Are Tech-Driven 'Career Meltdowns' Hitting Generation X? (nytimes.com)
- Reference: 0176854399
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/03/29/0626254/are-tech-driven-career-meltdowns-hitting-generation-x
- Source link: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html
> If you entered media or image-making in the '90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there's a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That's because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand... When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn't seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.
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> More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields. "My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s," Mr. Wilcha said. "The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it's just gone. It's startling." Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It's as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted...
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> Typically, workers in their 40s and 50s are entering their peak earning years. But for many Gen-X creatives, compensation has remained flat or decreased, factoring in the rising cost of living. The usual rate for freelance journalists is 50 cents to $1 per word — the same as it was 25 years ago... As opportunities and incomes dwindle, Gen X-ers in creative fields are weighing their options. Move to a lower-cost place and remain committed to the work you love? Look for a bland corporate job that might provide health insurance and a steady paycheck until retirement?
The article includes several examples of the trend:
One magazine's photo studio director says professional photographers have been replaced by "a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500."
The article adds that "When photography went digital, photo lab technicians and manual retouchers were suddenly as inessential as medieval scribes." (And "In advertising, brands ditched print and TV campaigns that required large crews for marketing plans that relied on social media posts."")
An editor at Spin magazine remembers the day its print edition folded...
And besides competition from influencers, there's also AI, "which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, [2]ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs , or 7.5 percent of the industry's work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester."
Meanwhile [3]the cost of living has skyrocketed , the article points out — even while Gen X-ers "are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, [4]according to recent surveys ..."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/28/style/gen-x-creative-work.html
[2] https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-agency-ai-workforce-2030/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/nyregion/housing-crunch-affordable-housing.html
[4] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/10/19/generation-x-retirement-denial/75731069007/
That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:4, Funny)
or maybe a steel mill. Something that will never become obsolete.
Re: (Score:3)
Other jobs which probably won't be going away anytime soon:
1. Electrician
2. Carpenter
3. Plumber
4. Car Mechanic
5. Vegetable and fruit picker
7. Nurses assistant
8. Prison guard
9. Police officer
10. Politician [hehe]
All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.
That is, until they successfully design robots to replace them.
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South Park comes true. Again.
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> All of these jobs require more brawn then brain.
I can't tell if you're joking, but Electrician, Plumber, and Nurse Assistant all require on-the-job training, and you have to pass license certification in the US and Canada. I'd hardly call those "brainless" jobs. Do you want an unlicensed electrician to wire your home? How about an unlicensed nurse assistant monitoring your vitals after a heart attack? I've helped a plumber replumb a house I owned; it looks simple, but if you don't get the slopes and ru
Re: (Score:2)
Carpenters are being replaced by prefab building systems.
Car mechanics are becoming obsolete as it's cheaper to replace half the car than repair it
Vegetable and fruit pickers are being replaced by robots
Nurses assistant will be an AI assistant
Prisons will be fully automatic without staff, guided by AI surveillance
Police officers too will be replaced by AI surveillance
Even politicians are using ai in budgeting and campaigning
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Carpenters are still used on prefab assembly lines and site placements of prefab modules. I have relatives that have been doing prefab stuff for 20 years now.
Car mechanics still have to replace that half of the car that you mention.
Harvesting has been heavily automated but field-tending is still very manual for some types of crops. That may get automated at some point though.
AI can't wield a needle or empty a bed pan yet.
Prisons do a lot more than contain prisoners. AI won't ever be the chaplain, the psycho
Re: (Score:2)
My eldest son is an oysterman. As long as his health holds up, he'll be okay. Pays well, but the hours are tidal.
Will they? (Score:2)
Are we really going to need that many plumbers and electricians as our economy unwinds? Serious question.
I mean did peasants in medieval Russia need a plumber? How about an electrician? You're assuming our ruling class is going to continue to allow the existing service sector economy to function. I think it's pretty safe to say they're not. Guys like Elon Musk won't be content with anything short of Pharaoh style godhood. And they're going to use machines to build their pyramids.
As for prison guard
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This is why I never really stopped cooking part-time. People will always need to eat, and there will never be a way to peel, dice and brown parsnips digitally in my lifetime.
All else fails, I move to full-time. I never been on on a job search for kitchen work that's lasted over two weeks
(and besides, is there a job that produces more happiness outside of prostitution?)
Re: That's it, I'm getting a job in a coal mine (Score:1)
Hmm, be careful there, I think parsnips can be 3D printed.
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Pay is varies directly with the amount of risk the company you work for is exposed 2 and the difficulty of replacing someone in that position.
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remove health insurance from jobs.
Won't add up ... (Score:2)
> ... professional photographers have been replaced by "a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500."
> Meanwhile the cost of living has skyrocketed, the article points out — even while Gen X-ers "are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys..."
It's going to be hard for Gex X-ers to handle the costs of living, and taxes, get/be financially secure and plan for retirement at $500 a pop, unless they work themselves to an early death or keep living at home -- taking advantage of their grand/parents ...
Re: (Score:3)
Meh. There is a whole world in between the financial security of the Boomers and homelessness. Us GenXers are good at living with compromise.
We will be fine.
It's not just Gen X (Score:3)
... and, while the pace of change has accelerated, this is something people have had to deal with since the start of the industrial revolution (at a minimum). For example: even before the current AI craze, those of us who make our livings in IT have needed to continually learn new skills if we wanted to remain gainfully employed.
Regardless... why focus on Gen X? I mean, pity the late baby boomers (myself and my friends, of course!). The pace of technological change over the past 20 years upended many of their careers while they were still 10-15 years from retirement. Just trying to switch jobs when you're in your 50s is problematic - how about trying to completely switch fields? I've been fortunate, but I've seen a lot of my non-tech friends get blindsided over the past couple decades.
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> For example: even before the current AI craze, those of us who make our livings in IT have needed to continually learn new skills if we wanted to remain gainfully employed.
TFA isn't postulating a world where you have to continuously develop your career. That is situation normal for most careers. They are postulating a complete and total loss of the entire career path. Your new skill that you learn in IT isn't how to drive a forklift (it sounds like an absurd analogy but compare that from darkroom retouching to digital photography and the phrase "like chalk and cheese" doesn't even begin to describe how fundamentally different the career paths are.
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That was a poorly-chosen example on my part. What I was attempting to illustrate was that, largely thanks to the industrial revolution, we've already seen this to some degree over the past 150-200 years
Like how automobiles ended most career paths related to horses, for instance (the old Slashdot meme "buggy whip manufacturers", grooms, stable boys, etc.). Or how mass production of small appliances and prepared frozen foods dramatically cut down the number of jobs "in service" (to use the old British term fo
So the problem is we are facing the change (Score:2)
That's a ludites did. We have a massive amount of automation going on and we don't have enough jobs and enough work to go around for the jobs we are automating.
The Democrats here in America saw that coming and their solution such as it is was to try and transition to a service sector economy Ala brave New world. In other words you'd have a lot of wasted energy to keep people at full employment. That didn't work because the ruling class wants the resources and energy for themselves that would otherwise g
Tech isn't immune (Score:3)
I'm Gen-X and have had to make major career shifts within my tech career.
The first piece of software I used in my software developer career was purchased by their competitor. It stopped being a viable career path within a few years.
"Just learn a new product/language" is the /. mantra, but knowledge and certifications don't convey -experience-. Anyone searching for a tech job knows how much of a hurdle that can be.
I made a pivot to something less hands-on... but the whole IT department was off-shored. The same thing happened at the next company after a few years.
I'm now tech-adjacent in MIS. My developer skills are still useful occasionally, but if I'd started in MIS I'd have a resume dating back to the 90's, instead of just the past few years.
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I'm glad I retired when I did, at 61. I had bleeding-edge skills at the time, but I was OLD and not near as cute as I once was.
And, frankly, programming was getting a little bit harder each year, to the point it wasn't much fun anymore. I still do it, and contribute to open source, but I am grateful I don't have a deadline hanging over my head (I'm a very lax self-employer, and my wife appreciates it).
My point is that I feel I got out just in time. I have all I need and my kids are all doing fine. Very luck
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Nobody will get out unscathed. I'm betting that social security gets cut in one way or another. If you can do it don't take social security until you absolutely have no choice to do it or reach age 67. They'll either cut everyone's check by 20-30% or it will become means tested. For example, you you might get no social security payments if your annual income exceeds 100K in 2025 dollars. Oh, and don't try to live on a small amout, because they'll look at the net worth of your retirement accounts and base
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> I'm betting that social security gets cut in one way or another.
That's actually already baked in. If Congress does nothing, social security cuts of $325/mo start around 2033. You can go find that info on both NPR and Fox... But the thing is, they can start sooner if the trust fund runs out early.
T
This article seems a slant towards journalism jobs (Score:3)
If after 93, you couldn't see where the world was headed, you weren't paying attention.
I was 20 in 93, my first ISP was PSI-Net and prior to that it was Fidonet strung together by BBS's. People were already sharing news articles via Fidonet mirrors of NNTP servers. Granted, there was no URL share button, and they were retyping stuff word for word, but they did it. By 93 however people were starting to take scans and images as well.
Fast forward to 1995, when a lot of my friends were graduating SJSU. A few of my closest friends got degrees in print. It was interesting watching and comparing our career trajectories. When I was a young man, my family and their families were so proud of them. "Oh so and so does LAYOUT for the Mercury NEWS!" "So and so does PHOTOGRAPHY for Wave Magazine!" When attention turned to me it was, "MIS? What is that?" While I struggled at first to get my footing in MIS, they were hired right away by local newspapers or magazines, but slowly their careers petered out, and mine is still raging.
I now work for one of the largest IT departments in the world, making great money. A few of them stopped trying to find jobs in journalism, one went to work for the local equivalent of a Kinkos.
Ironically their parents carry computers in their pockets.
If you're young, like I was, and you don't want to become obsolete, don't look at jobs and say, "Oh I like the idea of this, that is what I want to do!" No.. Look at what is being used as building blocks in the world. You want to work with the building blocks, not what comes after the construction. Right now? It looks like AI is huge. GPU design is HUGE. Quantum is going to be the next building block after. Get into quantum.
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The problem is that AI wasn't even on the radar 5 years ago.
Sure there were articles and work and ideas floating around, but someone who just picked his major in 2020 is probably looking for a job, armed with a masters degree, in 2025.
Problem is, the world of 2020 was way different from the one 5 years later. Hell, you're saying that GPU design is huge right now, the big tech companies are building data centers right, left and center to accommodate all their GPU needs... And then the chinese dropped a model
I'm not worried (Score:2)
Elon Musk claimed that 20 million people aged over 120 are "marked as alive in the social security system", thereby implying (or wanting us to believe) that they are being sent checks by the big bad nasty Social Security Department whose employees are pigs. Anyway, it clearly means he's secured at least 200 billion dollars from social security funds already (temporarily to his own bank account for safekeeping I'm sure), I'm expecting that every US citizen will get a "DOGE savings" check (I'm sure it'll happ
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> Elon Musk claimed that 20 million people aged over 120 are "marked as alive in the social security system"
That's because COBOL uses 1875-05-20 as the epoch ("zero date"). So anybody with "age undetermined" will be shown as being ~150 years old.
Full employment (Score:2)
A bland corporate job with health benefits? Sorry, those are disappearing fast too. Workers who have labor to offer are increasingly useless in our economy. It's only the capitalists who own the automated machinery that produces goods and services who are participants in the economy. Everyone else is scrambling to get by with gig jobs like driving for Uber. However, that misleadingly shows up as full employment in statistics, when the truth is we're witnessing the rapid disappearance of the middle class.
Yes. (Score:3)
Obviously.
Example: 3D was a dream-job 25 years ago. It was very niche and very demanding in skill and experience and the tools costed a fortune, but if you set your mind to it you could make an OK living, if only doing specialized client work like visualization or architecture.
Today we've reached a point where specialized Smartphone Apps can take a video rotation of an object and spit out an optimized textured 3D model in a few seconds. Blender is for free and there are services that can spit out 3D models of anything for free in a few moments. Even rendering services are dead. The last Oskar for that Blender animation flick was final-rendered on a standard deskop PC.
Another example: Drone Pilot. A few years back you could make a living with high-quality aerial videos or drone surveying. Special software and some knowlege and experience was required, but you could make money with this highly specialized occupation. Today you toss a drone-bot that costs a few hundred euros into the air and watch the aerial maps, pans, fly-throughs and whatnot just pour into your tablet in real time.
Same with media production such as DTP/Print or Video. AI will have 90%+ of that covered in 2 years or so but even today many processes have been shrunk and automated 90% of the way. It's turned into more of a cultural technique rather than specific jobs.
The bots are taking our jobs. I do webdev, moved (back) to frontend a few years back and now I basically just consult, talk to people and clean up shitty or half-finished code. And it isn't really a classic full time job anymore, it's just my experience and my self-marketing that helps me transition. I still have my IDE subscription, but I wouldn't be surprised if that becomes totally superfluos in a few years time. ... I am using ChatGPT4o as a tutor and personal expert/code assistant though. Really helpful. And a sign of things to come.
The bots are here and they're taking over. It's that simple.
No more strippers (Score:2)
In 1970s Los Angeles Times employment classified ads, there were a number of ads for strippers. Not that type, the graphic arts type, long replaced by digital pre-press.
Golden Age (Score:2)
Whenever you feel down, just remember Trump said at his inauguration and him and shadow president Musk have repeated that we're now in a Golden Age.
Keep your skills current. (Score:1)
The obsolescence of certain jobs and skills is not a new phenomenon. Throughout history, adaptability has been essential for professional longevity. Remaining relevant in any era requires a commitment to continuous learning and the ongoing development of new competencies.
Luckily (Score:3)
Gen-X does not give a shit.
I always said... (Score:2)
...Cultivate general skills which are used as basis for most specializations.
A scaffolding, if you will.
Gen-X'ers aren't as pliable to AI Theft (Score:2)
Those who came after Gen-x people, were trained to give their privacy away, and now all of their intellectual property.
Cannot believe no more Visual Basic / Flash jobs (Score:1)
Really, morons? Well, believe it, and while you are at it, kill yourselves.
Re: Lamp lighters say... (Score:2)
Or pivot to management. That's what I did as a successful network engineer. It has been 3yrs, and a lot of growth, training and learning new social skills and techniques to successfully manage highly intelligent people across different generations and from new to multi decades of service. Not to mentioning managing a high visibility and important portfolio for the organization. Even if management isn't for you, people staying in the technical field need to be flexible, and willing to be life long learners
Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:3)
Remember that the baby boomer generation larger than Gen X until the millennials grew larger than the boomers.
Gen X had the following trends preventing it from establishing itself as the the largest part of corporate leadership:
Giving the baby boomers 10 extra years in leadership of corporations, government, etc. preventing Generation X from rising economically as fast as the boomers did (declining lifetime earnings for Gen X)
1. Declining birth rate from the ~1956-~1962 baby boomer years
2. Birth control ava
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It sucks to be on the trailing edge bulge as it goes through the demographic snake. You want to be on the leading edge of the bulge.
This even apples to the boomers. The boomers on the leading edge of the bulge got cheap houses and retirement pensions, those boomers on the trailing edge got high mortgage rates and defined benefit plans.
The problem is there was no recovery after the trailing edge of the bulge passed through the demographic snake. This was because people didn't fight for something better, and
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Trailing edge boomers eventually got defined contribution plans ( 401(k) ) rather than defined benefit (traditional pension) plans. Many of these early on, were manipulatively channeled into annuity contracts with no control over investments, and high surrender charges. I was burned by both Aetna and Principal Mutual on these.
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Yes, I minced words and got that wrong. But I meant "contribution"
Re: Remember Generation X was never the biggest (Score:2)
You forgot another Gen-X fact - we were proven, by scientists, in a laboratory, to be the coolest generation of all time. It is a fact. Blame science if you have an issue.
Also boomers benefited from unions (Score:2)
And deindustrialization hadn't fully kicked in when the boomers were first getting into the economy. The boomers came into a fundamentally better and stronger economy because the huge automation boom from the '80s and '90s hadn't fully hit them yet and they had time to get set in the careers.
Also they had a fuck ton more government assistance. America in particular likes to hide our socialism through a complex series of government subsidies to private businesses. So the government would roll in and do a
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I can code and my career has been plagued by layoffs and long stints of unemployment. I guess its my fault for not playing the startup game or going to a FAANG company and making bank doing souless work. I guess it was silly to think that staying in VFX because the work was more fun.
Re: Lamp lighters say... (Score:2)
Oooh. We found over a dozen idiots who did not realize keeping up with technology was part of the job. Good riddance. Morons.