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Comment by MattGaiser | Hacker News Reader

Arguably, skill wise things never really stop being a race in general.

150 years ago, decent literacy alone made you managerial material. 50 years ago, people were in the middle class screwing nuts on bolts. Today, literacy alone qualifies you for nothing and if you are illiterate, your prospects are dim indeed. Manual skill manufacturing is a minimum wage (or below minimum wage) job offshore. Typing used to be a middle class skill for women.

Imagine being a dev 20 years ago. I think many would be scared of not having work in a world where you can stand up beautiful reactive sites and deploy them worldwide in a day. AWS, React, GitHub actions, etc. All could be reasons for predicting mass unemployment.

Instead, there are more of us than ever.

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> Imagine being a dev 20 years ago. I think many would be scared of not having work in a world where you can stand up beautiful reactive sites and deploy them worldwide in a day. AWS, React, GitHub actions, etc. All could be reasons for predicting mass unemployment.

> Instead, there are more of us than ever.

while I hate to quote CGP Grey (what a hack), he's got a pretty good take on this

https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?t=212

From a perspective of an individual, what defines quality now? Any attempt to stand out from the crowd requires significant energy. Given the nature of the industry, I fear that the experience I gain cannot be transferred for actual value. I feel like the bar is very high for me and I want to switch to other fields, but there is no way because I do not have relevant experience in other fields.

Same problem here. I'm siloed and no one wants to talk to me about anything else that's not basically the same thing. Part of the problem is I have lots of knowledge and experience in many things, just not in a way that can be neatly packaged in a format I can put on a resume.

I don’t get it. You don’t need to be better than everybody else. You don’t need to be better than AI tools. You just need to be better than the colleagues you have around. Become that person everyone in the “remote” office goes to to ask questions, resolve problems. Be that person who brings value not just by implementing algorithms, but by being an essential member of a team.

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