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?
I realized that all white collar jobs are in jeopardy when I worked on a PC refresh. All the cool scripting and imaging stuff that made me feel like a super duper smarty pants are things that can be easily replaced by AI or otherwise automated while all the low-brow grunt work like slapping a fucking asset tag sticker on an appropriate spot or removing the HDs of old PC for shredding is not so easily replaceable.
I strongly urge everyone with CS or coding background to begin studying and practicing IT tech support skills as a backup in case dev jobs don’t pan out and you want to pick a job that’s at least tangentially related to programming. The go-to cert for entry level IT tech support are CompTIA certs, namely A+, Network+, and Security+. You don’t have to actually get the certs (A+ alone is $250+), but your knowledge and skill should be at a point where if you do decide to find an IT tech support job, you can confidently pay the cert tax and walk out with an A+ cert without wasting time and money on retests. And trust me, your tech knowledge and skill are nowhere near as good as you think they are, and being a power userTM PC g*mer is completely inadequate for professional work.
At the end of the day, IT tech support is white collar work with blue collar characteristics, and the more your particular IT tech support field has those blue collar characteristics, the less it will be affected by AI. Printer guys won’t have to worry about AI anytime soon (but they have to service those infernal machines known as printers). People who specialize on supporting CCTV equipment won’t have to worry about AI either (but they’ll have to service security cameras completely caked with bird shit).
The job I got laid off of was software support (I worked for a medical software company), as well as some database management, server management, using AWS to spin up servers and set them up, and other miscellaneous things. We got calls from clients. It was a big mixed bag. So yeah, I think anything involving physical labor is better shielded against AI for sure. If your job can be done remotely entirely you are in trouble.