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Comment by ohnoitsahuman | Hacker News Reader

Gen X here. This author found the marginally productive people who can't read the room and adjust.

Us punk kids who photocopied their 'zines are doing just fine because we paid attention and moved on and then moved on again.

And the kids say: "skill issue, get gud"

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As much as I appreciate the spirit of your comment I don't think you're being entirely fair here. Professional journalists had the ground disappear beneath their feet with no obvious exit strategy. It was even worse for photographers. Sure some managed to tread water for a while by switching to digital workflows but demand for the trade evaporated. I mean, just in our local area something like 200 small businesses went bankrupt over the course of a decade and a half. Before digital you couldn't drive 5 miles in any direction from any point without passing a photography studio, film processing joint, or both. Now to the extend folks even get prints made there are self-serve kiosks in Walgreens. When the music stopped there weren't a whole lot of chairs left and being good with $50,000 worth of photography equipment doesn't really prepare one for any other career track.

Tech never had these kinds of issues because you could simply cross-train on the next related tech stack and keep working.

We understand that change can be hard. But the article strikes me as a bit self serving and myopic. I seem to remember a distinct lack of compassion from the media when the steel workers and miners were all losing their jobs. The "learn to code" meme started as a flip remark dismissing their plight. Now we have the rust belt.

The rust belt started long before that. So much so that the term itself was coined in '84 by Mondale. And I also think you are fairly incorrect about the media, it's just that the destruction of American manufacturing started happening in the late 60s and 70s and waves after wave of layoffs and downsizing. The transition from an industrial to a service/information economy was handled by the zeitgeist before Gen X's time. There's a reason the linked article isn't talking about people who dedicated their lives to corporations. Gen X has never trusted corporations nor has it ever trusted government institutions.

> The transition from an industrial to a service/information economy was handled by the zeitgeist before Gen X's time.

That's not entirely accurate. Sure textile mills and foundries were on a downward trend in the 70s and 80s but it wasn't until NAFTA came along that the bulk of manufacturing industries offshored. North Carolina retained it's command of furniture manufacturing and the timber industry was thriving up the eastern seaboard until then.

North Carolina isn't part of the rust belt and NAFTA (94) is ten years after the term "rust belt" was coined (84) so it seems pretty inaccurate to think that NAFTA had anything to do with the emergence of the rust belt. It certainly contributed and accelerated the decline, but if it's already so bad that politicians are calling it the "rust belt" ten years prior to what you claim is the clause, there's an accuracy problem with the narrative.

The concept of industrial decline and loss of manufacturing isn't limited to the rust belt. You dragged that in with you in your haste to well actually someone and if you actually -read- my comment you'll see I advanced no claims at all about it. Parenthetically what's your level of exposure to manufacturing in the US? Ever had a job making stuff?

This. I am a gen X and still employed. Repurposed my mainframe knowledge into general tech then marketing.

Still kicking.

I’m not Gen X but every time I read these types of stories I feel the same way. You have to adapt and grow or you die, simple as that. People that think learning ends when school ends annoy the hell out of me as do people who think it’s reasonable to expect a job to always exist, be the same, and pay the same.

Times change, you can change with it or be broken by it. It’s a choice and people who make the choice to not grow, and then complain about it, frustrate me.

Same. I still remember almost getting suspended in high school for "hacking" the school computers in the mid 90's. Now I get paid as a security researcher. Also have genX friends who do more tangible stuff like auto mechanic, architect, trucker, dentist and chiropractor. All are doing just fine in their respective niches.

Same. I’ve had a career that has gone from working on Novell > Windows > Cisco > Linux > VMWare > AWS > Kubernetes > Terraform > … whatever’s next.

Moving out’s the way to move up.

Sometimes in life there is a great delay between the FA and the FO

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