The whole “learn to code” push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. Every industry that starts a massive PR campaign to draw in high school graduates is doing it because the capitalist class wants cheaper labor.
the capitalist class wants slaves
They want all the upsides of slaves and none of the downsides, much like how they prefer to lease assets instead of owning them because then they have deferred responsibilities.
With slaves you have all of the costs of maintaining and housing and feeding them and giving them basic medical care. Letting them die is a huge burden of cost and loss of investment. You have to cover at least their bare subsistence.
With Proletarians you don’t even have to do that. You can pay less than subsistence as the reserve body of labor replenishes itself through reproduction. Thus you can squeeze all the value from someone then toss them aside for the next. You can let a percentage of your workers fall into health issues and die without any ability to afford care. You can let a bunch of them become evicted and houseless, and eventually die on the streets. There’s another worker there to pick up where the last one left off.
This is a big reason why capitalists don’t openly use mass enslavement anymore, and why the south lost the civil war. It was too expensive and inefficient compared to proletarian workforces. The slavery that does get used is subsidized by the state, so that the employers get prison laborers for cheap without any of the costs associated with maintaining them.
as the reserve body of labor replenishes itself through reproduction
No longer and capitalists are freaking out (they are still not going to lessen the exploitation).
They want all the upsides of slaves and none of the downsides
This was the exact rationale for the Nazis’ program of “extermination through work” and is why Cesaire was absolutely correct to say that at the end of capitalism lies Hitler.
The whole “learn to code” push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. When Boomers give advice on what career to pursue, it’s a really bad sign for that field.
I do believe that Obama legit thought it was a way for people to transition from blue collar work to white collar in an era where the US was clearly outsourcing the nasty stuff to china while holding the better jobs back for Americans. That has changed drastically with the advent of AI, and will only get worse.
Those of you who feel displaced from your profession, I hope you’ll begin looking at other ways to support yourselves in earnest, because no one is coming to save you. I’m a victim of our new reality as well, and fully understand that it’s adapt or live in a van down by the river. I haven’t figured it out yet. Good luck to all.
The worst thing is that having a large workforce of engineers is actually an incredible advantage.
Too bad it has no effect when youre as deindustrialized and neo liberalism is the guiding hand of society.
Paralleling this with China actually having socially beneficial projects for its technocrat base to do rather than building the next ubereats to monopolize another area of the economy.
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So that’s like 8 years of “we need warm bodies” against 10 years of no work and 8 years of it being not great but not awful out of the last 26 years, and the overlords are COMPLETELY bought in to paying any price to replace you with a robot going forward.
This is a very short paraphrase of exactly what I was just reading in Capital about the English cotton trade, lol
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My dad was a coder who graduated in 77 (I think) (back when it was a subset of electrical engineering at the local university) and did ok for himself.
I on the other hand have not been able to find work in the field
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I do have to pay the bills in the meantime. Maybe carpentry? Idk
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Unfortunately, electrician apprenticeships are bonkers competitive here. I did look into it though.
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This was always the plan. Saturate the tech job market so the wages would plummet.
They did the same thing with trucking. Told everyone it was a solid middle class career in dire need of workers. Convinced a bunch of states and the feds to foot the bill for truck driving schools.
They never needed more drivers, what they needed was more people to sucker in to predatory truck leases. They get new graduates to sign a lease for a truck. The lease forces them to only work for the company that leases them the truck, forcing them to accept whatever mileage rate the company decides to give them. Once the driver gets sick of that, the company takes the truck and leases it to the next person they recruit directly from trucking school(paid for by the government).
Saw it a million miles away when “learn to code” was the rage everywhere. All the boot camps, coding classes in elementary schools, encouraging it for every wage issue and job training program (like Hillary Clinton’s idea about what to do with the coal miners and people who lose their jobs), etc. It was so obvious they wanted to pay less wages. I feel like freaking Cassandra over here.
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I went to school for CS out of passion, computers and software have been my bread and butter since I was a kid. Currently on month 7 of the job hunt with no bites. I got another degree in math for similar reasons, but job prospects from that are pretty slim too. It’s a grim landscape; there’s work to be done and a need for more workers, but it’s more profitable to bleed the existing workforce white than to hire new people in any real quantity. And they lean on “AI” as an excuse for the hiring freezes but the reality of that grift is obvious; it’s all just bluster and excuses to pad the margins.
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Same thing with civil engineering too, but don’t worry all of our infrastructure has been well built, maintained, and has thoroughly planned replacements. lol.
It’s actually insane seeing how quickly things flipped or at least how quickly the popular sentiment did. I saw whispers of it which was part of my cope from swapping away from that to IT (which I do genuinely enjoy more than coding most of the time) but a lot of people got completely hosed. What industry is getting rug-pulled next I wonder?
(Pointing to the comp sci industry helped my friends understand some of the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions and might have them join the local chapter of my org though so capitalism is truly the best radicalization tool)
the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions
it’s you, comrade
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evergreen image
It’s actually insane seeing how quickly things flipped
It is. But not entirely unfamiliar. I think we’re going through upheaval and the people who are the best trained will be well positioned when things level out. Some types of tech jobs will be gone, but this is also not entirely unfamiliar.
And I mean best trained young people, of course. I don’t think ageism has gone anywhere in this field.
The ageism is insane considering some aspects of development and certain software benefit from insane legacy skills. It somewhat bleeds into IT but luckily due to the way much of it is built up skill and experience are important enough to overcome it in many paths.
Where do they go from here? Aside from going back to school for something more lucrative, they could take the suggestion from one laid-off tech veteran, who last year told SFGATE that she had started selling her blood plasma to make ends meet.
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im not bitter at all
Let’s start the hexbear coding coop and make our own jobs
Holy shit yes
same :doomjak:
Schadenfreude moment for me. Laugh some more at us, humanities majors.
Welcome to the Army Reserve of Labor. Get comfortable, stay a while.
Hilariously, I changed majors from CS to painting because CS started to feel really boring and the Recession made it look like things wouldn’t be great upon graduation. Better to have a degree that doesn’t pay you that you can keep doing while unemployed than a degree that doesn’t pay you that you hate.
Hell yeah, Comrade.
What is this “Futurism” website? All the headlines have this extremely combative kind of headline. The parent company website is the most soulless thing I’ve ever seen. Look at this crap: https://recurrent.io/what-we-do/
The article says the unemployment rate for software is 6.1% compared to 4.1% in the US in general. Considering a bunch of companies have just done massive layoffs in the last few months and years, is that really something that won’t go back to normal in the longer term?
This applies to all STEM fields tbh. It’s not great out there, folks.
See, they should’ve just gone into the trades.
Also, if you’re in a trade and can’t find a job, that’s your fault for not getting a bachelor’s.
8 years ago at 32 yo I found myself with a film studies degree and not job and decided to coming back to college. I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier (like 100 vs 5 students per admission) and I wanted to be sure I was admitted. Best decision ever. Nowadays I have a solid stable job with full benefits, and at the end I’m a programmer (python/pandas now learning polars) but with actuarial/accounting/finance knowledge that gives me an edge over other programmers or actuaries.
I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier
It’s the complete opposite in my country. Actuarial science requires you to basically have a perfect GPA (at least our country’s version of GPA), while computer science “only” requires a good GPA.
In my college is an admission test, best 40 get the spot. High school graduates know and arw interested om computer sciences, actuarial sciences have no glamor, nobody knows about and it’s have the reputation of being extremely hard, so almost nobody even gives it a try.
I’ve always told people not to learn to code. Less competitors in my field is good for me.
Damn Lucy moved the football again what an unforseen development
CS was already oversaturated 10 years ago. There was just lots of cheap money to fund start ups and new business
Yeah that was when I was first job hunting and struggling with it, and I remember people saying “a degree isn’t enough, what you really need these days is a portfolio.” I cobbled one together with school projects and some basic ass robot I made in my free time, and eventually I got in. But now I wonder if a zoomer who just graduated could pull off the same thing.
