I stopped reading there. Sure, there are scumbag lawyers out there, but telling eg. the EFF or Creative Commons, not to mention your average underpaid and overworked public defender, that they "aren't doing anything of value for society" is a bit rich.
I can't believe there are people out there who with confidence can declare that 1 million Americans are doing something that adds zero value to society.
I get hired ridiculously easy, its just unfair. Granted the odds stacked in my favour immensely. I'm young, i travel anywhere within the UK for work and can be on site with 24hrs notice, i have no dependents (other than my employees, but my businesses independently cover their wages), my living expenses are about 10% of my earnings, I live in a low cost city but work in a high income city, I'm highly skilled (by the industry average, not by my standard) and my industry is drastically under served by skilled workers.
Job security no longer means getting hired by a big company and staying there for 30+ years, today, it means how easily you can get hired. Some of these things you can influence, like skill, or choose, like flexibility on location and times, and some are things outwith your control but can still be exploited, like market demand.
That was reductive and unnecessary. Otherwise a good piece.
e.g. http://www.freedomtwentyfive.com/2013/03/where-does-it-end/
This is the mindset that ensures you will always have a job:
http://slyoyster.com/music/2010/50-cent-will-shovel-your-sno...
If I lost my job, I would start selling my skills & abilities the next day, working side jobs, whatever. Gotta hustle to make the ends meet.
You have to take a message to Garcia.
I'm 24, and I'm a CS grad student. I want to do research, or at least research&development. I can code plenty well; hell, I'm typing from the end of the workday at my sweet internship right now.
But if you're going to tell me that even tech will leave me broke and unable to support a family at 35, what... what anything? Why anything?
Why pretend I have career aspirations if anything I can think of ends in being broke and useless at 35? Why pretend I give half a damn about any of the work I do if I can't ever rely on even a reasonably stable lifestyle, if everything is just moonshot after moonshot before the unemployment line?
It's one thing when I hear that I'll probably never have a flying car or pet robot [1]. It's another thing when I hear that I can't expect to ever have a family or make it to retirement without plunging into poverty, and I'm part of the privileged elite.
What. The. Fuck?
PS -- I apologize for the obvious emotion in this post, but it's a worry I've been carrying for a couple of years now.
Otherwise, don't worry about it, because there's lots of people out there right now jumping around companies from year-to-year, doing that thing. It's the norm for an industry, right now.
There will be some conventional wisdom you can glean from colleagues, The Market, and your own heart/personal development, when the comes time for that.
You're young. You don't need all of the answers now, nor should you try to come up with them which would inevitably cause you madness.
Plus, there will always be the Googles/Apples/Microsofts, etc of the world. When you're ready for stability, move towards that pack.
This is my plan. Good management of technical assets is (in my eyes) absolutely essential to actually achieving anything noteworthy, so as an experienced, storied old guy you can still provide value. Maybe even more value than before.
Thing is, unless I hit it big with something, that's going to eventually leave me the choice between being a financially somewhat secure singleton and driving myself right back into the Broke Zone by trying to actually have a family.
The fact remains that I cannot expect to be a millionaire by the time I'm 40, especially not if I want a family, and living in a van to make a below-poverty-line income and lifestyle sustainable is... giving up.
