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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

> AI which will absolutely destroy entire sectors. Not a lot of people give a shit,

A lot of people __do__ give a shit and this is a very common conversation among blue collar workers. I've heard about it every Christmas for the past 5 years from people who don't know how to google. Mass shifting in jobs has always been a big conversation but there's just a big divide between the working class where people aren't talking together as much.

We have coal miners complaining about "big solar" taking their jobs. We have the whole "just teach to code" fiasco. We have a lot of discussions about Amazon. And I can keep going. If you think this is a "suddenly care" type of thing then you're likely in a bubble or not paying attention (a different bubble).

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What is the "the whole "just teach to code" fiasco"? I'm familiar with the idea of widespread coding education, but the fiasco part is news to me. Is it something interesting, or just another face on the same story of struggling/failing public schools?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/learn-to-code

Basically a bunch of journalists told laid off coal miners that they should just learn to code, which some people saw as callous. Then in 2019 Buzzfeed and Huffpo and a few other places laid off a bunch of journalists. People started tweeting "learn to code" at them and they weren't happy about it.

It is a bit callous to be fair. Job retraining is costly and the way it was said more comes off as blaming the person for not knowing any better (people who've been working in that field for decades and started before the 90's). Predictions that people could not have reasonably made given the information they had at the time even if obvious in hindsight. There's also plenty of historical examples where rapid industry shifts result in a lot of people being out of jobs and entering poverty even if the total economy turns out better or smooths out in the long run. Temporally local events still matter and you can't just point to long historical trends to say the people suffering now aren't a problem.

Plus, we all know code bootcamps don't make great programmers. And if we're being extra honest, LLMs have a good chance of replacing low quality coders, so now in hindsight the advice comes off as even more pejorative and low quality. Hindsight is always 20/20.

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