I hope you’re right that job losses in more ‘stable’ fields will catalyze interest in a constructive response, but I was surprised over the last 20 years or so as the market power of workers in various traditionally stable industries collapsed for mundane economic reasons and not much changed in the policy world. Professors, lawyers, accountants, civil servants, and even some types of physicians have all been squeezed fairly heavily in the US just from globalization, monopolization, and deregulation. There was some brief pushback around the time of Occupy Wall Street, and then after that increased job insecurity became part of the new status quo.
Entry level software engineers are now facing serious pressure. It’s debatable whether this is from pandemic-era over-hiring or from AI, but until last year “software engineering” was the paradigmatic example of a job more stable than art, to the point where artists went to coding bootcamp if they wanted to sell out. Now bootcamps seem mostly dead, but I don’t hear serious cries to save them.
I hope you’re right that job losses in more ‘stable’ fields will catalyze interest in a constructive response, but I was surprised over the last 20 years or so as the market power of workers in various traditionally stable industries collapsed for mundane economic reasons and not much changed in the policy world. Professors, lawyers, accountants, civil servants, and even some types of physicians have all been squeezed fairly heavily in the US just from globalization, monopolization, and deregulation. There was some brief pushback around the time of Occupy Wall Street, and then after that increased job insecurity became part of the new status quo.
Entry level software engineers are now facing serious pressure. It’s debatable whether this is from pandemic-era over-hiring or from AI, but until last year “software engineering” was the paradigmatic example of a job more stable than art, to the point where artists went to coding bootcamp if they wanted to sell out. Now bootcamps seem mostly dead, but I don’t hear serious cries to save them.