Imagine if you as a programmer suddenly woke up at age 30 to find programming as a career was dead due to AI. The government is willing to invest time and money...into you retraining as a professional juggler, in the hope you would start your own street performing job, because the wave of the future is tourist performances.
Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws.
This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.
> STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free.
No, that's not true of STEM in general, and actually AFAICT not particularly true of programming outside of the startup scene and top tech firms; the spare-time programmer is much less common, AFAICT, in the legions of programmer outside of those places, and the parallel phenomenon is no more common in non-programming STEM fields than in non-STEM fields.
Juggling was the farthest thing from your mind growing up, and you aren't particularly talented or skilled in manual dexterity. So for you to try to be one, you need to put in a LOT of effort, and it may be for something that you aren't good at, and will lose the few permanent positions as a employed juggler to some kid at age 20 who has made juggling his whole life and has the talent for it. You might also need to accept that you might be a contract juggler even if you do manage to retrain, and that it might all be wasted because you might be too old to be hired, or that they taught you to juggle pins when you needed to constantly update your repertoire and juggle chainsaws.
This is what retraining for STEM looks like for someone who has never considered it. Most programmers never really get that they in essence like juggling, and that's what enabled them to do their career...there is so much winnowing out even at the college level that STEM has selected for people who not only like STEM and have a lot of talent for it, they willing spend their off time working on STEM related stuff, often for free. If you don't have that powerful motivation from a young age, and need to learn or retrain for it, it's a lot grimmer, even if you are intelligent or successful in other areas. I use juggling because for most people, it's probably about as hard to be a professional at as computing is for non-STEM inclined.