Brittany Luce

This episode of It's Been a Minute was produced by Corey Antonio Rose.

This episode was edited by Nina Potok.

Our supervising producer is Barton Girdwood.

Our VP of programming is Yolanda Sanguini.

All right.

That's all for this episode of It's Been a Minute from NPR.

I'm Brittany Luce.

Talk soon.

And that was part of what we believed culturally.

I've been laid off a few times in my life.

Once in 2013 from a motorcycle dealership that in retrospect was totally correct to let me go.

Then again, in 2020, when I was in production for a video series for a company that shuttered without telling us.

And I remember that for a long time, there was a common refrain that some people parroted to newly unemployed folks like myself as soon as they could.

Learn to code.

I heard these words all the time, like there was an idea that getting a coding job in tech was your one-way ticket out of desperation and into the good life.

And this wasn't just true for people already in the workforce.

STEM education became a priority for both K-12 and colleges.

But today, learn to code holds almost no weight.

The tech industry is hemorrhaging jobs.

According to one estimate, there have been over 700,000 tech workers laid off since 2022.