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?
Get into IT tech support as a backup. On top of your academic work in software engineering, begin studying for CompTIA certs like A+ and messing with computers in your spare time in order to build up technical knowledge and skill. To get spare computer parts, you can ask around for people to donate their e-waste to you or just buy old computer parts online. You don’t necessarily have to build a functional PC, but you need experience in troubleshooting and if your Frankenstein PC doesn’t successfully boot up, you should be able to say, “it doesn’t boot up because of A, B, and C.” If anything, having old faulty parts that you’re MacGyvering together is better for practicing troubleshooting skills.