I joined VFX at the start of the 2000s, I rode the evolution of VFX from special effects, to fully digital, and back again (well not quite, "practical" effects are rarely practical, just really good VFX.)

I left in the late 2010s, Lots of competition meant that wages were kept down, and hours fucking long. It was fun, I loved being at the intersection of Art, infrastructure and programming.

I fear for the future.

I hope that I am ok, because I have experience of high scale that is not really in the training corpus. I've also been in ML for a reasonably long time, so have more experience of getting the dipshit machine to do useful things.

But thats pretty thin gruel.

I am rapidly approaching middle age, which means that no fucker is going to employ me as an apprentice if I want to re-train. My techincal and artistic skills are basically replaced. They are the equivalent of Linotype expert. Technically impressive but utterly fucking pointless for a world where newspapers are dead and so is analog printing. In 40 years I could possibly make a thin living as an artisan. But I plan on being dead by then.