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Where is the American Dream?
There has always been a dream of wealth and fortune in America. Drawing immigrants and inspiring the population. A sense that you can start from nothing or very little and pull yourself up through hard work, a bit of smarts, and a bit of luck. But I find myself a little unsure of how do this lately.
Learn to code
A decade ago there was a refrain among the elite "learn to code". That was how the coal miners in West Virginia would replace their dirty global warming causing jobs with something less harmful for the environment.
I know how to code. I've been coding for more than a decade. I'm out of a job and unlike in previous years I'm not being assaulted by job offers on LinkedIn every day.
The talk I'm hearing (and believing) around twitter and silicon valley is that AI is replacing coders. Or at least that is enough of a perception that hiring is down.
I'm at least a senior web developer, but for the new kids coming out of college... I don't know. I used to know guys a few years younger than me asking for help finding a job out of college and I'd do a resume tune-up and send it back to them and they'd tell me thanks but they managed to get a job already.
Nowadays I don't even think telling people to go into coding is a good idea.
Heal the sick
There does seem to be a consistent growth industry in medicine. I'm certain this is true. However I feel this is a bad omen.
Medicine has this feel to me like it is a consumption industry. The typically unhealthy are often old people that aren't really producing lots of goods and services anymore. It's savings that they are using to prolong their life.
Maybe if all the medical spending was on life extension I'd feel this was a good use of money.
But forget about how I feel about the industry. Is this any place to get rich as part of the American dream? If you enjoy terrible hours, lots of bureaucratic red tape, and years of mandatory training then it's all for you. It's certainly not available as a quick career pivot.
Become a social media star
Another avenue of wealth open to seemingly everyone is to go on social media and become an internet sensation. Sell advertising and related products.
Im honestly not sure if this is a realistic avenue these days or not. I do enjoy quite a few niche media things. They seemingly make a living even if they aren't wealthy.
The downsides seem numerous.
Where do I go make money?
Some of this really just boils down to my personal job security. Where do I go to start making money?
But the the rest boils down to where do my kids go to start making money?
My mom was able to give me good advice a decade and a half ago to go into coding. It worked out well for a while.
Now I'm in a bind of figuring out what to do next, and what paths to lead my kids down for good career paths.
The AI-lephant in the room
LLMs certainly change things. I'm sorta operating on an assumption that language based things will be solved and done for. If it involves typing up or reading and comprehending a thing that seems like something current AIs can generally do better than 95% of people.
I'm assuming other distinct areas will not be solved for. Not because I think they are unsolvable, but just planning becomes meaningless at a certain point. But they also don't seem currently solved.
FWIW I’m still getting plenty of recruiter chatter as a backend / infra engineer, but that’s with about twenty years experience, half at FAANG. I’d say a plurality of the reachouts, when the end employer is identifiable, are in the financial sector.
Though yeah, it won’t be long before I’m managing a team of AI agents, and then eventually an AI is managing a team of AI agents that replaced me.
I don’t know what to tell my two year old career wise, I’m focused on giving him a good moral foundation first. He has signs of being the kind of student I was, so I think he’ll probably figure it out better than I could. My exposure to upper class jobs was almost all via television, so my ambitions were to be either a doctor or lawyer. I had considered computer science as a fit for my natural talents, but Newsweek convinced me that was a dead end industry and all the jobs are moving to India. Then I spent about a week in a hospital with a serious injury, decided I didn’t want to spend any more time in a hospital, and chose a major suitable for law school.
And then ended up as a software engineer anyway.
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I'm confident that my future kids won't go to college (there'd be no point). Perhaps some degree of standard schooling might still be either legally or pragmatically necessary, but there's no need for a college fund. I've always been an autodidact, and with LLM assistance (and the wider internet for procedural skills), it's quite possible to teach yourself most of the things formal education can.
I particularly pity people entering or immediately graduating college right now. I've previously discussed at length my beliefs that a qualified doctor in training like myself still has a very limited shelf life. If I had to put numbers on things. I think that by the time I become a full consultant (which takes ages in the UK), there's 50:50 odds of an outright hiring freeze or layoffs.
Someone entering med school right now? Good luck paying off those loans. I don't envy them at all.
The very young are luckier. It's their parents who need to agnoize over their fates. Maybe by the time they're older, we're more clear on the trajectory of the future, and whether humans need not apply to jobs or colleges.
The most general and sane advice I can give to anyone reading this is to try and make more money, and then save and invest it. It'll probably do your kids more good than anything else you can do.
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This answer depends a lot on how old your kids are, no? If they are 16 and looking at university pathways, then there aren't clear answers. If they are 6 and still dreaming of being astronauts etc., then you're just going to wait and see. If AI progress stalls soon, then you'll know that coding, graphic design, and most "writing" occupations are a no go, but there will still be plenty of other positions. Nothing wrong with the old middle class staples like accountants, architects, maybe lawyers if AI doesn't get good enough.
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For the average technologically inclined student, there's still all the other engineering disciplines. My prediction is they will be much, much harder to crack for AI than software engineering (there's just not that much training data available, the training data that exists would need lots of experienced engineers to be curated, and the data is not actually all that much... text. It's models, drawings, phone calls and proprietary SAP processes) and they will be somewhat safer from off-shoring.
The American economy still needs a whole lot of mechanical, electrical, chemical and construction engineers. Most (by number) of them, especially outside of the big corpo design jobs, can't realistically do more than a day or two of home office per week - because their day job is still very much boots on the ground, solving problems directly involving hardware and the people that run/make that hardware. So much of the problem solving is looking at hardware, talking to people, identifying the problem, solving the problem, and then talking to people again to get it fixed.
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The cynical take was that "learn to code" was a deliberate push to oversaturate the technology worker market in order to break the power and unity of a dissident and growing political-economic block. Tech workers were getting too big for their britches, too expensive, and too socially/politically powerful. But now that there's 100 people applying instantly on linked in for every single tech job, and laid-off mid-level devs are taking 5 (even 6!) digit pay cuts just to get back to work (which also completely shuts out fresh grads even more since they are now competing with people who actually have experience)? Not so much.
The rise of a competitor to the PMC successfully quashed. But we see as well the power of all those gatekeeping institutions in other professions. Why was tech so easy to flood with workers as opposed to something like medicine? Because there's no big regulatory credential bottleneck.
Even if AI rapidly reaches the point where it could begin replacing doctors - it won't, because of the massive regulatory, legal, and credentialing edifice. That is, even if it becomes true that any guy of moderate intellect with just a bit of training and a fine-tuned LLM could statistically match the average primary care physician, that still can't happen. He can't be your PCP, because he doesn't have an MD. And as we all know, you need an MD to be a doctor and do doctor things. That's just the way things work. Which is great for doctors, not so good for everyone else.
Rideshare apps completely slaughtered traditional cabs and cabbies, especially the racket of medallions. Sucks to be some poor cabbie who saved up for years to get his own medallion only to have his entire investment torpedoed. But, it was ultimately a good thing and made car service infinitely more accessible and cheaper for everyone else.
What I'm saying is we need to break the hold of the MD over medicine. This will absolutely suck for doctors who already have their MD, who will see their wages drop tremendously as they are forced to compete with people who didn't take on six-figure debt and invest the better part of a decade getting an MD. It will, however, dramatically reduce healthcare costs and increase healthcare accessibility. I'm not saying you get rid of credentialing entirely - but there's no reason that every single doctor needs to do a whole ass MD where they take tons of classes and rotations on specialties they will never use. There's certainly a use for such well-rounded physicians, but it's frankly absurdly wasteful to have someone with 10+ years of higher education spending all of their time doing rote carpal tunnel releases that someone could learn to do in a few weeks. We're already seeing this emerge inefficiently and chaotically with the rise of the nurse practitioner solely because of the dire need, but what really needs to happen is a massive, widespread and deliberate reduction in the legal privileges of the MD in terms of "only an MD can legally do this."
It's worth noting that one of the main reasons for this transition is the sheer depth of poor quality service and outright fraud associated with the old yellow cab model. It truly was unbelievably brazen and hard to convey if you didn't live through it.
Now back to my regularly scheduled defense of doctorhood.
There's a range, everything from pretty much parity (MD, DO, MBBS) to obviously inferior but often not in a way that patients notice (NP, PA, Psychology Prescribing), to actually quite dangerous (Chiropractors, Naturopaths, Alternative Medicine providers - some of these have full or mostly full rights in some settings/states).
You see all kinds of tensions associated with these options and I know plenty of doctors who have lost out on jobs to one of the others, but in terms of improving care well... we have evidence it makes it worse, and we have evidence that it saves no money or even costs money (example: unnecessary testing).
Many of physician job responsibilities extend outside of direct clinical work and you can't replace them adequately with the others (they make better administrators, managers, and executives). Others also can't fulfill the educator roles or research roles.
Most doctors do some form of teaching and research and essentially all of them have done both at some points in their career.
That kinda stuff doesn't track well on research into these matters but is important. Likewise physicians pick up the slack in the way the the others (especially nurses) do not.
We've been running a natural experiment for awhile now and having growing evidence of that gap.
You also have to consider that if you box someone into say total knees from the beginning then they have to do that 100% of the time they can't switch to another specialty to avoid burnout or other things like that. It's very common for surgeons to switch around and extend the longevity of their careers by doing that sort of stuff.
What'd they do, not tell you the price and then make up one that didn't make sense after services were rendered? Hard to believe that people wouldn't love that...
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Today's version of "learn to code" is "learn a trade." There is a dearth of electricians, plumbers, carpenters, welders, etc. right now and there are well-paying jobs available for those who choose to enter those fields. The other part of the answer is just that the last generation of coders came of age during a gold rush and now those mines have run dry. Not everyone is born in time to be a 49er.
All the same, the US is probably still the best place in the world to start a business doing whatever you can imagine. Want to breed exotic fruit trees in Florida and sell subscription boxes to rich patrons with adventurous palates? Want to figure out the secret recipe for Roman concrete and start a construction company building docks that don't degrade in seawater? Want to build a fleet of nuclear-powered asteroid mining robots and take control of a functionally infinite supply of rare elements? Want to join the Vesuvius challenge with your superior ancient scroll-deciphering algorithm, become the greatest classicist who ever lived, and then go on tour with your AI buddy Plato reciting all the lost works you discovered to a captive audience? In the rest of the world they ask why, but in America we ask why not?
Think what you will about the migrant caravans knocking at our southern border, but the fact that so many people choose to make that perilous journey, not only from utterly destitute countries, but from China, with its gleaming cyberpunk "cities of the future" and zero crime or homelessness and growing power and influence throughout the world, tells you what the American Dream still means to people.
I don't have any specific advice about long-term prospects. I'm preparing myself mentally for the singularity, societal collapse, and everything in between, and just count myself lucky that I'm around to watch the fulcrum around which the rest of human history will turn. We're all stuck on this crazy ride together and might as well enjoy it.
This was one of the paragraphs I almost added in the initial thing. Tradesman is sort of an option. It's not as bad as coffee barista, but breaking six figure incomes seems pretty difficult.
I'm not quite willing to go bug my neighbor across the street about how much he makes in his plumbing business. But he is living in the same neighborhood as us, having bought his house thirty years ago. His land use lawyer brother is definitely richer.
It feels like tradesman is a sort of compromise where we say "no! You don't have to be poor in America if you try hard. It's just we are gonna gate off the middle class." It's a bit of a fuck you. Even Mike Rowe who laudes this kind of work made his money in entertainment.
The US is still great and still the richest. But it also leads the way. Are all nations headed towards this kind of stagnation? We can't quite figure out what to do with everyone. Even skilled workers are likely to get left in the cracks.
HVAC tech here. In general, tradesmen make similar money to average college educated workers(so less than six figures but not a bad salary), or to law enforcement, once they’ve been doing it a few years. First year apprentices live with their parents, but second year can live on their own. Six figure jobs are either for the union(more like a guild in this case- the plumbing or electricians union is technically a temp agency that lets out workers to employers) or at the top of the trade(meritocracy, yes, but also seniority and people skills), or just have an insane number of hours/travel requirements. It happens and is by no means rare but it isn’t a default.
I'm in situation with kids and wife's earnings that anything less than 80k will probably lose us money as we would have to hire additional childcare help. And that additional expense would eat all my take home income. Unless I can find something part time or work from home with flexible hours.
But it sounds like tradesman salaries are topping out around where software developer salaries start. Unless just living in an expensive area ups those salaries significantly.
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Done any installs of r32 units yet?
No, and I haven’t had ‘installer’ as a job description since I was an apprentice- it’s shit work for newbies and jailbirds, you might have a full tech doing a little when it’s slow, or showing up to finish technical parts or something like that, but you don’t do a lot of it in your career with experience unless you screw up.
Most jobs still use 410. The industry in general won’t switch until actually forced to do so.
Ah, that explains why Barclay says "installer" with a hard r, and how they manage to install units with casings live at 240v to earth.
Yes it does.
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The trades are the way to go and making money isn’t a problem for the same person who could write software. My personal dealings with the trades goes like this: I make a meeting for a bid. They don’t show up. They show up but never give a bid. They don’t show up for the job. They do absolute shit work and I make them do it again. I’ve picked up quite a few skills having been forced to do stuff myself when contractors didn’t show up.
If I would do it over again, I’d be a GC and I would make way more money than a software engineer. Clear and frequent communication, keeping appointments, and honest work lets you charge a 50-100% premium in any trade.
These jobs will be the last to be automated away.
Are you sure you'd make more money? @hydroacetylene up above suggested it was less money. And my perfunctory googling all has it at less money.
A GC isn't a tradesman in the electrician/plumber sense of 'does skilled labor'- he oversees and manages an entire construction project. He's a manager of managers, that is, someone who will pretty much always be paid very well regardless of industry. Most GC's are college educated professionals who also have construction experience.
But your median mid-career tradesman makes basically teacher money with higher inequality.
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If you work for someone else, you will make less money. On the flip side, I’ve dealt with people putting up fences at over $100/hr because they showed up and cut straight lines. I’m not exaggerating, the bar is that low. The default fence contractor is someone who speaks literally no English, using a skill saw to cut hundreds of pickets, measuring every one by hand to the same length on site.
You don’t want to be a contractor, you want to run a business.
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Absolutely, a lot of businesses are just waiting for someone who isn't a corrupt asshole to show up. Uber so massively trounced cabbies because cabbies absolutely fucking sucked.
General trade and contracting work, lots of things to do with cars.... you could make a killing by getting into these things and not being corrupt assholes.
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On the ubiquitous internet advice to do this, after getting fired from my tech sales job I applied and worked as an electrician's apprentice for two months last year.
It was absolutely awful. Backbreaking work, in extreme heat. Digging ditches all day to run pipes and wires. Being in crawlspaces, just the worst. Long, loooong hours.
Also, all of the older men had horrible health, tons of injuries, were addicted to drugs and missing teeth, etc etc. The trades are not nearly as glamorous as they are made out to be online.
Different companies are different and electricians are known for hazing their apprentices.
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My uncle worked as an electrician his entire life and he was none of that. He's in his 70s now and still does regular part time work for fun and money. Perhaps you just worked for a terrible company?
I mean, it's not glamorous but it's not that bad either. Something like firefighting on the other hand... Now that is truly backbreaking work and everyone is physically worn out decades before retirement and there are only a few desk positions available for dozens of aging firemen.
I dunno about all that tbh. Structure departments in wealthy US cities/counties seem to take pretty good care of their people and most of the work is, like, lift assists on medicals. Retirement eligibility is usually quite a bit before age 65. These jobs do tend to be a bit of a tournament to get in at first, though.
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IDK, my dad owns an electrical company, and while there aren't a ton of old people involved, that does sound about right. Trenches and crawlspaces and dealing with extreme weather because the heat/air can't be turned on until after you've done your part... and also he's the only one there over 40 without either a current or historical substance problem that had conspicuous physiological effects.
He also has gotten in the habit of splurging on an annual company trip to the beach, but that only sounds like an incentive if you don't already live close to a beach.
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The American dream is still alive and quite strong, and we can see this by the large number of immigrants risking life and limb still trying to get into the country to this day. But for the average American it's a bit more faded and one big reason is pretty simple.
What is it? Life is simply better to begin with. Even the poorer end of rural Americans still tend to have somewhat reliable food, clean water, safe shelter, entertainment that even the kings of old could only dream of (who needs a royal jester when there's millions of them on your TV and computer), good looking comfortable clothing, and medical treatment among many many other things. That's not to say there aren't still problems but the lives of most citizens are substantially better than even many upper class of the 1800s.
You don't have to go to the big city living next to horse manure filled streets with one arm from a factory accident anymore because the alternative is somehow even worse. Despite the gap in wealth increasing substantially the actual life experience has narrowed. Even the average home is getting larger, putting them closer and closer to mansions despite smaller household sizes. There's simply less to aspire towards, and the American dream has always been one of aspiration.
It takes a somewhat adaptive and entrepreneurial mindset to really make major money from nowhere. Any simple answer is liable to go the same way they've always gone, a flood of new workers over time chasing the simple money.
But the good news is, if things go well, we might even need to worry about it too much. Perhaps AI and automation are so incredible that even the poorest of rurals will now benefit from the personal maids and private chefs with very little work done in exchange. The American Dream may dry up completely for citizens because we'll have reached the peak of the mountain and find ourselves nowhere else to climb. (And hopefully not some sort of great war over resources wiping out most humans or some other doomsday scenario).
Philosophically that scares me, how will we find meaning in this life where no jobs are even needed anymore? Can humans handle Paradise? But if we disregard that sort of concern for a second, then the life is better and you will have no need for an American dream any longer because that dream will be the default.
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