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’m doing contracting work right now to clean up a SQL database for a manufacturer. But I can even see this going away eventually. It’s too repetitive and tedious and monotonous. Only thing about this is the company will never let an AI controlled by another company catalogue their databases. Plus, the number of people on the data side of the business is my friend and the contractor they hired: me. But this work isn’t enough to keep me going long term.
Also, I fucking hate it I hate it so much goddamn it is boring and sucks and I want to jump into a woodchipper at the thought this is going to be what I do for the rest of my life.
I also do contract work and my contract is now 7 years old but when they try to push me into an FTE role, I’m like “I’ll be working with you . . . forever???”
On one hand, FTE means more security which is nice. After being laid off I get that desire for stability. On the other hand it means doing that shit in the long term. After being hired I get that dread and dullness of doing meaningless and unfulfilling tasks till I die… Work sucks