In poor countries like mine (and looks like GP's too), IT positions are very limited indeed. Nevertheless, it has been one of the very few sectors open to nobodies, helping us to pull ourselves out of poverty, open to those who weren't born to the right family with the right connections, or to a sugar daddy who can cover the first 25 years of our lives to go get a good education in Europe or the US.

Looks like it's being slowly taken away from us to make a few billionaires into proper trillionaires. Can't see this ending well for humanity.

And the common advice you hear on this site ("just migrate to country X") doesn't really apply to most of us. Even if you can name many examples of people doing just that, you're seeing a very narrow slice of the population; I can find many more counterexamples for each one of them.

Your weak passport won't impress anybody, almost all of the world is closed to you, you can't travel anywhere (forget migrate) without going through a lengthy and expensive process where you're treated with suspicion, and can be denied with no compensation, on every step of the way. I'm still talking about traveling here; finding work is much more difficult.

So it's really hard to move anywhere decent if you're not at the top of your profession, which in large part depends on your innate abilities, not just how many hours you put in.

I've become jaded and extremely cynical; if worst comes to worst, there's always one universal way out, which is what keeps me going for now.

Thank you for your encouragement, and I know it's sincere. In a purely technical sense, if you have the resources, AI is an good tutor I'm constantly astonished by it myself.

However, the difficult part about what you said is this before AI, even relatively simple tasks carried a certain cost. But with the introduction of AI, that cost has actually gone up. And honestly, what shocked me when I first encountered AI was that the code it introduced was several orders of magnitude more impressive than anything I had access to in my environment.

Of course, I'm not saying I was diligently studying open source code before that. The environments where I primarily studied were centered around old books like Effective C++ or EIP. My skills themselves were outdated, and the code I was commissioned to work on in Korea and Japan was also built on very lagcy technology. The kind where everything is crammed into a single PHP view, or where a WinForm application controls everything through one global singleton—essentially procedural programming and heavyweight coding.

But with the introduction of AI, surviving on these so-called legacy technologies suddenly became drastically more difficult. The problem was, most of the documentation I could access was this outdated. It's not that I delayed my studies, either. For instance, I knew Redis was released in 2009, but the first time I actually used it was in 2020. The gap between America and the non-American world is that vast.

So, learning modern coding techniques actually took quite a long time. Patterns like the event bus pattern, which I'm familiar with now, and other specific patterns. So I'm not denying your goodwill—as you said, I am taking on my own challenges.

It's just that AI has been a field of shock, making me realize just how narrow my world was and how terribly inadequate my coding skills are. And to close that skill gap, I'm reading HN.