Comment by photonthug

> tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy

It was in a sense, although this is changing. Rising costs of education started to ensure that degrees are just another tool of class warfare, in the sense that you can only make money if you have money. Any well-paying and non military job category that bypasses this, caring more about talent than certification is probably getting us closer to a utopian meritocracy.

But of course, this was never a credit to the management class or the industry leadership, just an accident of timing during a growth phase plus some peculiar aspects of computing itself vs domains like say, medicine or structural engineering. Maybe it does come down to scale.

Anyway, even if the world hasn’t overproduced SWEs and info workers, the AI we’re all building works for management. So eventually AI engineers won’t be able to find AI jobs not because the AI is doing their job, but because AI filtered them out of the applicant funnel early for ranking high as mercenary, or low on conformity, dependability, or desperation, without even looking at certification count. Imagine how easy it is to flag applicants as not-desperate-enough yet to be lowballed on the offer, especially after there are only a few ways to apply for anything, and after indeed and linked in etc all decide they work for employers more than job seekers. Everyone who is talking about whether they can be replaced in their job should be much more worried about being filtered, because from the employers perspective, there’s always some reason you’re not the best hire.