[alvah]

Agree 100%. When I was young and idealistic I believed in the "learn new skills" mantra, but learning completely new skills would look a lot different at 50 than it did at 20. When career choices were being made 30 years ago it would have been hard to predict the current & upcoming AI-driven destruction of lower-end "thinking" jobs. Attempting to retrain after ~30 years puts you at a massive disadvantage vs a new graduate (I mentor some of our companies graduates & trainees & I've been assigned a guy in his mid-40s, after a few months I just don't see how he'll get to a point where he's adding value). Not really a personal whinge, as my skillset isn't under immediate threat from any AI I've heard about, though the rate of change in the field is something to behold.

[astrange]

I agree that intentional retraining doesn’t really work, but I don’t think it matters. As I said, all that matters for whether you have a job is the Federal Reserve. If you hire random people to do a computer job, some of them will just turn out to magically learn everything on the job.