OT: A Generation of Semi-Useless “Workers”

[barnacle]

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Good management is a special skill, which is probably lacking in most managers.

Not helped by the habit of promoting good engineers _who just want to keep engineering_ into management positions for which they have neither the talent or the interest. Brookes pointed out forty years ago that this was a bad idea.

Neil

[jgharston]

barnacle wrote:

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Good management is a special skill, which is probably lacking in most managers.

Not helped by the habit of promoting good engineers _who just want to keep engineering_ into management positions for which they have neither the talent or the interest. Brookes pointed out forty years ago that this was a bad idea.
Neil

When I get tempted to answer questions on Quora from people who ask "how do I get promoted from engineering into management?", my stock answer is "WTF did you go into engineering, if you wanted to do management, you should have gone into management in the first place." It's not as though engineering is the "deliver phone books to pay the bills" job that you scrape along in until your vocation job comes along.

Another of my friends who is a skilled programmer hasn't done any programming for about 15 years, as his company near enough threatened to fire him if he didn't allow himself to be "promoted" into management. Something he didn't want to do, had no skill or aptitude in doing, saw as a punishment, and reduced the productivity of the company by "banning" one of its most productive producers from producing.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

barnacle wrote:

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Good management is a special skill, which is probably lacking in most managers.

Not helped by the habit of promoting good engineers _who just want to keep engineering_ into management positions for which they have neither the talent or the interest. Brookes pointed out forty years ago that this was a bad idea.

I left my railroading career because the company I had worked for for many years wanted to “promote” me to be their New York City service manager.  The problem for me was two-fold: 1) I liked my technical work and wasn’t at all interested in becoming a glorified babysitter; 2) No way I was going to live in that toilet of a city.

When it was presented to me as “you will do this,” I told the CEO there wasn’t enough money in the company treasury to convince me to take the “promotion” and handed him my resignation.

That was over 35 years ago and I haven’t been anyone’s employee since.

[commodorejohn]

barnacle wrote:

GARTHWILSON wrote:

Good management is a special skill, which is probably lacking in most managers.

Not helped by the habit of promoting good engineers _who just want to keep engineering_ into management positions for which they have neither the talent or the interest. Brookes pointed out forty years ago that this was a bad idea.

It's a twofold problem, I think. The best managers (IMHO) have both management ability (which is indeed a completely separate skillset) and at least a working knowledge of the problem domain, plus a temperament that does not lend itself to vainglory or pique. These people are vanishingly rare, but they do exist; I've worked for a couple.

But between the rareness of triple-play candidates like that and the well-documented tendency of management hiring practices to select for incompetence (since competent managers may hire/promote incompetent managers by mistake, but incompetent managers will always hire/promote incompetent managers, and everything in modern management culture is designed to insulate managers from the consequences of their actions, so they never get fired,) the usual course of events is either that A. managers will be hired who may have management ability, but have no knowledge of the problem domain, or B. engineers will be dragooned into management despite not having management ability - and in either case, it's a crapshoot whether they'll have a suitable temperament (spoiler: the answer is usually "no.")

[plasmo]

I was lucky to work for an engineering company for 35 years that has two promotion tracks. One is the engineer into project leader into 1st level management and on up management chain; the second is engineer into senior engineer into distinguished engineer. If you want to pursue management track, you'll need to move around the company a lot, but if you want to stay in the engineering track, you can stay in the same job doing same thing for decades. I picked the engineering track. The entire company management except few vice presidents and the president were promoted from within and all started off as engineers. The company is full of people recruited fresh out of colleges and worked for 40 years then retired. Management have actually complained that the employee attrition rate is too low, that fresh new blood is needed more often than 4% yearly turnover.

[GARTHWILSON]

plasmo wrote:

Management have actually complained that the employee attrition rate is too low, that fresh new blood is needed more often than 4% yearly turnover.

The solution might be to regularly send employees to seminars and conferences, to collect new methods, new technologies, new ideas, etc..  It should still be kept in mind however that not everything new is an improvement; but even then, the awareness can help solve problems.  Much of my work is with aircraft communications, and there are a few companies whose "new blood" has not been aware of well entrenched interface standards, and they just can't wait to design some new IC or other technology into their radios or intercoms or audio panels, and cause trouble when used with equipment made by other manufacturers.  I'm dealing with such a situation right now.  We've never had any trouble with Bendix/King which has been ultra stable, but we, and other manufacturers are trying to figure out what the problem is with Garmin, and one of our distributors who's always dealing with customers says when there's a problem, Garmin is almost always part of it.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

barnacle wrote:

We might consider the rather strange concept of industries that want to hire skilled workers but which aren't ready to train them...

There are exceptions...

Just got finished reading an obscure news article about a semiconductor fab being built in Phoenix, Arizona (US) by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation, aka TSMC (yes, that TSMC).  In the article, it is said a principal problem TSMC has encountered is finding qualified people to build the facility and staff it.  Apparently, they resorted to sending would-be American employees to Taiwan for training on how to properly construct a fab plant—it’s not quite like building a run-of-the-mill factory.

This particular bit of information in the article caught my eye:

• Quote:

  When Nancy Pelosi [Ed: former US speaker of the House] visited Taiwan in 2022, Chang [Ed: Morris Chang, founder of TSMC, who was US-educated] lectured the House speaker on the challenges the U.S. would face in mastering the microscopic precision required in chip production.  Chang has since also warned against the lack of manufacturing talent in the U.S., and how hard it would be for Taiwanese managers to supervise Americans.  Speaking to the Vying for Talent podcast in April 2022, Chang concluded that the U.S.’ attempt to onshore semiconductor manufacturing would be “a very expensive exercise in futility.”

(Emphasis added.)

That is a dismaying thing to read, especially since it was in the USA that semiconductor manufacturing first developed.  The reasons for the loss of the talent mentioned by Mr. Chang are many, but a big part of it can be blamed on politics, especially in the realm of education.  Environmental zealotry is also a factor, which had a part in decimating what was once American industrial might.  And, then there are the labor unions... 

Education policy in the USA is dismal, at best, and seemingly encourages mediocrity.  In particular, we’ve managed to produce a generation of college graduates with useless degrees, little motivation to get their hands dirty (both metaphorically and literally) and whose main talents seem to be endlessly complaining about student loan debt (which they voluntarily incurred in order to matriculate with a useless degree).  People like that aren’t going to be of much value when it comes to designing and producing semiconductors. 

[jgharston]

commodorejohn wrote:

It's a twofold problem, I think. The best managers (IMHO) have both management ability (which is indeed a completely separate skillset) and at least a working knowledge of the problem domain, plus a temperament that does not lend itself to vainglory or pique. These people are vanishingly rare, but they do exist; I've worked for a couple.

It always amuses me when I read a news report, eg: "Train drivers on strike, services kept running by managers". Why don't they just fire all the truculent train drivers, and get the managers to drive the trains, they clearly demonstrated they were capable of doing it in the strike, and the fact they weren't doing their actual management job clearly didn't have any impact.

A bit similar to the Covid lockdowns. Great swathes of public sector paper pushers were paid to barricade themselves at home and do nothing.... yet the organisations still managed to keep going. The very definition of redundancy.

[barnacle]

I suspect that in many cases, 'environmental concerns' equate to 'not in my back yard'. There are valid concerns, but there are too many people who seem to be 'whatever it is I'm agin it'.

A common complaint in the UK over the last forty years has been 'we're not educating enough scientists/engineers/technologists'. This in a country that started the industrial revolution... it always struck me that the complaints give the government the perfect opportunity to sponsor people to take degrees in, say, engineering, teaching, medicine (whatever they expect to be short of) rather than expecting people to be seriously in debt when they get their degree. A mechanism to require said graduates to remain in the field for enough years to pay back their training costs - no actual payment unless you leave that field of employment, and pro-rata if you leave the field before your time is up.

It's not unreasonable to _enable_ anyone who is capable to get to university; it is unreasonable to get them their to get degrees in comparative basket weaving (thanks, RAH, for the quote). (I saw a meme recently that pointed out that you can get a degree in pyramid archeology. There are however almost no jobs in that field, so your only option is teaching pyramid archeology... it's literally a pyramid scheme )

jgh: managers driving trains is not perhaps a good example: most of the managers are perhaps ex-drivers, and there are a _lot_ fewer of them than actual drivers. Certainly the service is not up to the usual shambles of British Rail (or indeed Deutsche Bahn as we have to suffer over here).

But again, regarding high-tech jobs and skills: what do you expect when your MBAs kept exporting your production to somewhere _that was cheaper this year_; when companies like HP and IBM deliberately sack, er, I mean of course, encourage to leave, their older workers - the ones who developed the processes and systems and know how they work.

IBM in particular wants to replace its workers with AI - and the AI simply doesn't work: https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/24/ ... ai_talent/ - Is there any reason why anyone wants what might be laughingly called a career in such a place?

Neil

p.s. small world department: my parents were friends with a chap who was the head of a UK university electronics department. Nearly forty years after I last saw him, I discovered he had educated my at-the-time boss.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

jgharston wrote:

Why don't they just fire all the truculent train drivers...

Nice bit of alliteration there!    Here in the USA, an equivalent alliterative expression might be exasperating engineers.  Unfortunately, there seems to be no synonym for truculent that begins with the letter ‘E’. 

[BigDumbDinosaur]

barnacle wrote:

A common complaint in the UK over the last forty years has been 'we're not educating enough scientists/engineers/technologists'. This in a country that started the industrial revolution... it always struck me that the complaints give the government the perfect opportunity to sponsor people to take degrees in, say, engineering, teaching, medicine (whatever they expect to be short of) rather than expecting people to be seriously in debt when they get their degree.

In the USA, public funding of education theoretically ceases beyond high school (grade 12—I’m not sure what the equivalent is in the UK).  I say “theoretically” because each state has a public university system that receives some tax dollars (a lot of tax dollars, in some cases).  That funding doesn’t, however, extend to subsidizing individual students’ tuition.

If one wishes to attend a state university, one had better find a source of funds to cover tuition, room-and-board, books, lab fees, etc..  If one is smart enough and had top grades in high school...or is athletically talented, one might snare a full-ride scholarship.  For most, the usual route, if not already well-to-do, is to take out a student loan.  Since a student loan is effectively an unsecured line of credit, the interest tends to be high and of course, compounds until the loan has been repaid.

There are exceptions to this pattern.  My wife’s oldest grandson (Mike, of a prior marriage) had saved some money from working while in high school and that, plus a part-time job he held while in college, covered a lot of his tuition and expenses.  During the summer break, he interned with a company that designs industrial control panels, so he was getting a paycheck and some very valuable real-world experience.  A small loan handled the rest and since he got an in-demand degree (electrical engineering) and had a better-than-average grade-point average, he immediately landed a position in the nuclear power-generating field.  Using good financial common sense, he retired the remaining college debt in about three years.

Speaking of working in nuclear power, we like to joke that when his boss conducts a review of his work, Mike always gets a glowing report.

The “I got my degree but now I’m seriously in debt.” angle is partly because too many college students don’t belong there, major in useless or semi-useless fields while there, and upon graduation (assuming they do graduate), encounter heavy competition for the jobs that are available to those who have gotten the same or similar ill-advised education and degree.  Heavy competition drives down starting salaries, and with the debt of four years of college looming, the highly-educated job-seeker is suddenly confronted with the reality that possession of a degree is not a guarantee of remunerative employment.

As for why college students are there when they shouldn’t be, American society has strongly pushed the notion that one will be a third-class citizen without a degree and will be doomed to a subsistence existence until the Grim Reaper shows up.  In response to that sort of thinking, the following should make sense. 

College isn’t for everyone, but you won’t be able to convince the people who run colleges and universities of that.  The way I see it, too many kids are being indoctrinated with the faulty philosophy that higher education is absolutely de rigueur if one is to succeed in life.  The result is, at least in the USA, we have a plethora of college-educated people who can’t do anything useful, and a dearth of college-educated people who can do something useful.  The latter mostly go on to successful careers in science, engineering, medicine, etc., and the former go on to successful careers in schlepping cartons in an Amazon warehouse or flipping hamburgers at the local fast-food joint.

Colleges and universities need to be more selective about who is being admitted, and need to get rid of worthless degrees, such as African Women’s Studies (a real degree offered at a Chicago-area public university) or Etruscan Cave Painting (I made up that one, but it may well exist somewhere).  A liberal arts education is fine...if you can find a job.  Otherwise, you may end up being an over-educated burger-flipper.  I know one such person, who is the grandson of a friend—no idea how much debt he has.

——————————
Edit: fixed a typo.

[barnacle]

No problem at all with useless degrees: I'm all for being educated in interesting subjects, irrespective of the subject. One reason I took a degree at the Open University was because (iirc) six credits gave you a bachelor's, and credits were cheap enough - a couple of hundred quid - that one could do anything that looked interesting. When the UK took their funding largely away some years ago and allowed universities to charge nine grand a year, of course every university _did_ charge that, including them. So credits immediately rose to several thousand quid, and the whole concept of educate for your interest went away... a genius move.

The problem with useless degrees is that there is no concept of them being useless. The joke used to be: the first professional words of a Social Science graduate? Would you like fries with that?

A state should encourage education but not for those for whom it will serve no function. But since schools went from 'are they learning?' to 'anything to keep the little darlings happy'...

Neil

p.s. it strikes me that for the majority of my career, I have rarely had to use maths more complex than V=IR (and its inverses); P=IV; and Xc=1/JwC... but the fact that even after sixty years I can still calculate areas and volumes and handle probabilities and compound interest and basic calculus and trigonometry and simultaneous equations (and...) is very handy in my day-to-day life.

[teamtempest]

I wouldn't call knowing something of philosophy useless at all. I get quite a kick out of Plato and Hume (among others), but it's also true I read them for myself long after college. And I don't know if it's true today, but when I was there, students were not allowed to major in philosophy unless they also majored in something else. They were required to be double majors, because of the poor job prospects of having only a philosophy degree.

[jgharston]

barnacle wrote:

A state should encourage education but not for those for whom it will serve no function. But since schools went from 'are they learning?' to 'anything to keep the little darlings happy'...

Employers used to train people, and to save costs and duplication they pooled together to form trade schools. And they became institutes and polytechnics, run by and specialising in what the local businesses specialised in. Metallurgy and medicine in Sheffield, vetn'ry in Edinburgh, brewing in Burton. Then the polytechnics became part of local government, and concentrated on what politicians wanted instead of the local employers, and then they became Universities and now concentrate on having Chancellors and fancy hats.

No, the state shouldn't be encouraging *anything*, the state should be keeping its damn oar out.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

jgharston wrote:

No, the state shouldn't be encouraging *anything*, the state should be keeping its damn oar out.

My...er...philosophy as well.  Politics and state meddling has probably done more to mess up education than anything else.  It’s why I refer to public schools as indoctrination centers.

As for getting a “useless” degree, I define such a thing in terms of economic viability, not intellectual value.  Being conversant with the works of Plato, Socrates and others of the antiquities is all well and good, and is a sign of an educated man or woman.  However, will such knowledge result in gainful employment?  In terms of producing positive cash flow, knowing how to design or repair a machine or an electronic circuit will likely do a lot more for you than being able to bloviate about the events leading up to Julius Caesar’s demise.