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Sam Altman's bad week continues, as a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO.
It appears that, if measured by deed, Mr. Altman may be in contention for the title of most hated business executive in the country.
Unless I am profoundly misinformed about the base rate of assassination attempts on tech CEOs, it appears AI anxiety has apparently reached a precipitation point among American youth, to the point where discontent is crystalizing into direct action. I've seen this in my personal life. My youngest brother is a bright kid - top of his class, eagle scout, 1400+ on his SATs as a junior, the whole shebang. He's completely given up on his original goal of going to college for something software-related, and he's not only adrift about what he's going to do with his future, but he's angry about it. I hope he has a support network sufficient to keep him on the right track, but I don't like what I see.
I'm not exactly old, but I'm sure as hell not young either. For those of you who are 25 or under, what does it feel like on the ground right now?
Where I am, IT seems to be doing fairly well. I know people who aren't spectacularly bright, but technically interested, who are doing well in entry-level IT and moving up into engineering positions. The hard part is getting your foot in the door, but once you do, there are opportunities available. They aren't always glamorous but they're real.
That said, success among young men in general is extremely bimodal, in ways that aren't necessarily correlated to socioeconomic background. I'd say half the zoomer or millennial men I know are unemployed or significantly underemployed, in a way that tracks mental health/functioning/grit/economic necessity more than it does raw intelligence or capability. Several are bankrolled partially or fully by the women in their lives, who have normal but not glamorous white-collar jobs that are generally higher-status or pay than what the men have. The ones who don't have a girlfriend are... pretty damn depressed, in the "repeatedly dropped out of college and lost touch with all their friends because they sleep 13 hours a day" way.
Young women have a distribution of success too, of course, but it seems to map most directly onto SES than it does individual factors. So I have a female friend whose mother was bipolar and is struggling to launch, but most of the college-educated ones are white-collar workers making median+ salaries, and it's the non-college-educated ones who seem to be stuck in the service sector.
The mental health/loneliness/decoupling of academic success from life success crisis seems to be hitting young men most of all, though I don't doubt it has victims among young women as well. Being able to survive through this period of time with a sense of optimism and drive for the future, as well as romantic achievement, is probably the strongest correlate (not necessarily causal factor) of success among men, in a way I'm not sure is precisely true of women in the same way.
In some ways I'm in the winning column, in some I'm in the not-so-good one. I don't have a lot of optimism for the future and I do feel like many of my early academic dreams died due to overcompetition and the marginalization of people like me in elite or semi-elite spaces. I suppose I'm just trying to hold on to what success I do have, but I have very little buy in for the system as it exists -- I just don't feel homicidal and find it morally outrageous that people do. Our problems are far, far more diffuse and our evils are far, far more banal than anything that would justify killing people over.
For the record, this is in a flyover state most coastal folks probably think of as a shithole. We have our problems but it's home.
What sector of IT in particular is killing it? Over in infosec they’re doing terrible at the moment. The economy has left the industry to thin out the herd at the moment and jettison what it can. Balance sheets are suffering in a lot of places. Are the entry positions you’re finding localized to a particular type of entry work?
I wouldn’t say they’re killing it, just that there is a bit of opportunity. I don’t know how to compare.
To be clear, by IT I mean general office IT support/MSPs, I can’t tell you how programmers or infosec people are doing. This is not a very tech focused area, but there’s always a need for general IT services even in flyover country because every organization uses IT. Last I heard cybersecurity type positions were desperate to be filled, and the big issue was finding people actually qualified for those kinds of roles. But what I hear from cyber people around here is their jobs tend to be cleaning up AD/Entra junk and enforcing role-based access control. Again, nothing glamorous.
Makes sense. IT / administrative work will always dominate corporate office settings.
In the case of infosec, a number of years ago there was an analysis that found a 0% unemployment rate; but there’s also a lot of candidates that can’t find work. It’s a strange industry on the labor side if you don’t understand what’s going on.
Right now there’s an over saturation of analyst positions. Qualified people are looking to get in on the ground level but many of them are unable to get their foot in. What’s very high in demand is the meat for the industry. Threat detection engineers, incident responders, etc. A lot of the veteran, very high pressure roles. These are greatly understaffed at the moment.
A lot of them probably work as L1’s or as juniors. It’s a good position to get into if you can manage the burnout and pressure (especially in an MSSP setting, they’re notorious for that). IAM is also increasingly becoming the frontline for threat actors looking to exploit systems. There’s problems on both the technical side as well as the business. The latter has to constantly prove its value to the executives because they often don’t understand what value you bring to the organization. Depending on who your employer is, your position may also be at risk of being permanently unstable; so it’s a worry people have.
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