> It's what happens when there's no other comparable growth careers/opportunities available.

That's not entirely true. We (society, definitely US) pushed going to college HARD for the last 3-4 decades and glamorizing how much money you'll make. Now, we have an overabundance of people with college degrees and thousands of dollars in debt to those degrees.

There's plenty of career paths where you could make decent money that don't require a college degree.

We should have been pushing people to figure out what they wanted to do, not "Make lots of money", and figure out the path that gets them there.

We did push people into what they wanted to do: make money.

The sad reality is that "everyone learn to code" was by and large a marketing distraction from the severe structural unemployment the fast and loose economy is in. No a coal miner can't just learn to code and get a job in WV, certainly not 1,000's of other miner sin the same position, not can the millions of people that corporate laid off over those same decades.

Coding was a way out of poverty, but for most people it was just a distraction to keep them from seeing how bad the economy is.

Americans are poor: PNC Bank's annual Financial Wellness in the Workplace Report shows that 67 percent of workers now say they are living paycheck to paycheck, up from 63 percent in 2024. https://www.newsweek.com/2025-rise-americans-living-paycheck...

We should have figured out how that get some of the benefits of productivity gains to go to workers. We were promised a rising tide lifts all ships, but now that the tide rose and is started to go back out, those that promised didn't deliver but keeping hoping we won't notice.