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?

  • LaughingLion [any, any]
    ·
    26 days ago

    Trick is to start doing it in your free time. Get an old laptop, install linux and go download all the pen-testing tools you can find. Hack your own router. Setup a server on your network and then hack it. Then fix it and clamp it down. Then hack it again. That is what the real security experts do. They are always fiddling with shit and breaking it and fixing it. That is how I got into tech. As a kid I fucked up my computer so many time and then fixed it myself. Hell, it's how a lot of mechanics got into doing that. This is a field for the dangerously curious.

    • Diuretic_Materialism [he/him]
      ·
      26 days ago

      Get an old laptop, install linux and go download all the pen-testing tools you can find.

      Been trying to do this kinda shit with VMs but I struggle to get them running right on my current machine lol. Maybe I'll ask my friend if he's got an old shit machine I can use.