@Revelate wrote:
Out of curiosity what do you do?
I consult in new market risk mitigation. Every single consultant in my market is useless but not as useless as I am. We are, without a doubt, the most easily replaced 6 figure earning workers in the workforce and I truly believe I'm the only one who sees the writing on the wall. The basic idea is we know more about future tech than IT does, and we can tell our customers what to be aware of. For example, in the past 2 years I made a bundle of cash just by holding cryptocurrency to loan to companies that ended up with malware locking their data down. Oh, you have 150 workers and they lost their server drive to encryption? That'll be $15,000 for the 24 hour loan of the crypto to unlock it. Lols.
Because technology changes faster than companies can pay attention to, they hire folks like me to keep them apprised of future risks and mitigate them today, or at least pay us to insure against problems. I remember in 2014 I offered our customers the option of paying $500 up front for 5 years of insurance against crypto encryption malware and all of zero of our customers took advantage of it, but 5 of them in the past 3 years have had to pay a gigantic bundle of cash to fix their encrypted data lockdown. In 5 years, no one will pay a dime for it anymore because cloud storage backup solutions are cheaper now.
I'm currently in the IT operations / support side and I can see the writing on the wall even though I'm actually pretty good at what I do the fact is the number of jobs will go down, and even same number of people competing for fewer jobs is going to erode my wages.
Yeah we got rid of IT 2 years ago and replaced it with remote IT. They are slow, have no concept of manners or English (Eastern European) and I don't trust them with the data, but for what we pay, the return is measurable and was realized in 3 months. I have no idea what will happen to IT, though, but it's a scary future if more of the tech world moves to thin clients. Hell, I moved to a thin client for most of my operations -- Google Drive on my smartphone instead of needing a PC for Excel and Word? Done. If it breaks, I just log in to a different client. Scary for IT, though.
Finally biting the bullet and learning how to sling code, that should keep my income stream for a while and assuming my expense profile stays the same I'll make it to a livable retirement worst case.
Probably true, but I am not a code guy. I can write SQL commands mostly because I have to. Then again, spend a few minutes in Google Sheets and see how well it can auto-write code for you to do lookups and information queries. Really scary. The most recent app I use was 100% written by bots, again: SCARY. Zero of the code was written by humans and it's a fantastic app that just pulls data from a variety of sources and aggregates it into a useful number or remark. Like FICO, actually, lol.
I'd looked at building a bunch of rent capable spots, just I haven't been in the right spot credit wise to do so; I may still do that though my current place where I'm living now would've been a great opportunity for that post collapse, not so great now. Live and learn I guess heh, but transitioning to a residual income model isn't a bad idea.
I got very, very luck in finding my magic unicorn location AND transitioning to "the cloud" for tenant interaction. I have never once had a tenant end a lease EXCEPT for marriage reasons. They rent from me and they stick with me because I am an awesome landlord with a web tool for them to use for complaints or concerns -- and when there are complaints, I am on the phone (or text or chat) with them in 5 minutes, 24/7, even if I am on an island off Spain. And since they are in a market that I doubt will get robotized any time soon, I figure I should have no issue with keeping occupancy to 100%. My last tenant who ended his lease was replaced by a new tenant 30 days before he moved out -- and I had a semi bidding war for the space because of word of mouth (he told his coworkers about me). Those units don't profit much, but $400 each means less "real work" for me.
I have now driven in 8 autonomous vehicles since last summer, including a prototype for cargo. If people aren't looking for the hidden writing on THEIR walls, they're going to be shocked, stunned into silence by what may come to various markets before you would believe. 3-5 years in my outlook.
If you can pull wire, bury pipe or unclog a $2500 gold plated toilet for the 1%ers, you'll have a job forever, though.
) as a Schedule A (disability) employee; my Schedule A probationary period ends in 3 months and then I'm basically set for life, which is a good thing because I'm 53 already and too blasted old to be chasing work for eighteen months again the way I did in 2014-2015. Even if I weren't already reasonably confident of getting a full 20 years in as a civil service employee, I'm confident of it with my skill set and experience because, whereas the private sector is digitizing like mad, the government is still paper-based. I kid you not; I work in an immigration court and we're inundated with paper case files, it wasn't even until just a few years ago that we started using a barcode system to track our case files and we still use Windows 7 as the base OS on our computers even though Windows 10 has been out for over a year and a half now.
