I lost my job yesterday.

I was a contractor for the US Federal govt. DOGE has cut thousands of jobs in the last few months and it finally hit me. No notice. No severance pay. I work from home so at least there was no humiliation of being walked out the door.

Now I am feeling very fearful. I am going to be financially stressed, and its a hard time to find a job.

I am angry. There was no reason to cut my job. Just someone's greed.

I was angry about what is happening to my country before this happened, and now its hit me personally.

I just want to give up. How can you fight when your country is against you?

Alice

First, thank you for being willing to do the thankless, unseen work that keeps the government running to accomplish the job of keeping the proverbial lights on.

Second, IDK how to fight, but I am in the same boat. I was not a federal employee, but the mere threat of tariffs late last year changed financial forecasts, which lowered my employer’s budget, leading to a 50% reduction in my team. I lost my job in that round.

I felt alarmed in 2015. I was telling friends and family that if this character is allowed in office, he will declare himself president for life. For all his antagonism towards central and South American people, he sure looks like one of their dictators. I failed, as did many thinking people who put country over party, to overcome the tide of resentment gave a wannabe dictator his base. Now, here we are.

Your dismissal was illegal, but the law obviously protects no one with a net worth less than $1 billion. So that won’t buy groceries or a roof. I’m a programmer, and 10s of thousands of other programmers have been laid off from both the federal and private sectors, while job availability has fallen. End result is 100+ applicants for every job posting. It’s a matter of luck at this point as to whether your application makes it through the AI screening.

I’m angry, sad, and fearful. I am utterly shocked by the deportations and looking for ways to protect the immigrant community here. I think we should join together. The ruling class only governs with our consent. If we join together instead of blaming people who look or think differently, we can change this country.

A really interesting counter example to the "Learn to code bro" answer to things.

I dunno if a answer to the geopolitical end of things would even be a relief cause well... unemployment is a prolonged form of hell regardless of the politics of debt and deficit spending.

No real advice but I do empathize (even if my own unemployment came from being a crazy asshat).

I made a bit of a left turn in my career choices that I'm happy with (I like my job) but not everyone can be so lucky.

Oh dear. Anyone who thinks that coding is an easy path to job security is almost definitely not a coder. It used to be, when the economy didn’t suck, and AI was not on the market yet.

It’s not the case that AI is actually replacing developers, but rather that business managers have less appetite for internal data analysis if they can ask chatGPT to do their job for them. This is a doomed strategy, but the fact that idiots are still allowed to make decisions means the immediate term is very poor for mid to entry level developers.

I dunno maybe because I work around already a lot of automated processes and use to manage people to a degree that I have a kind of jaded perspective. However I completely understand the upper management hard on for ai.

A lifetime ago I was asked to do some data analysis for the ltl shipping company I worked for. It was busy work for all intents and purposes but I had noticed that a two specific terminals were consistently a day or two later then they needed to be on pickups for making the route that past through the facility I worked at. I figured catching those types of details was showing good operations initiative and wrote my contact on the project and got no response. Computers don't talk or rock the boat lol.

A few years later I was doing sales analysis fory boss cause she was losing her ass trying to do inventory control for two buildings. Had a whole system where I could pull data for week, months and year for our product and averages for all skus.

The goal was to organize the place to reduce foot traffic and optimize space. I had some product that I want to move to a top shelf that were heavy but hadn't sold in a year... operations management objected cause it could "sell tommorow and be a safety hazard". I lost the argument that I was trying to to make room to deal with stuff like that and had to use real estate and stuff that I don't think ever sold if memory serves. The knuckle heads never bothered to really investigate for flaws in my data and went with there 'gut'. If I said my stuff was developed by ai....I'm pretty certain they wouldn't have doubted it.

Feels like AI in a lot of contexts is just going to excuse bad behavior but people are going to go with it cause "people suck and question the narrative"

Dunno about what your credentialed in Jack but I would consider if I was in your shoes moving closer to engineering. A lot of the technicians I have seen at my job have engineering degrees but rely a lot on coding to make heads or tails of what they deal with on the daily. If I had a redo on most of my adult life I would gone into that stuff myself, however I'm to old to start from zero.

Thank you Lumberjack and Shinzon. I am close to retirement, so too late to start over. I am not a programmer, but work mostly on the security/infrastructure side of IT.
I think we have to fight for our country or we will lose everything.