The whole "learn to code" push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. Every industry that starts a massive PR campaign to draw in high school graduates is doing it because the capitalist class wants cheaper labor.
the capitalist class wants slaves
They want all the upsides of slaves and none of the downsides, much like how they prefer to lease assets instead of owning them because then they have deferred responsibilities.
With slaves you have all of the costs of maintaining and housing and feeding them and giving them basic medical care. Letting them die is a huge burden of cost and loss of investment. You have to cover at least their bare subsistence.
With Proletarians you don't even have to do that. You can pay less than subsistence as the reserve body of labor replenishes itself through reproduction. Thus you can squeeze all the value from someone then toss them aside for the next. You can let a percentage of your workers fall into health issues and die without any ability to afford care. You can let a bunch of them become evicted and houseless, and eventually die on the streets. There's another worker there to pick up where the last one left off.
This is a big reason why capitalists don't openly use mass enslavement anymore, and why the south lost the civil war. It was too expensive and inefficient compared to proletarian workforces. The slavery that does get used is subsidized by the state, so that the employers get prison laborers for cheap without any of the costs associated with maintaining them.
They want all the upsides of slaves and none of the downsides
This was the exact rationale for the Nazis' program of "extermination through work" and is why Cesaire was absolutely correct to say that at the end of capitalism lies Hitler.
The whole "learn to code" push was always about flooding the market with labor to drive down wages. When Boomers give advice on what career to pursue, it's a really bad sign for that field.
This was always the plan. Saturate the tech job market so the wages would plummet.
They did the same thing with trucking. Told everyone it was a solid middle class career in dire need of workers. Convinced a bunch of states and the feds to foot the bill for truck driving schools.
They never needed more drivers, what they needed was more people to sucker in to predatory truck leases. They get new graduates to sign a lease for a truck. The lease forces them to only work for the company that leases them the truck, forcing them to accept whatever mileage rate the company decides to give them. Once the driver gets sick of that, the company takes the truck and leases it to the next person they recruit directly from trucking school(paid for by the government).
Saw it a million miles away when "learn to code" was the rage everywhere. All the boot camps, coding classes in elementary schools, encouraging it for every wage issue and job training program (like Hillary Clinton's idea about what to do with the coal miners and people who lose their jobs), etc. It was so obvious they wanted to pay less wages. I feel like freaking Cassandra over here.
It's actually insane seeing how quickly things flipped or at least how quickly the popular sentiment did. I saw whispers of it which was part of my cope from swapping away from that to IT (which I do genuinely enjoy more than coding most of the time) but a lot of people got completely hosed. What industry is getting rug-pulled next I wonder?
(Pointing to the comp sci industry helped my friends understand some of the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions and might have them join the local chapter of my org though so capitalism is truly the best radicalization tool)
the Marxist theory I like to espouse and point to during drinking sessions
it's you, comrade
Where do they go from here? Aside from going back to school for something more lucrative, they could take the suggestion from one laid-off tech veteran, who last year told SFGATE that she had started selling her blood plasma to make ends meet.
im not bitter at all 
Let’s start the hexbear coding coop and make our own jobs
Schadenfreude moment for me. Laugh some more at us, humanities majors.
Welcome to the Army Reserve of Labor. Get comfortable, stay a while.
What is this "Futurism" website? All the headlines have this extremely combative kind of headline. The parent company website is the most soulless thing I've ever seen. Look at this crap: https://recurrent.io/what-we-do/
The article says the unemployment rate for software is 6.1% compared to 4.1% in the US in general. Considering a bunch of companies have just done massive layoffs in the last few months and years, is that really something that won't go back to normal in the longer term?
This applies to all STEM fields tbh. It's not great out there, folks.
8 years ago at 32 yo I found myself with a film studies degree and not job and decided to coming back to college. I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier (like 100 vs 5 students per admission) and I wanted to be sure I was admitted. Best decision ever. Nowadays I have a solid stable job with full benefits, and at the end I'm a programmer (python/pandas now learning polars) but with actuarial/accounting/finance knowledge that gives me an edge over other programmers or actuaries.
I planned to enroll on computer sciences, but days before the inscription I changed it to actuarial sciences mainly because the admission would be easier
It's the complete opposite in my country. Actuarial science requires you to basically have a perfect GPA (at least our country's version of GPA), while computer science "only" requires a good GPA.
CS was already oversaturated 10 years ago. There was just lots of cheap money to fund start ups and new business
Yeah that was when I was first job hunting and struggling with it, and I remember people saying “a degree isn’t enough, what you really need these days is a portfolio.” I cobbled one together with school projects and some basic ass robot I made in my free time, and eventually I got in. But now I wonder if a zoomer who just graduated could pull off the same thing.
Damn Lucy moved the football again what an unforseen development
I've always told people not to learn to code. Less competitors in my field is good for me.
See, they should’ve just gone into the trades.
Also, if you’re in a trade and can’t find a job, that’s your fault for not getting a bachelor’s.
Anecdotally, people writing in relatively niche languages (the ones that are generally available as single-semester electives if at all) are still doing all right since the talent pool is quite small and the pool of companies using those niche languages is similarly limited (but they frequently need another body). Specialization is like the only thing you can use to differentiate yourself, at this point, so it pays to have something weird on your resume to separate you from the 5000th Java/Python candidate. As a person who reviews resumes and interviews candidates, I have a significant bias for people who do that since it demonstrates the quality I actually want (curiosity) rather than the one on the job listing (X years of experience in Y).
So predictable
On the road to fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Spreading Linux propaganda since 2020
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