[mozman]

I’m opening a local metal working business. Running both until I can get a decent income stream.

Tech prospects look bleak, I think the party will be over in 10 or less years as engineers are viewed more as a cost vs value add.

[bayesian_horse]

There are way more "tech jobs" than people who are qualified for them. Those numbers have to come way down. Digitalisation is far from complete, there is still way more productivity to reap. Machine Learning and automation is still far from finished, growing steadily. Cynics can disagree, of course. There may even be the odd bubble bursting, temporarily.

The worst that will happen is that some companies are chasing opportunities that aren't profitable enough to hire tech workers.

Most experts who have any data or solid reasoning agree that tech jobs won't get slashed permanently.

[brianwawok]

Tech can generate enormous wealth. Talking on the order of 1 guys code for Google might bring in 100s of millions of dollars of revenue (granted most guys codes contribute far far less).

I find it rather hard to generate 100s of millions of dollars of wealth through metal working.

On the flip side, which is harder to outsource? For metal trinkets it would be similar, for stuff that needs to be on prem.. metal working would be outsource proof.

[bayesian_horse]

Outsourcing doesn't affect the labor market. Offshoring does. And there's no such thing as choosing to offshore or not. Everything that can get offshored gets offshored, which isn't actually that much. Supply of tech labor in other countries is just as tight.

[brianwawok]

> Everything that can get offshored gets offshored, which isn't actually that much.

Eh, there are some moats. For example around Law.

Imagine how much members of the US could save with offshored and outsourced law?

But lawyers have a strong guild protecting them. Software developers do not.

[ravenstine]

> Tech prospects look bleak, I think the party will be over in 10 or less years as engineers are viewed more as a cost vs value add.

Seems realistic, though optimistic. I think the party will be over sooner than that, probably in the next 5 or so years, but we'll collectively be in denial about it for at least another 5 years following that.

[Temporary_31337]

You're both wrong, I hope ;) Tech jobs just seems to follow the usual hype cycle so IMO tech jobs will still be needed in the future but perhaps fewer of them. Tech jobs are also much harder than they used to be - when I started 'coding' HTML+CSS was considered high skill. Now you're expected to have serverless lambdas generating those pages and to configure a CDN and SSL and maybe talk to some backend Machine Learning APIs for a similar pay grade. So roles where you can still handle other people, and deliver, working technical solutions will still be very much in demand.

[ravenstine]

Tech jobs are harder than they used to be, but that doesn't necessarily mean the effort is proportional to the value being produced.

Let's be honest here; a lot of what we do involves navigating the theology of software more so than actually performing valuable work. Take frontend, for instance. Frontend development is continuing to move towards Java-esque complexity all while providing no measurable improvement in efficiency or reduction in bugs. New features ship slower than they used to. Until someone can show actual evidence that "modern" web development is a measurable improvement over the old days, I'll believe it when I see it, and what I've seen for most of my career now is adherence to a bunch of clever ideas that don't really improve anything.

Yes, more tech jobs have been needed to compensate for the onslaught of bullshit, but much of that bullshit was invented by the holders of those very jobs. Much of object-oriented dogma alone invented a bunch of jobs that otherwise wouldn't have existed because it created more problems than it actually solved. When the going gets tough, economically speaking, no one's going to give a fuck about all the frameworks, all the needless abstractions, all the supposed "best practices", all the build tools, all the lint rules, all the devops, all the stupid ass containerization schemes, or any of that jazz. With some exceptions, machine learning probably being one of them, what isn't necessary will be culled. Companies that know better are going to suddenly become interested in what their engineers are actually doing, will remove the low-performers, and tell their remaining engineers to stop making things complicated.

[theGnuMe]

Idk, we are still in the digital transformation and customers are now easier to reach from anywhere. Add in AI tools and tooling. People will still want to wire these things up. There will always be value at the customer interface. There will also always be open source and then new companies building on open source. We have many multiple database vendors. Multiple OS vendors etc...

I remember the Windows shrink wrap days and everyone predicting doom, and then the internet happened. Next is AI and then the metaverse most likely.

I think the future is bright.