9 ms·

My way of life was just upended in October by machine learning, I didn't fight it instead I just switched careers. Not sure why others are so unwilling to do th

• icebraining 10y ago
  I'm curious, what did you do before?
  • jes5199 10y ago
    software engineer
• grogenaut 10y ago
  Also curious. How far out did you see it coming?
• rosser 10y ago
  If you're on HN, it's very, very likely that you have a skill set, and knowledge base that makes career-changing fairly easy (relatively speaking, anyway). If you've worked in a factory all your life, and suddenly all the factories around where you — and your well-established, extended family — live are closed down, or moved overseas, or whatever, you're probably going to be a bit less sanguine about the situation. The myopia of tech people will probably never not astound me.
  • chrischen 10y ago
    It should be the government's job to provide an ecosystem that provides jobs and opportunity to its citizens, and when it fails its the governments job to pay for the shortcomings.l directly. Expecting the government to patch the syptoms of the problem doesn't fix anything, myopic we are or not.
    • wmccullough 10y ago
      > "It should be the government's job to provide an ecosystem that provides jobs and opportunity to its citizens, and when it fails its the governments job to pay for the shortcomings.l directly." > "Expecting the government to patch the syptoms of the problem doesn't fix anything" So care to explain that a bit better? I think you just contradicted yourself. The government has no business anywhere near the job market. Go read about the subsidized corn market if you want to see their brand of job creation in action. For too long we've expected the government to take care of the needs of society when we should have been doing it as citizens.
      • crdoconnor 10y ago
        >The government has no business anywhere near the job market. Go read about the subsidized corn market if you want to see their brand of job creation in action. Or drive through the Lincoln Tunnel or use electricity from the Hoover Dam. Or fly from LaGuardia to LAX. >For too long we've expected the government to take care of the needs of society Maybe corporate welfare should be cut to the bone first.
      • chrischen 10y ago
        If government bears direct financial burden (paying for the fact they cannot be employed) of failing to provide useful employment, then the feedback mechanism is in place for it to be incentivized to create jobs.
      • sjg007 10y ago
        Well the govt will subsidize for votes regardles.
  • nitrogen 10y ago
    The myopia of tech people will probably never not astound me. Isn't it equally myopic to assume that factory workers as a class are unable to learn or adapt?
    • rosser 10y ago
      Did you deliberately skip the bit where a significant factor in my notional factory worker's situation is the "established, extended family"? If you also can't move out of the place where there are no jobs left, that's an extra layer of fucked. I made zero assumptions about anyone else's situation. I merely point out that the assumptions tech people make about job mobility are, on the whole, a lot less applicable if you aren't a tech person. What tech people call "changing careers" tends to mean something like "Well, I do React now, but I used to do Rails." Trajectories like mine — I started my career writing C++, now I get paid for keeping people's PostgreSQL instances happy — are "uncommon", and mine happened gradually, over a few years. What much of the rest of the US means by that is often more like, "Well I used to be a salesman, but now I'm a tool-and-die machinist." And those jobs are disappearing, too. (And all that leaves aside pursuing things that might require a certification or degree.) Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling.
      • MrLeap 10y ago
        I'm glad to see someone voicing this opinion. Empathy takes looking at why you're dismissing the plight of other people and seeing how hard you have to futz with the multipliers before you can't dismiss it anymore. If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us. Every industry is all about competition, consolidation, and maximizing profit. The older this one gets, the lower the wages are going to be for your run of the mill programmer. The societal message that "everyone should learn how to program!" is ultimately all about lowering wages. As regular ol' programming tasks become cheaper and cheaper, we'll keep adapting and doing more specialized work, right? So what there's no one wanting to pay you 6 figs for making CRUD apps anymore. Just learn some machine learning and away you go! A year goes by and uh oh, Microsoft just added auto-ML to excel at the price of 20$ a month. How long can your job last? Better change specializations again! Maybe it wont happen in our life times, but the wealth we're all capturing in this industry WILL dry up and get captured. And eventually there will be a new technological revolution that fills a new pond somewhere else. There will be a whole lot of callousness until a vast sum of us have to finally make that long horizontal migration. People who change from actionscript to rust are making tiny vertical migrations in career. It's not at all the same thing.
  • manyxcxi 10y ago
    You can ALWAYS switch careers and learn new skills. If your factory closed down you could pick up a different trade that is available in your area if you're willing to start all over. You can move to a whole new area and do the same. The question is about whether or not someone has the intestinal fortitude to make it happen and see it through. Unlike tech where a complete career change could happen in a short time, not necessarily degrade your pay too badly, and not necessarily require relocation- this could easily be just too overwhelming for people, especially with families. The key is, there is nothing preventing an able minded individual from finding a means to support themselves if they're willing to go through lean times to see it through.
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    • icebraining 10y ago
      No, the point is that if you let things degrade to the point where many individuals can only choose between either going through lean times and uprooting their lives or supporting a ban on renewables, it's not surprising that you'll be breathing coal fumes for a while longer.
    • manicdee 10y ago
      How do you retrain when you have no money? "Willing to go through lean times" is easy for a six-figure-salary with five-figure savings to say.
      • manyxcxi 10y ago
        I watched my mom take night classes and work a day job while raising three kids (with my dad) under 6. We literally packed up and moved back to the US (we're all citizens) because where we lived was bombed by US forces. We came back to the states with 3 kids, no jobs, and a lot of what we had was actually blown up. Don't tell me you can't retrain. It's a matter of deciding to do it and figuring out a way to make it work. It's not EASY, you don't want to do it if you don't have to. There's simply nothing keeping you from doing it other than the fear and anguish associated with upheaving your life.
  • dietbacon 10y ago
    How often does that -suddenly- happen? Most often it's pretty obvious that it's happening/about to happen, giving plenty of time for it's workers to prepare for a transition. It's unfortunate that many don't, but it's not because it's too hard.
    • SteveGerencser 10y ago
      It happens more often than you would expect. I live in an area of West Tennesse that made sports apparel for the most part. After the signing of the NAFTA agreement in 1993, we lost multiple factories and unemployment jumped to 20% in less than 2 years. It took out the factory jobs, the service jobs that supported all of the people that worked there, and sent more than one county into such a downturn that it has still not recovered fully. Everywhere you look are empty buildings and homes as large sections of the community was forced to pick up and leave to find work.
      • Avshalom 10y ago
        Speaking of Tennessee. The VW plant in Chattanooga fired like half of its work force after a year because it turned out no one wanted an extra ten thousand Passats. No way for workers to see that coming after years of consistent growth in Passat sales. Now 'fortunately' it was only a year for anyone so no one's life got too upended but that shit happens all the time
        • bobwaycott 10y ago
          It wasn't anywhere near half the workforce. It was 500 temp/contract workers who'd been brought on for a third shift to keep up with anticipated demand. When supply outpaced demand and dealership inventories were growing too large, they cut the third-party temp workers, and went back to two shifts. It still sucks, but your understanding of the facts is off. Temp workers are constantly in a state of gaining and losing employment. It's a pretty awful way to engage employment. VW is still a major employer around here, and never seems to cease hiring (or at least heavily marketing available jobs throughout the area).
  • lazaroclapp 10y ago
    It is obviously not an easy thing to make a career change. Specially if you are asking people to go from factory workers to say, software developers (a career that requires years of formal or informal training). However, here you are not asking for that. You are asking them to go from coal miners to solar panel installation technicians. Not trivial, but doable. Of course, it would be easier to do it their state or country provided retraining programs and good unemployment benefits. You know, societal support for a societal shift, as opposed to 'mumble mumble bootstraps'. But the change itself is possible, desirable, and does not require the retraining equivalent of a full college education. I can't find it now, but there was a recent article about how, on the short term at least, a move to renewable energy will likely create more jobs than it eliminates.
    • pm24601 10y ago
      Really? Lets see coal mining - heavy equipment operators. Driving trucks, excavators, coal train loading, locomotive engineers.... to .... electrical engine maintenance and solar panel construction. It may be just me, but I am missing the vast overlap of similar skill sets between the two industries.
      • lazaroclapp 10y ago
        Are you saying this is not doable in the context of a formal retraining program? What you describe is similar to the transition between being in construction to being an electrician, a transition which I know a lot of working class people have done. I particularly once knew a man who had been, professionally: a construction worker, a truck driver, a security guard, a plumber, an electrician, a factory worker, a caretaker for the elderly and a private corporate driver. Yes, it is harder than going from C# enterprise developer to JS front end developer. It is more on the scale of going from electrical engineering into software. But it is viable. "Just learn to code", for example, isn't. We should be, as a society, providing lots of help for people to accomplish similar transitions, rather than saying "oh, sucks to be you, anyone without masters level education is useless to our modern economy" or "oh well, we will prop your failing industry, even though it is killing us all, because otherwise you won't ever be able to get a job". There are blue collar jobs that will be around for a decade or two at least. Also, I am in favor of safety nets and UBI and free college education, but that doesn't preclude offering people structured paths back into useful work they can realistically take.
  • notyourwork 10y ago
    > The myopia of tech people will probably never not astound me. The myopia of blue collar workers will never not astound me.
    • kelnos 10y ago
      I'm a lot more sympathetic toward the latter myopia. A lot of blue collar people can't imagine what they'd do if they could no longer get a job in their current industry. Severance is meager, pensions are drying up, and retraining assistance (if they'd even accept it) is virtually nonexistent. When faced with "progress" making your way of life and standard of living untenable, that gets really really really scary. I'd challenge you to remain entirely rational if your job -- no, your entire industry -- went away, the bank decided to foreclose on your house (which is now worthless anyway, because there are no jobs where you live), you were unable to feed your family, and you didn't even have the money to move somewhere else where prospects were better. On the other hand, we have a ton of tech people around here who, because of their privilege, are unable to put themselves into anyone else's shoes, even for a minute. It's basic empathy, and seems to be in short supply sometimes.
      • geggam 10y ago
        when did hard work suddenly become "privilege"
        • rosser 10y ago
          "Hard work" is utterly orthogonal to what your comment's parent is describing. The kind of "hard work" that many blue collar people do would leave most programmers crying in pain and frustration before the first day is out. On the whole, people whose job perks include the fully-staffed, all-day gourmet cafeterias, paid gym memberships (if not on-site gyms and massage therapists!), and six figure salaries for sitting in meetings, thinking kinda hard, and then tapping away at a keyboard for a bit (yes, I'm being reductive; so are you) have exactly fuck-all grounds to call out anyone else about "hard work".
  • reddog 10y ago
    I couldn't agree more about the myopia. At the last place I worked I did a lot of interviewing of fresh outs for development and data science positions. Most of these kids came from elite schools with fine academic records. But hardly any of them had ever worked at a McDonalds or swung a hammer over the summer or done any job that made you sore the next day. I was in my 50s at the time and thought that strange but the HR folks said, nope, thats they way they all come these days. I can't help but think that spending at least one summer picking oranges or unloading 18-wheelers would give tech people a little more perspective and some compassion for what most of the rest of the country has to deal with.
    • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >Most of these kids came from elite schools with fine academic records. But hardly any of them had ever worked at a McDonalds or swung a hammer over the summer or done any job that made you sore the next day. I was in my 50s at the time and thought that strange but the HR folks said, nope, thats they way they all come these days. That's a bit weird. I'm only 27, and I painted some basements and did some yard-work back in high school to earn spending money. I thought that was normal.
      • knieveltech 10y ago
        As far as I can tell it really isn't anymore. I'm 41 and worked in just about every trade involved in building a house plus a brief stint as a union ironworker before I got into tech. The overwhelming majority of tech industry coworkers I've had over the last 10 years have never performed any sort of manual labor and most are totally unfamiliar with basic tool use.
• deleted 10y ago
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• rhizome 10y ago
  Not sure why others are so unwilling to do the same. "Unwilling." Going back into your comment history it appears you have had some struggles along these lines, so maybe ixnay the condescending illiteracy angle. Did you used to have any previous HN accounts, maybe from the period where you were being "upended?" Probably some gold in there, too.