My father in law was a draftsman. Lost his job when the defense industry contracted in the '90s. When he was looking for a new job everything required CAD which he had no experience in (he also had a learning disability, it made learning CAD hard).
He couldn't land a job that paid more than minimum wage after that.
Wow, that's a sad story. It really sucks to spend your life mastering a craft and suddenly find it obsolete and your best years behind you. My heart goes out to your father.
This is a phenomenon that seems to be experienced more and more frequently as the industrial revolution continues... The craft of drafting goes back to 2000 B.C.[0] and while techniques and requirements gradually changed over thousands of years, the digital revolution suddenly changed a ton of things all at once in drafting and many other crafts. This created a literacy gap many never recovered from.
I wonder if we'll see a similar split here with engineers and developers regarding agentic and LLM literacy.
He couldn't land a job that paid more than minimum wage after that.