Anecdotally, from personal experience... job hunting is worse now than the recessions of 2000 or 2008. I think I belive Jerome Powell based on that. https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/fed-chair-jerome-powell-say... ?
You probably need to be more granular. I got lucky, but in 2000 anything tech-related was nuclear winter. A lot of people just left the industry. 2008 was more broad-based and, while it wasn't a great market for tech (I held off making a change for a couple of years for that reason), I'm not sure it was terrible for a lot of tech.
The capital-owning class is society. Don't you have a 401(k)?
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> Well then I guess we should just tear down the planet, the environment and society, burn, sell and grind to a pulp everything that isn't nailed to the ground for profit, and give everyone a cut, future consequences be damned.
The gig economy is hiding the real employment problem in most of the West. How money Works "The Gig Economy is Full" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqmJN5z6Rjc (10 Dec 25)
That’s just one facet. It’s not just the gig economy is “full”, all economies are “full”. There are not enough jobs for the employable people.
At the salaries they want at the salaries that employers are willing to pay for them.
There would be if we were investing in our infrastructure the way we should be, rather than allowing an aging population to hoard their wealth and shirk their responsibilities.
> rather than allowing an aging population to hoard their wealth and shirk their responsibilities. Middle-class Baby Boomers hoarding their wealth is exactly what we've been teaching them to do for decades . Save save save. I've been hearing it since the 1980s. Social Security is not going to be there for you . And yet still a large part of them have no meaningful retirement, and no plan.
Facts.
My father passed last year, penniless after a 50 year career engineer. My mother passed penniless after a 40 year career. It’s so sad. They thought they did everything right. They thought they had enough saved. They didn’t. It took everything from them.
> Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are people supposed to move to? The most successful model in history is the "capital class" creating new middle class jobs by venturing their capital.
That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically. Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our c…
It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue subsistence farming, but they choose not to.) People materially got richer, as they moved up from subsistence farming. I think I spend a few hours a year to get the money to buy clothes, which I think is a good deal. (I spend longer looking for clothes I want, which I hate doing, but is quite the luxury historically.)
> Well then I guess we should just tear down the planet, the environment and society, burn, sell and grind to a pulp everything that isn't nailed to the ground for profit, and give everyone a cut, future consequences be damned. Yes.
That’s literally the opposite of what happened historically. Read up on the history of textiles for example and cottage industry created and then was supplanted by a capital class. Economies of scale require all sorts of things to get going like efficient transportation, but after a tipping point wealth centralizes not the reverse. Slowly clothing goes from something like 1/3 of all labor to a small fraction of our c…
It is true that manufacturing reduced the time spent making clothing, but a) a lot that time weren't really career jobs, but women spending their time spinning and selling the results for a small amount to supplement what the household could not grow, and b) people willingly decamped for cities to work in the factories. (You can still see some of this process in China, with the migrant workers; they could continue su…
What happens when the jobs the migrant workers left the farm for are automated away? Do we expect other jobs to appear that won't also be automated?
Does the wealth created by automation reduce the need for humans to work to survive, or does it just centralize in the hands of capital owners?
I go to a cashier lane whenever possible because shakes fist at cloud no one's paying me to ring up and bag my groceries. Also, unless job automation is tied to some kind of UBI or Freedom Dividend or whatever, we're facing a dystopian future with a starving underclass. Automation is supposed to free us from drudgery and open up more fulfilling work and leisure, not siphon wealth to the capital class. What jobs are p…
No one's paying you to fill up gas either. Do you always go inside and ask someone to do it for you?
If I grew up getting my gas pumped for me, I would resist that going away too. Admittedly, this is my status quo bias.
Why not engineers? I've definitely never had a harder time getting interviews, though obviously anecdotal. Or do you just mean that the scope is larger than software eng?
Many of my engineering friends happen to work in defense (I'm friends with a lot of aerospace engineers from college) and are now highly specialized engineers on stable and long term projects and happen to be at the forefront of innovation in that space and all have high level security clearances (for some of them I don't really know what they do since it's classified). Though it also could be they just have gotten l…
Thanks for clarifying, I wasn't clear on how to interpret!