Not everyone can be a SW engineer. Same how not everyone can be a doctor. Or a lawyer. For a lot of people, bolting bumpers to Fords is as good as it gets in terms of job prospects.
But then the question is - do you think going backwards to an earlier time is a solution?
Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing. You'll be self sufficient, but you won't be able to afford a phone or television!
It's going to be a difficult problem (always) solving for the future of individual contributions to society as labor gets replaced by automation, and even knowledge work gets replaced by machine learning.
But I still think great minds (and also the minds that get put in charge) should look forward and try to build a good future, rather than cling to a dying past.
This argument of "fuck others' jobs, I got mine" works if you're OK with having a handful of prosperous cities full of multinational conglomerates with smart/educated people in the service industry, surrounded by slums of poverty, crime and homeless people on drugs who can mug you, as their industry blue collar jobs got offshored and they couldn't "just learn to code bro".
There's a reason countries with a solid industrial base like Germany are livable almost everywhere with a lot less income inequality, poverty and homelessness, and try to hold on to these jobs.
UK's deindustrialization is also another point on the map. Great if you work at some bank/tech company in London, not so great otherwise.
>Go far enough back to individual homesteads doing some light farming, hunting, fishing.
No one's arguing about going back to the stone age. But having moved nearly all manufacturing to Asia was a mistake, not only we lost jobs but also scale, competencies and bargaining power.
Remember the covid pandemic when you couldn't get masks initially because most were made in China and they were hoarding them all for themselves? What then? Use stonks as masks?
Even if all of US became homesteaders this would likely still be at least a little bit the case, because foreigners would simply buy the property instead. Take a look at places like Spain, Portugal, etc and the high land prices are based on global competition not vs the low local wages.
What is this stereotype? Government retirees aren't some elite wealthy class. IIRC government pensions haven't been anything to write home about since 1982 (or something), and are roughly equivalent to private sector retirement benefits.
In any case in my rural homestead region there are mainly three classes
1) .gov pensioners 2) successful professionals 3) inherited property
The key to government pensions here I think is that they get benefits early enough in life that they are young enough to build and live a homestead life. At age 65+ you might be able to maintain an established property but buying something affordable (read: rough or vacant land) out and getting it up and running would be pretty rough for most at that age.
Military is a unique subset of government, and IIRC most people who join don't stay long enough to draw a pension.
When you said "government retirees," that brings to mind the civil service, which I believe is larger.
It's not "backwards in time." The need for machine tools didn't disappear. There's an essential machine-tool industry that the US depends on very much, it's just in places like China.
That's not a permanent situation, proven by the fact that the countries that are now ahead in machine tools used to be behind the US in machine tools.
> So it’s “backwards in time” because you have to start manufacturing the shovel to start digging when your competitor has a backhoe. And even if you could somehow steal the design and build it you don’t have anyone who could operate it.
As aptly demonstrated by China: it's a lot easier to catch up than to develop at the cutting edge. All you need is a little bit of investment and will.
And personally, I think the government should conscript some crypto and adtech startups (and their employees) to build up an operator pool, because they're obnoxious and those people should be doing something useful instead.
We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.
Oh, the fallacy that grinding harder and longer leads to more and better results. Do you think you do your best work when you're exhausted?
Also, 996 is more typical in China, hated, and I believe illegal too. That kind of thing is one of the (many) reasons their population is starting to collapse.
Please not a non-sequitur like "some Chinese grind, so here's some thing from China, therefore grinding is good."
Show me the reason for Deepseek's success is people grinding for longer hours.
Not everyone can be a good software engineer, sure.
Among people who cannot be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a good software engineer, there are also very few people who can be a good machinist.
Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.
Bolting a bumper to a Ford is different from manufacturing the metal shape of the bumper itself, and a competent machinist is the person who both figures out how to turn a piece of raw metal into a piece of bumper-shaped metal, and also the person who figures out how to do so in an easily replicable way.
That doesn't mean you'll get hired as one. Especially in the current market. There's a lot of shitty politicians out there, that doesn't mean anyone can just become a politician.
>Competent machinists require an extremely similar set of problem-solving skills as competent software engineers.
Every job has some critical thinking aspects to it, even landscaping and construction workers, crane operators, truck drivers, etc that doesn't mean everyone wants to code, or can be a productive programmer.
I have plenty of friends form technical university, mostly mechanical engineers, who did everything they could to avoid getting into SW development because they just don't like it and they weren't good at it.
You're taking a swipe at factory workers, and elevating Software Engineers to the intellectual strata of doctors?
Most working-age adults can be a contemporary Software Engineer (even without LLM cheating).
For that matter, I could teach bright 12 year-olds to apply the technical skills that your average Software Engineer does (though that would be mean, and stunt their development).
You'd better pray that your doctor is much more capable and professional than your typical Software Engineer.