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.
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.
I genuinely truly hate that there is both a huge population of older/retiring senior programmers in all sorts of jobs (MEGACORPS, state, local, public, federal, and small-businesses alike) and also a huge population of eager/teachable junior programmers looking for jobs. If our stupid social organization wasn’t so motivated by markets and profit we’d all be better off for it.
Older professionals linking up with younger professionals to cultivate talent, share ideas, and generally make better code would be great but the Vampires and Mummies don’t want better products or better workers, they want profits and whatever the current magical hyped super-tech is. I’d also think a lot of our terrible brittle software infrastructure wouldn’t suck so much either if new hires and seasoned professionals worked together more often.
Regardless, comp-sci majors aren’t all would-be techno tyrants and wannabe Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Most of them are just regular people who did what they were “supposed” to do, and went to school to get a degree in field they were told will have have jobs for them. Sure like ~10-20% of them wanna be the next Zuckerberg or whatever, but that’s true of any graduating class of STEM dorks.
It’s all really fucked up. I feel bad for them because even if you push all of the many legitimate problems of higher education aside, that shit is too expensive to have a job lined up after graduation. 6-18 months of under/unemployment is not good for the souls of young people who have been told their whole life that you have to have a grown-up job or you’re a bum.
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.
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.
Facts dude! Objectively correct take. It’s so frustrating that you hear all this “No one wants to work anymore”/“There is a talent gap”/“Our graduates just aren’t a good ‘fit’ for our company” all that shit. There are plenty PLENTY of work to around and workers who just need to be taught how to do it from those who are currently doing. These companies don’t want to hire, they don’t want to train the few hires the few who actually snag a job, they don’t want to take any risk of any sort, they just want all the reward. It’s so lame.
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.
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.
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
This image gets me every time. The the sheer force you see in the dude. Love it
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.
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.
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.
Anecdotally, people writing in relatively niche languages (the ones that are generally available as single-semester electives if at all) are still doing all right since the talent pool is quite small and the pool of companies using those niche languages is similarly limited (but they frequently need another body). Specialization is like the only thing you can use to differentiate yourself, at this point, so it pays to have something weird on your resume to separate you from the 5000th Java/Python candidate. As a person who reviews resumes and interviews candidates, I have a significant bias for people who do that since it demonstrates the quality I actually want (curiosity) rather than the one on the job listing (X years of experience in Y).
what are some examples of such languages
I interviewed for(and got offered but didn’t accept because the compensation wasn’t worth moving from my cushy C#/typescript job) a PHP role a couple weeks ago, which I didn’t think anyone used any more and they certainly don’t teach in 99% of uni courses, I only had experience with it from personal project before even uni, terrible language btw don’t recommend
Fucking a php is old now 👵💀 do you think C is in this category too?
Nah C is too ubiquitous in lower level/high performance stuff to be going anywhere soon
I think my great grandma used C at work. /s
italian
Functional languages like Scala, Haskell, and Lisp dialects are prominent in some industries. Scala is especially workable since it runs on the JVM so there are plenty of Java shops with a chunk of Scala that needs maintaining. Haskell is a little worse on pay since it’s a very enthusiast-driven language, so people will take a hit on pay to write the language they like. Most of the jobs are also in crypto and other evil shit, so it’s kind of depressing when the market is otherwise cold.
Rust is still in this category, though it’s in a hype cycle right now so the market can be weird. Modern PHP is having something of a renaissance, so if you don’t still write the ancient garbage version then you can get into some neat spaces.
I also imagine knowing how to write modern C++ will probably get you quite far, considering how much of the industry still writes the C++ I learned in high school.
I mean definitely fair enough. In a field where people go into it cause they just wanna make money and gain prestige as opposed to actually enjoy and be interested in it I can imagine something like that is a diamond in the rough.
So predictable
American computer science is a room of Zionist elon musks finding which public good to privatize and which innovations to squat over for royalties.
Deeply embarassing field (unless you contribute to collectively owned software and hardware projects).
learn to cope
I will never
