I mean, not _that_ big a risk. Most people layed off are probably still going to manage to get another job making more than other occupations that never made the "big reward" salaries in the first place.
Agreed. The “risk” here is that you won’t get to stay with the same company your whole life and collect a pension. The “risk” is also that you’ll need to retrain yourself to match the change in the industry. This is different from the expectations that people have for other industries, though job security certainly isn’t what it used to be outside of tech either.
True to some extent. Almost nobody gets to count on staying with the same company their whole life and collecting a pension anymore, though -- so I would not say that expectation exists in other industries anymore. Especially a pension. I don't think anyone outside of government really has pensions anymore.
Re re-training yourself as a software engineer... I wonder how often people really need to do this either... to keep getting top possible salary maybe, but just ("just"!) to keep getting a better salary than most of the USA? Maybe sometimes. But, I mean, there are still people making very very good money writing Fortran and COBOL... probably better money than you can make writing PHP -- and you can still make better money than most of the USA writing PHP! OK if you specialized in, like, Flash or ColdFusion, you probably had to learn something different.
(Now somebody is going to tell me they still make good money writing ColdFusion! Apparently there was a 2021 release with a 2023 release expected, it is still a going concern. I used to get paid to write ColdFusion, like 20 years ago).