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I know the leftist in me is supposed to have sympathy for these people and get them to unionize. But only after I stop laughing and enjoying this moment. For years these fucks told the rest of us to “learn to code” and pretended like studying anything else at uni was a fucking waste of time.
GUESS WHAT FUCKERS. SO WAS CODING. Looks like we’ll be baristas together, only I’ll have three years of experience!!!
"learn to code" was always about increasing the supply of labor so they could reduce their costs.
The 2001 crash is a pattern. For years people would "Learn HTML" to get into jobs and others were encouraged to follow. The crash flushed many people out, and outsourcing of the early aughts devastated the whole profession. Today it's "Learn to Code" and "AI" are the new hip terms of art. It's all about slashing labor costs.
it's more interest rates than AI or "learn to code". most of the programming jobs were deeply dependent on VC funding for companies that never intended to make a profit. with the rise in interest rates, VCs stopped getting a continuous influx of cash to invest in these companies so they suddenly want their investments back ASAP. it's why reddit is suddenly IPOing, for example. large companies can't cheap debt to buy smaller competitors, so the only exit plan is to turn a profit - most of these companies planned to get bought out by a larger player. the larger companies are also struggling because higher interest rates mean their customers are spending less, so their bottom lines are looking bleak, hence all the layoffs since fall '22.
It's going to have to get much much worse before engineers unionize. I am sorry to say my fellows do not occupy reality in a class sense and these layoffs are just a taste of what's to come.
I also don't encounter a lot of the "learn to code" types irl, if ever. If anything, i hear pushback on outsourcing and bootcamps. I wonder how much of that sentiment was actual engineers vs students online who hadn't entered the workforce yet.
Most engineers I know are OK but not at all class conscious people.
I also have some bias here, I don't live or work on the coasts so the silicon valley elistist tech bro musk worshipping cutthroat competitive culture you see at big tech is just not there. And those types tend to be the loudest shittiest dudes online.
Midwest here, most folks just treat it as a job like any other. Still won't fucking unionize though, US propaganda is too strong.
for some reason techies who have never worked in the trades tend to be more "learn a trade" type guys
tradies: learn to code
techies: learn a trade
coding is a trade.
You're an individual paid to use skill to make things that someone else profits from. You may be paid well but you're also at the bottom of the ladder, having to do what you're told, discarded as it suits the employer.
My point is both are alienated and aggrieved, and they both use some “grass is greener” shit to justify why the problem isn’t the capitalist system but just that you chose the wrong line of work
The only people I’ve ever actually heard say “learn to code” are like Cory Booker and co
Yeah it tends to show up IRL more as a proposed solution than an insult. The whole, we just need to train these laid-off coal miners in West Virginia how to code, that will reverse the economic decline there.
everyone should be a plumber so that anyone can fix plumbing on their own instead of paying others to do it. how will a person get food if everyone's a plumber? 
You have to understand, these arguments aren’t about solving macroeconomic issues. They’re meant to chastise people complaining about the macroeconomic issues, hey you individually could potentially do this one thing that would given you a comfortable life, ergo the macroeconomic issues aren’t real. It’s a modern day version of “let them eat cake.”
Retire early due to being a small business tyrant and stealing the fruit of your employees labour? 
Retire early because of a large scale nationalised democratically run construction industry that prioritises early retirement for physically intensive work? 
The thing I’m noticing about trades is that the most successful businesses are the ones with multiple licenses under the same brand, so they’ll be an electrician, plumber, hvac whatever else all at the same time. It’s becoming more difficult to learn a single trade and then open your own business and make it big. Way easier for a company to go on say an electrical call and then ask the homeowner if they would like their AC checked while they’re there for example.
its gonna be really funny when generative AI fucks up a bunch of code and these people have to try and hire someone who actually has a clue but all of them have moved on to other industries.
trying to read code written by AI is going to give me an aneurysm.
Shoutout to my dad in 2020 who told me to become a blockchain developer because it was the future.
I am not a programmer at all, btw.
i dont really know what to do. i learned to code and right now i can't get a job.
all of my experience is in programming, so i can't really get into other industries. i can't do most jobs bc i am disabled and cannot drive, so the fact all the current advice is "do a job that requires the ability to drive" really isn't helpful. like even if i made enough money to move to the city i still couldn't be a plumber.
if anyone has any advice on jobs that are remote i would appreciate it
finance firms, honestly. they're immune to the underlying causes of this crash so they're still hiring programmers.
Was it coders saying that? I thought it was out of touch politicians.
It actually peaked with techbros on twitter aiming at journalists when there were mass layoffs after pivot to video failed. The politician line was always STEM education, "learn to code" was a twitter dunk thing.
wow you mean the money faucet running dry means suddenly all the startups that could never and would never turn a profit suddenly collapsed? shocking
A handful of speculative super-bubbles are on the verge of popping (one might argue that sites like Twitter have already popped and just won't admit it).
The overwhelming majority of software engineers and systems architects and coders are either
a) doing just fine in their non-imploding industries, such as finance and energy and manufacturing
b) eating the same pile of dogshit they've been eating for the last 30 years, assuming they're doing entertainment software or working Fivr jobs or otherwise engaged in the most precarious forms of software development work
This isn't bad news for coders. This is bad news for Silicon Valley VCs and their promise of unlimited borrowing capacity.
they've already moved from "learn to code" to "go to trade school and learn to weld"
Mmmm mmmm heavy metals and carcinogens!
My uncle died early because he was a hard working welder. My friend's father died early because he was a hard working welder.
Sure you get paid well to weld, if you don't mind 15-30 years off your lifespan.
Until the next artificial tech bubble leads to over-expansion and then it’s back to “learn to code.”
I still think we should learn to code just cuz its a genuinely useful skill and we shouldn't let giant corporations determine what software we use
That applies to all skills, but unfortunately there are so many hours in a day dor us to learn skills. Somee of us can code, some can bake. Some are excellent woodworkers, and others have a knack for gardeneing/farming. All skills are valid and needed in society. What we REALLY need to do is meet up with various people with various skill sets and form co-ops/communes to ensure everyone has everything they need.
Skill issue. I would simply write a barista script in the AngularJS framework.
Java might be more suitable for that
As someone actively trying to get into the industry, this is a certified bummer. I'll keep working at it anyway.
not me, when 99,999 coders get laid off because AI took their jobs, they're all going to sit around and do nothing all day, meanwhile I'm going to be the one who continues to apply for jobs or use those AI tools to make 50 micro-startups!!!
I would simply move to a peripheral country poor enough for outsourcers to hire me. In fact they were already doing it, gentrifying the shit out of everywhere.
Plus Romanian is an easy language
Honestly a lot of this is because of a coordinated action by big employers all deciding to cut budgets and do layoffs, all at the same time.
It started about two years ago when I kept hearing "2023 is going to be bad, we need to cut costs" and then costs got cut. Things didn't really turn out as dire as originally thought, but the costs keep getting trimmed.
I want to think that it's all part of a concerted effort by fortune 100 companies to nose dive the economy and get the Republicans back in power so they'll run the economy hot again like 2016-2020 but it also could just be idiot business herd-mentality where someone said it's going to be bad and spooked the entire fortune 100 elite into all doing the same thing.
Either way it has me just sitting right where I work and not looking, even though I've had conversations with a group of folks who all are looking to move as a group, together, a-la Dave Cutler's tribe when they went from DEC to Microsoft. We'd like to move as a group from one employer to another
It's the interest rates. You can't borrow money for basically free anymore. Previously risky ventures financed on loans now just don't make financial sense anymore, so they get cut. And that's still true because interest rates are still high.
It's 100,000% this. Venture capital went fucking wild from 2008 onwards because interest rates were so low you could take out a loan for practically zero interest to fund whatever dumb idea was being tossed around. FAANG in particular hired like fucking mad during the pandemic, and when interest rates inevitably raised they all realized they were dumping billions of dollars into dead-end projects that would never deliver profit.
It's shitty that, as usual, workers end up eating the cost of capital's hubris, but this downturn in the industry was inevitable.
Damn I picked a bad time to "learn to code" 