I’m not sure how deep you delve into the culture wars but there was a brilliant battle on the seemingly innocuous phrase: Learn to Code, over the past ten years or so.
You see when factories were dismantled and shipped to China, coal mines were closed in West Virginia, and customer service departments were shipped to India, the corporate press callously pointed out that the now impoverished former workers should simply “learn to code.” After all, code monkeys could make a good living and were in demand.
Here are some headlines from 2015:
Can You Teach a Coal Miner to Code?
-Wired
From Coal To Code: A New Path For Laid-Off Miners In Kentucky
-NPR
Out of Work Coal Miners Find New Work in Computer Industry
-CBS
Then in 2019 when many of the leftwing news outlets like Huffington Post and Vice among others were going bankrupt and laying off college-educated journalists, former factory workers and coal miners started a meme on pre-Musk Twitter that these partisan hacks should just “learn to code.”
This deserved mockery was laughed about in good nature and held up in a positive light as acceptable back and forth of political free speech… Just kidding, it was branded as “hate speech” by the petulant, now-unemployed journalists, and banned from social media.
The greater point beyond the basic stupidity of corporate media Twitter, and this timeline in general, is that writing code, or “Software Development” is a good-paying job that is in demand – or at least it was…
Code monkeys make a median annual wage of $132,270. Entry level is $77,000 and hits the 90th percentile at $208,000. A family with two wage earners at the top of their career could pull in over $400,000 a year.
These people would be over 50, own a McMansion, and have matching Audis. The problem facing America is that they are about to get fired and due to their age will never find a high-paying job in IT, or anywhere else for that matter, ever again.
Check out this chart of job listings for Software Development on Indeed:
Absolute murder.
There are 1,656,880 people who work in this industry in the United States. Most of them work in California, Texas, and New York in that order.
No one is talking about this massive shortage in high-paying, white-collar work, and it sure as hell isn’t priced into equity markets.
Here is what Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in a leaked conversation to the units employees and later posted by Business Insider:
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding.”
“It just means that each of us has to get more in tune with what our customers need and what the actual end thing is that we’re going to try to go build, because that’s going to be more and more of what the work is as opposed to sitting down and actually writing code.”
A spokesperson for AWS told BI that this didn’t mean job losses. Instead, “Matt articulated a vision for how AWS will continue to remove undifferentiated heavy lifting from the developer experience so that builders can focus more of their skill and energy on the most innovative work,” the spokesperson said in a statement.”
That’s straight-up bullshit of course. It means that the programmers will get fired.
In January, the International Monetary Fund warned that AI could affect 60% of all jobs in the US and potentially worsen wealth inequality.
Last year, Mustafa Suleyman, who is currently CEO of Microsoft’s in-house AI unit, said that AI would create a large number of “very unhappy” white-collar workers who will be forced out of their professions.
Elsewhere, Emad Mostaque, founder and CEO of Stability AI, predicted that there “will be no programmers in five years.”
The question no one is asking is what will the unemployed programmer do? He already knows how to code. Home Depot isn’t hiring and he doesn’t have the skill set to work in a coal mine.
All the best,
Christian DeHaemer
Owner, Occupier: Outsiderclub.com
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/out-of-work-coal-miners-find-new-work-in-computer-industry/
https://www.npr.org/2022/03/31/1089994672/patagonia-vest-tech-workers-san-francisco
https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-will-change-most-jobs-employers-help-workers-keep-up-2024-8
https://www.outsiderclub.com/nvidias-hypergrowth-is-over/
