this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2024
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I really wanna hear what the proposal is for removing "unqualified" jobs en masse without implementing universal basic income.
The low pay and bad conditions of "unqualified" jobs often gets excused because they, allegedly, are "stepping stones", a means of sustaining oneself while working towards more specialized careers.
If you destroy a significant amount of those positions, where does that leave those people? Are we so drunk on cyberpunk-esque lust of AI evolution that we are fine eliminating the means of entry to society for so many?
This is happening not just in “unqualified” jobs. A good chunk of junior level professional positions are evaporating too. High functionality automation has taken a bite out of lots of IT jobs. I look at my own path in rising in IT and see it largely doesn't exist anymore.
I don't have any answers as far as what the end game of this looks like or what could or should be brought to bear to change course. I'm thinking there will be small pockets of seasoned IT professionals that are kept on to maintain system/processes until those age out and are replaced. This could take decades at the normal pace of giant corporations and government.
When it comes to IT, it's important to keep things in perspective, there's a limit on how much it can be impacted. It may be able to give you the foundations of that Python code you need, but it sure as hell won't be able to make sense of the fucking mess that your organization has made out of the venvs (I won't either, but sssshhhhhh). I think most if not all of IT specialties have that kind of situation.
If there's anything my time in IT has taught me, is that any solution or paradigm change that gets introduced doesn't really outpace the difficulties and challenges that are constantly emerging, and more often than not they create their own positions without completely eliminating the ones they are trying to streamline/replace. You introduce Ansible to automate and streamline the configuration of your storage systems, you think the people that were doing the deployment and config until now are now obsolete... Joke's on you, you now need both the Ansible dev as well as the guys that were already in charge of deployment and configuration, because inevitably something goes wrong periodically, something needs to be adapted to the particularities of the environment, or any other number of other things.
In the short term, yeah, maybe some entry positions might be affected under the direction of directives with lack of foresight, but I hope that, in the end, it won't end up being as severe as we expect, or at least that there will be an eventual course correction.
Do not despair at 100% is what I'm trying to say.
Only like, 70%.