Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to The bad news...

re: The bad news...
Larry J — (archived)

Think back to the days up to perhaps 1970. Major corporations still had book keeping departments to handle their accounting. Computerized accounting was one of the first killer applications for computers. Who knows how many accountants were displaced by that (or how many have been hurt by programs like TurboTax).

There are days when the computer is acting especially ignorant that I wish we'd stayed with the slide rule. However, they'll have to pry my word processor out of my cold, dead hands! I remember retyping college compositions to get it right. Typewriters sucked!

There are at least a million people working in the computer industry today in jobs that were unimaginable even 15 years ago (who could've imagined web page designers and webmasters in the days before there was a World Wide Web?) Jobs are constantly being created and destroyed in a dynamic economy. Just as the auto industry displaced a lot of blacksmiths, livery stable operators, and the like associated with horses (and today the auto industry directly or indirectly is related to at least 10% of all jobs in America), low cost computers and software have ended some jobs but spawned countless others.

I graduated high school in 1975, the year the first commonly acknowledged personal computer was invented. Today, I'm doing a job that no only didn't exist back then, it was unimaginable. Just gotta keep learning! If you stagnate in the computer industry, you'll not only find yourself unemployed but unemployable.

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