Good job. Disenfranchise the people who are capable of 3d printing drones and automated turrets, and also capable of programming them to act on desired targets.
Keep it up. Seriously
“AI isn’t capable of taking any jobs away.”
And surely when the AI bubble pops everything will go back to the way it was in 2022 before ChatGPT.
(I have no subscriptions to any cloud-based coding AI currently because I can run Qwen3.8-27B locally on my desktop and it’s perfectly fine for everything I’ve thrown at it so far, it’s just a little slow. If I was a business it wouldn’t cost much to have a server rack that could run the latest big DeepSeek models at a speedy clip. AI is simply not going away at this point even if OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, etc. evaporated tomorrow in a puff of stock fraud.)
You’ve got to get a foot in the door first these days. I started my career as a customer support agent, then moved into a helpdesk position, then into enterprise IT.
After Doge killed my last company, I got a job doing manual labor at my current company until an IT position opened up.
Companies generally like to hire from within because they can often pay below market average. Just treat those jobs as an internship, pad your resume, then start looking for better opportunities.
In my 20 year career I’ve witnessed 1 (one) person get promoted into a tech role after holding a different position at the company.
Job opportunities for junior and intermediate software devs were not great 5 years ago and now ai killed them entirely. My previous employer not only stopped that kind of hiring but fired ~20% of the staff and told seniors to make up the difference with ai.
Technically I did way back at the beginning of my career, but only due to interdepartmental budgetary shenanigans going on under the table. The company needed a programmer but the programming department’s headcount was full. They had room for a technical writer in that department’s headcount but didn’t need one. So I got hired as a technical writer, started coding, and then about six months later got “promoted” to the correct department the moment there was an opportunity to do so. It was all planned ahead of time, though. I was never really a technical writer.
Ah, dumb business tricks.
There’s definitely no one size fits all solution to a saturated job market.
But, I had 10 years of experience in my current IT field, plus 4x letters of recommendation from the owners of my last 3 jobs (it was technically the same job). I sent out over 600 applications, and got a single invitation to a round 1 interview (answer more questions on their hiring site), and maybe 20 rejections. Every other one was just silence.
Basically the only ways to get into the field now are A) get lucky, B) know a guy, C) become a known quantity at the company. I went with B and C (my wife worked there and got me the temp job).
Companies generally like to hire from within because they can often pay below market average. Just treat those jobs as an internship, pad your resume, then start looking for better opportunities.
That works sometimes and backfires others. No shortage of companies that make the exact opposite call. “well the guy working in department A is more qualified than this outsider… but then we have to find someone to do the job in department A, an outsider lets us just replace the one piece that’s missing”.
I mean maybe it can work, I’m a 40 year old IT vet, every upward move I’ve ever made in my life involved switching companies. Bosses always tell me I’m too good at what I do for them to want me to move up.
Now maybe some do. obviously no matter what the advice we can find someone it worked for, and someone it worked against.
No doubt. Any advice is going to have caveats, and you have to be able to read the room to know whether hard work will pay off. It usually doesn’t hurt to reach out to current employees to see what the culture is like.
But, people do need to temper their expectations of hopping into a high paying salaried role directly out of college if they haven’t networked enough to know a guy.
Well yeah but that’s the overall problem with the world in general right now. Basically the whole concept is “right now there’s less job opprotunities”, so companies can race to the bottom, let people underbid eachother. But in the future… there may or may not be opprotunity to advance.
What makes it scary is basically the industries statement is “yeah we’re cutting jobs here… but historically we’ve always come up with new jobs to replace the ones we get rid of”, but now there’s just no real indication of that to be the case. There’s obviously a tipping point to that, we can’t manufacture everything infinitely and there always be a market. Especially when disposable income for the average person is rapidly declining as everyone’s putting most of their resources into essentials.
