Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjk166 | Hacker News Reader

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When you have a large pool of qualified mid-life new learners available for hire while fresh graduates are scarce, why wouldn't employers hire them?

This is only an issue if either there are genuinely not enough jobs in the field lots of people are trying to go into, in which case people should not be encouraged to go into it; or if older people demand higher compensation for the same skillset as younger people based purely on age, in which case that doesn't seem fair anyways.

And realistically, a mid-life learner is generally the better option to begin with - it's nearly impossible that someone after years of working has picked up no transferrable hard or soft skills and made no network connections of any value.

You may think so, companies are notorious for rejecting middle aged applicants in favor of 20-somethings because the latter are considered more malleable and eager to prove themselves.

> more malleable and eager to prove themselves.

That's just a polite way of saying "willing to work for less" which again means either somebody's asking for too much or someone's being exploited, which is the real issue.

Obviously its mere anecdote, but every company I have ever worked for has gladly hired middle aged entry level employees. If anything they have been preferred.

In short, the job hunt is going to become even more unbearable. I don't trust companies with the kind of leverage they're going to have with AI at their fingertips.

So software engineer salaries will experience a race to the bottom because you'd have to be grateful to be hired as one. That's just the way it is, I guess, but I can't fault people for feeling bitter that the skills they've built over many years or decades will be massively devalued. I often wonder which profession is safe from others working as hard as they can to make it less valuable. Probably you'd have to get on the side of those building the automations. Become an AI/ML engineer or starve, basically.

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