpen proletariat, and a Global War on Whatever to galvanize young liberals and conservatives alike against the phantom menace of foreign invasion, has supplanted any kind of negotiating between capital owners and their wage cuck workers.
The only thing you have to hope for in the modern day is a big enough 401k such that you can live like a parasite rather than the host.
That's what happens when everyone rushes to do the same qualification - you get too many people for that area of work. More graduates doesn't magically make more jobs - it just makes more people applying for the same amount of jobs.
And most of them are shit at their jobs because they just do it for money. No care for the skill.
When you like your profession, your job you still do for money. Otherwise you'd be playing with similar things at home to much more satisfaction.
So here I won't agree and say that tech needs unions. Union pressure would solve the problem of labor organization and on-job education, so that they wouldn't be shit at their jobs.
Skill and such things are practically important for scientists, maybe.
It's finally happening, tech jobs are suffering the same unemployment that the trades had been suffering for years if not decades, only this time around it's probably self-inflicted by the AI bubble.
AI hasn't really taken much, if any tech jobs so far. If anything demand for building and using AI has taken up a good share of the job market in tech.
The bigger issue, currently, is that experience is required even for "entry" level jobs because they simply won't pay for people who are learning and gaining that experience. It's also cheaper on the whole to pay someone overseas with experience to do the "grunt work", for lack of a better word, that you would normally pay a newbie to do, and they'll get it done faster and more reliably. You'll have a domestic leadership team and a few senior engineers to steer projects and manage the communication and timezone issues, but very few, if any, fresh graduates.
It's short term thinking that's going to fuck the industry in a generation when all the old school guys die or retire, the senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers move up to fill their roles and you don't have enough Jr engineers to become the seniors, leads and managers. They'll be trying to manage entire teams from overseas, trying to replace people with AI, which will never be a true replacement, and they'll suddenly see the value in hiring new graduates, but there won't be enough by then because they made the major useless. The few that exist will probably make bank straight out of school, though, as companies become desperate for them.
I'm glad I never took it. Been employed in the field for thirty years.
I set my mind on comp sci like 6 years ago because it was said to be one of the most in demand fields (maybe still is) and pays well (I was looking at SWE). Nowadays I have set my mind on a job that involves me working away in a server room. Hopefully that pans out.
3-5 years ago my answer would've been different. I could trip and find a job offer. I was getting job offers by email essentially without interviewing.
About a year ago that completely dried up. I can't even remember the last email I got that was more than recruiter spam. My friend who used to also trip into jobs (7 at peak) has been hunting for 3 months now with no luck.
But...servers and data centers and stuff, you're probably onto something. Wishing you the best.
