u/Hurt69420

I'm no seasoned economic analyst or economic thinker, but a lot of posts in this and related subreddits got me thinking. I see people musing over the beaten down prices of SAAS and consumer cyclicals and an implicit assumption that the divergence of these sectors and AI-related sectors will eventually lessen.

But what if it doesn't? 250 years ago, agriculture was the dominant form of wealth production and employment. It's still around, obviously, but its relative weight in global equities and as a share of the labor force is a tiny fraction of what it once was. That's not a direct corollary to what's happening with AI & automation, but it's hard to draw a direct one because this technological revolution isn't just redistributing human labor - it's potentially eliminating it as a necessary input to the productive process.

So is this what investors are potentially eyeing, over the very, very long term? I'll see the occasional recognition of this possibility with people saying "it's self-defeating because who will these companies sell to if no one is employed anymore?"

The answer, I think, is that they won't - not to you and I, at least. We'll live in a highly stratified economy dominated by B2B & B2G sales, with a handful of wealthy luxury consumers, a massive underclass subsisting on UBI, and an increasingly small middle class.

I'm not suggesting that AI is going to wipe out, say, accountants as a career field within the next 5 years, but once it does, that's it. They're gone. Who in their right mind would want to own Robert Half in that scenario? Or restauranteurs targeting the middle class?

All of this has been said a thousand time before with more eloquence, but I rarely see it connected to the stock market and the decreased size & purchasing power of the global middle class. None of this will happen overnight, but buying a lot of these beaten down names at the present strikes me as similar to investing in plow manufacturers in 1920. Who cares if current FCF looks great?

tl;dr - I may be able to get an associate counsel title or similar right out of law school. Will my lack of law firm experience seriously hurt me in future job searches?

I currently manage the contracts/potential claims/compliance matters for one of my employer's business units (~100m/yr revenue in a ~250m/yr company). My boss, the CLO, got HR to amend their tuition assistance policy so that I can go to law school half on the company's dime (GI Bill is paying for the rest). I'll start part-time in August at a local T100. My boss has stated that his end goal is for me to handle legal matters for my business unit, and my responsibilities have been growing in that direction.

I have not been able to get him to confirm that he'll give me an Associate Counsel title, but I would advocate for that or some similar title more vigorously once I've actually completed law school.

With that context, my question: If I were to leave my current employer after doing some time there with an AC title and associated responsibilities, would my lack of law firm experience hurt me when looking for future such positions? Or at a certain point do employers see "5+ years of experience as AC" and stop caring about how you got there?