The best way to build up your resume if you don’t have traditional credentials is by getting involved in open source!

I do feel a little weird about all the layoffs. I’m all for more efficiency. But as someone recently unemployed, I do find it challenging to know what the best thing(s) to do for landing a good job. I wish there was a more straightforward way. At this point I’d work for free for a while if it was a path that led towards something full time.

Thoughts?

Tech companies had layoffs because they could leverage the myth of inflation to justify layoffs with less public blowback. A wave of layoffs meant more companies started seeking scalps. But they all just had record profits. Across nearly every industry. How can they maintain record profits while also doing record layoffs? Well, they can’t, but they’ll try, by asking more of their current staff, for less in return. After all, they can shake the stick of recent layoffs. You don’t want to get laid off too, do you? Better put in 80 hour weeks to make up for us firing half your team.

It seems very naive in 2024 to pretend that people laid off enter a magical capitalist utopia where everyone willing to strap on a pair of boots and pull on their big boy pants can leverage their hard work and time to provide for their family. If you’re a software engineer, you need to find a software engineer job, and likely sooner rather than later. There’s no time to retrain into whatever field happens to have a bull run in hiring. And calls to “diversify skillsets” seem not only to be blaming the victim but also simply naive. The last time you were in charge of hiring, when did you ever take the generalist mechanical engineer that recently pivoted into frontend engineer over the five year fe engineer that has worked with the libraries your company uses?

Time and again we see that improving technologies serve the owners, not the workers. The luddites didn’t smash machine looms because they were scared of technology, they did it because they thought the improved efficiency would benefit everyone at a mill. When it turned out it just meant them losing their jobs, they decided to take matters into their own hands. It didn’t have to be that way – their mills could have invested in their workers by retraining them and finding new roles, or, if it was structured like a co-op, simply letting everyone work less for the same or even more money, distributing the increased profits to the people that actually make a company money.

The deeper we get into the 2000s the less capitalism as a means of allocating resources makes sense. There will be a day when the value of human labor in nearly every field is pennies, and capitalism has no answer for what we do with people when that day comes. Utopians talking about people doing art and music and whatever they want are not describing capitalist society, they are describing a socialist one. Under capitalism, you have to justify your existence by laboring for an owner, and how are we going to create an entire labor market out of the arts? Absurd.

We need new social solutions to deal with the incredible new technologies we’re inventing.

And when AI has driven the value of most human labor to pennies? Is “you have to justify your existence through profitable labor” the long term solution capitalism offers in the face of infinitely increasing productivity?

That’s actually the U-3 unemployment rate. U-6 (including discouraged or underemployed workers) is at 8%. The labor force participation rate is even a more dismal number at 62.5%. This has been the trend since the early 00’s, so the gov’t likes to report the soft numbers so people aren’t scared.

Our economy is a heck of a lot worse that people think it is. Thankfully we can all stand together and reinvigorate the market. I believe we can do it. We just have to wake up to how bad it really is and make changes.

The unemployment rate, no matter how insignificant for now, is going to increase over time given the unsteady layoffs at work. The job market is also nowhere proportional to the exponential population growth that we are experiencing. Also, I guess people won’t be able to take time off or go on vacation if they are constantly considering changing jobs.

Probably at the college and school level, we will have to start encouraging the exploration of alternative career prospects. We will also be required to cater to the needs of these young minds by creating suitable job opportunities and help boost the employment rate over time. It will take time to enforce this, but it’s the need of the hour.

Probably it was all golden about 3-4 decades back when technology started booming and growing at an accelerated rate- as it was marketed as something that people can rely on. However recognising that only fewer people are going to be needed in the future to create the apparent change in the technology aspect will be a dire need – it would be necessary to either start creating a separate market with regulations on separate offset careers or encourage all the other career options that have been overshadowed by the boom in technology.

Having said this- we can’t escape from technology. I agree with the part in the post that soon it will become a one man based company or a small team based. In that case, it is of a paramount importance to make sure that such power is distributed to a possible extent and stricter regulations are developed from an independent company/ a group of companies under the government radar that will hold it liable in case of any lapse. Automation will also create a separate set of maintenance level jobs requiring various certifications and graduate degrees/ diplomas at entry level.

An open market has little to no barriers to free-market activity with no regulatory barriers to entry. I don’t think that’s our system at all. And the current market have significant competitive barriers to entry.

Hah, thank you for recommending that domain. I registered it on WP.com for $12/yr (only took a few seconds!) and currently redirecting it to matt.blog. Wanted to pick it up before some scammer did, and I love a good Matt-pun.

It’s the open market of capitalism in a free society. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports the unemployment rate currently at 3.7%, which is on the low end of the range. Below 3% we start to get inflation, too much demand for too few workers. (Which is when trade and immigration kicks in.)

Where’s this alternative market where they can quickly pivot to something else when all their previous effort has been focused on the thing that has been automated?