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 mean it’s barely a cover. People were predicting a slowdown in white collar jobs soon in spring of 2022. It was a weird time because the job market was still hot, but the covid era demand that created a lot of tech jobs clearly receded. Layoffs started like that fall. I remember someone leaving my company for amazon and amazon axed the entire division like a week later. Like I think people forget fear of a recession, one disproportionately hitting white collar workers, and tech layoffs predate even chatgpt 3.
Edit: every management update we received that year was about a recession, potential layoffs, and becase I worked in marketing how to deal with client expectations because almost every one of them had dropping revenues relative to 2020 and 2021.
