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I’m a gen Zer (albeit on the older side) and I don’t feel this way about work. Probably depends what field you’re in, I quite like being a programmer.
by jolux 5y ago
I’m a gen Zer (albeit on the older side) and I don’t feel this way about work. Probably depends what field you’re in, I quite like being a programmer.
- ixtli 5y agoI’m a millennial and I feel the same way, but I think a lot of this is due to a privileged position we have in the labor force. It’s the whitest of white color jobs. We’re still exploited as any trade, but it’s easier to be an architect or a lawyer than it is to be a construction worker. Especially over time and with contradictions sharpening as they are.
- finnh 5y agoHigh-skill tradespeople often make more than architects. Not at the star level, of course, but architecture is generally a poorly-paying field for the amount of schooling and intellect it requires.
- paulpauper 5y agounless we start seeing trillion-dollar building contracts, this will not change. Tech jobs pay so much because the stakes are so high when we're talking trillion dollar companies, first-mover advantage, and network effects. Architecture is the opposite of tech in this regard.
- ixtli 5y agoTrue yeah. I was just thinking of other sorts of “high qualification” high paid trades which require lots of investment to create.
- kitsunesoba 5y agoSoftware development is very much an exception. It’s one of the precious few fields with compensation that’s somewhat tracked with inflation and has a somewhat reasonable barrier to entry. As a millennial in my 30s I was fortunate to be able to break in and start earning a nice paycheck without a college degree, but even that possibility is deteriorating now due to a sudden flood of entry level applicants. Companies are now seeking mid-level-to-senior candidates almost exclusively because they don’t want to bother with training and mentoring a newbie, they want someone who can hit the ground running. There are still some possibilities for one to get one’s foot in the door with barely paid or unpaid college internships but from my perspective the gates are slowly closing.
- ixtli 5y agoIt’s interesting to read people like Marx when he was writing about the class society he lived in because you can see how much the bottom has fallen out of the middle. He describes the specialist artisans who are capable, sometimes, of upward mobility into “petite bourgeois”. Not much directly translates in the “middle” class any more but this resonated for me. We are kept happy but slowly we are becoming less and less capable of owning.
- rtlfe 5y ago> I quite like being a programmer. This job is truly an anomaly. There are very few careers where you can earn top 1% income with no degree, no physical exertion, under 8 hours a day "on the clock", the freedom to quit any time and have multiple new offers within days, etc, etc.
- madaxe_again 5y agoThat’s the thing. I know this sounds glib, but the barrier to entry is so low ($20 5th hand laptop will do just fine to do first-steps development), I can’t understand why the market isn’t flooded with coders. So many people say “oh I could never do what you do”, and I’m like “I’m a shaved ape who wanted to play computer games and accidentally ended up learning stuff, you absolutely can”. Then they just go on saying that they’re helpless. Out of the hundreds I’ve had this conversation with, two that I’m aware of took my advice and just tried to start making stuff. One now runs a dev shop, the other is at alphabet making bank. I think, more than anything else, learned helplessness is crippling people. so many are mollycoddled from cradle to grave and never understand their own capabilities.
- pydry 5y agoI know plenty of people who learned to code and never cracked that entry level job.