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I’m going to ignore most of your comment, which I agree with and have nothing to add to, and focus on the part that deserves elaboration.
I’m a white collar worker, and a member of a specific skilled trade - namely, a programmer. And it is a craft, or trade, for what it’s worth. There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at. If I do my job right, nobody notices a thing, and their systems run as smoothly as sci-fi.
The reason I bring this up is to add some context on white-collar work and why what you say is so.
The biggest costs to cutting yourself out of white collar work are:
Going through these in turn.
White-collar work - the real stuff, not lesser clerical roles, usually called email jobs - is knowledge work. And that means your job involves a hell of a lot of learning and recitation. Obviously a skilled craftsman also needs to know his stuff, but the amount of specialist, company-specific, novel, or downright esoteric knowledge you are expected to have in a white-collar role is massive.
This is the table of contents for the Arch Linux wiki. Scroll up and down - pretty long list. Now note a little number in parentheses by most of those - this is the number of subpages aggregated under one of those keywords. And while Arch’s wiki is known to be pretty exceptional, it is not exhaustive of Linux knowledge, and Linux knowledge is not exhaustive of computer science or IT skills.
So dropping out of that world for a time means you will concretely be missing skills when you come back. The longer you’re gone, the worse it will be. In the best case you’re simply going to be making the same money as before you left. Worst-case, you’ll be making less. Some of this, in software, is honestly just dumb churn. I’ll admit to that. But it’s the
Moving on. Analyzing a white-collar worker on the merits, especially in a large (bureaucratic) organization, is challenging. It usually doesn’t have obvious and measurable parameters, and if it does, those are guaranteed to be gamed and inefficient elements will rise to the top. So your ability will be in no small part judged by superiors with good reputations. Is this potentially cliquey? Can it keep good workers who are bad at networking down? Hell yes. But it’s roughly the best of a bad set of options. So if you drop out, you have to spend X amount of time proving yourself when you get back and giving some concrete evidence that your superiors can use to support you when you’ve won their trust.
Lastly, and this is probably the most important. Learning to be really good at a trade takes a lot of time and focus. You need talent, and then you need to put effort into it daily. This is doubly true for anything with poor feedback cycles, and the feedback cycles in white-collar work are typically slow and lossy. There’s a long, long way from the choices I make to my company’s revenue, and so telling the difference from a good solution and a bad will take some abstract reasoning and really good evidence. This usually boils down to time in the industry deeply engaged. And if you want to rise above a certain position, this effort and growth is required. On top of that, the vaunted “soft skills” are indeed quite important, since your average white-collar worker is navigating a human-dense and political environment. Dealing with them effectively is just another part of the job, and you only get better at it with time.
I’m aware none of this really undermines your central point. In fact, in a sense I’m supporting it. None of these points are actually fun things about white-collar work, at least the high-skill variants. And the low-skill variants aren’t much different, they just tune down all the knowledge about real things in favor of trends and politics. But the problem of returning to work isn’t just getting past the HR screen, and I wanted to convey a little about my own vocation.
So, in your view, is the current advice about "if you don't want to be laid off in the next round of IT job cuts, make sure you're promoted into a management role" since that seems to indicate "just programming on its own, no matter how good you are, is not job security"?
I do take your point about specific knowledge, but the problem there too is that if you know all about how to keep the janky, tricky systems of Company X running, little of that transfers over to Company Y which has a totally different tricky, janky system.
Lowest level managers are prime candidates for downsizing.
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If you want my opinion, keeping your IT job is mostly about working for the right company (responsible, hasn’t overhired, good market prospects) in a critical and productive, usually backend, capacity - not on puff projects funded by zero interest debt. Easier said than done, I know, but the team I’m currently on has survived multiple rounds of layoffs at my company completely untouched. In software, boring is extremely good. Management is not immune to cuts, on the other hand.
You’re right that domain knowledge transfer is a serious problem in tech. The one thing I’d say is: the best people tend to be good by virtue of their ability to learn fast and learn as a function of general principles over rigid specifics. I personally haven’t had much trouble moving into new jobs or domains. Then again, I wasn’t even a programmer initially - I learned on the job. So maybe I’m not the best example, since my case is already weird.
Overall, I empathize with pretty much any cynical take on big industry and tech in particular. Industry leaders have not shown great judgment over the past couple decades. That said, the best advice is always some combination of work on your skills and build good relationships, and be prepared to pivot if it comes to it. The one good thing about the modern industry is that your individual labor does have value and you can take the value of your labor where you want - it’s fundamentally inalienable. Keeping that idea close to heart helps you stay sane.
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Sure, but computer programmers are what, 80% male? That's my guess without submitting to artificial mental retardation, whether through a search engine or not. Last I checked, a (slim)majority of (employed)women were employed as k-12 teachers or registered nurses.
I'm entirely prepared to believe the statement 'men and butch lesbians shouldn't take time off work to have a kid'- that's their wife's job. The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
Yes, but it was another one of the complaints that was question-begged into existence. Woman at every peg of the promotional ladder already worked less than men. If you take 3 years off, even if you come back at 100%, you will have men 3 years younger than you next to you that are working harder than you were 3 years ago, and now you are 3 years older and even less likely to put in 60 hours while only obligated to do 40.
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I haven’t heard that- what I have heard was that such jobs wouldn’t hire women with children/married women, full stop.
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I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
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