OT: A Generation of Semi-Useless “Workers”

[barnacle]

Pratchett, Stewart, and Cohen, in the Science of Discworld series, discuss this at some length. They call it 'extelligence': the ability to pass on knowledge between generations.

Apprenticeships - and guild apprentices in particular - pass on knowledge but specifically to a selected trade. There's an incentive not to let anyone who is a guild member know how you do things - be it how to tan leather, how to smelt iron, or how to build cathedrals.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

In keeping with the general tone of this topic, I recently ran across this article.  The article focuses on the relatively large number of working-age men in the USA who have dropped out of the workforce, meaning not employed and not seeking employment.  Particularly of note is this statement in the article:

Quote:

[Mike] Rowe believes this problem is being made worse by a cultural overemphasis on traditional higher education, which he says steers people away from skilled trades, even as thousands of trade jobs remain unfilled.

This ties in with my earlier assertion that many college students don’t belong in college and instead should look to vocational training to secure long-term employment that is remunerative.  Not everyone has the mental capabilities that are required to survive the rigors of higher education and graduate with a degree that will open the door to a rewarding career.  I read an article not long ago in which the author, who is a professor at a major American university, posited that less than half of the students enrolled at his institution belong there, with, he claimed, many lacking the disciplined work habits needed to handle college-level material.  Many are likely to drop out.

The reality is we need a lot more skilled tradesmen/women than we have.  All the science and engineering in the world is of little value if there is no one around capable of building what the scientists and engineers have designed.

[sburrow]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

I read an article not long ago in which the author, who is a professor at a major American university, posited that less than half of the students enrolled at his institution belong there, with, he claimed, many lacking the disciplined work habits needed to handle college-level material. 

BDD, I'd like to quote everything you said But this particular sentence stuck out to me. I, being a professor at a "minor" American college, could have written that very article I am sure! Wanna hear an interesting statistic? 50% of our students who take College Algebra 101 fail the course. In particular, this College Algebra course is a STEM-major based course, so it is their first math course they will take in their STEM field. It is a pre-req for Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, you name it. And yes, 50% of those enrolled in this course will fail. Hm.

I ask folks in that College Algebra 101 course, day one, "What is your degree program?" Many say STEM related things of course, but I hear an unusually high amount say "Engineering". I ask, "What kind of engineering?", and most say, "I don't know." Hm. I used to teach Engineering 101 and the first project for the students was to find out what type of engineering fields were out there, and 'pick' one for the remainder of the course. I had to force them to do this, otherwise they wouldn't. Hm.

We have an ENORMOUS amount of "declared Engineering" students... that either: A) took College Algebra 101, failed, and then dropped out after the first semester, or B) haven't even taken a math class at all, took a history or english class instead, failed, and then dropped out after the first semester. These are "declared Engineering" students, as in they talked to the counselor and there must have been some confusion somewhere because they wrote down that that student wanted to be an Engineer. Confusing indeed. Hm.

I'm saying "Hm" a lot. It is something to ponder on at least. I could literally type about this subject for hours, but you already know everything I'd say anyways.

By the way, my wife *loves* Mike Rowe. Like Number-One-Adoring-Fan status. Yeah, I think he's good looking too of course, lol

Thanks BDD.

Chad

[BigDumbDinosaur]

sburrow wrote:

BDD, I'd like to quote everything you said

Be careful with quoting me!  ’Tis better to be thought a fool than to quote a random dinosaur on an Internet forum and remove all doubt. 

Quote:

Wanna hear an interesting statistic? 50% of our students who take College Algebra 101 fail the course.

I can’t say I’m shocked to hear that.  Algebra is very much an abstract thing and requires a certain sort of brain to be understood.  Getting competent in any mathematical field requires disciplined thinking, something that a not-insignificant segment of the population seems to lack.

Quote:

...College Algebra...is a pre-req for Calculus, Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Engineering, Computer Science, you name it. And yes, 50% of those enrolled in this course will fail. Hm.

The reality is the mathematical sciences make the world go ’round (literally if calculating Earth’s circumference ).  I’m conjecturing that not being able to understand at least high school-level algebra is not an issue with most 6502.org forum inhabitants.  Realistically, one can’t do anything with a computer beyond playing with it without some algebraic knowledge.  College-level algebra is the logical progression from what we were taught in high school.  If one wasn’t cutting it in high school algebra, they are virtually doomed to failure anywhere beyond.  I personally always found dealing with polynomials to be hard, but hardly impossible.

Quote:

I ask folks in that College Algebra 101 course, day one, "What is your degree program?"...I hear an unusually high amount say "Engineering". I ask, "What kind of engineering?", and most say, "I don't know."

If someone has “I don’t know” for an answer, they do not belong in college.  Instead, they belong in the workforce doing what they are capable of doing until such time as they figure out what they want to be when they grow up.  Some will never grow up until all their safety nets are gone and they are wondering how they are going to afford their next meal.

Quote:

...there must have been some confusion somewhere because they wrote down that that student wanted to be an Engineer.

When I was a youngster, I too wanted to be an engineer...and run a train.    Later on, I learned that “engineer” not only referred to many different occupations, the word was often used to refer to jobs in which no engineering ever occurs.  BTW, when I was a recruit in the Navy and going through boot camp, I became a highly sought-after sanitation engineer.  I always had the head in our barracks so clean and shiny, we never failed inspection. 

Quote:

I'm saying "Hm" a lot. It is something to ponder on at least. I could literally type about this subject for hours, but you already know everything I'd say anyways.

As someone on the outside looking in, I don’t know just how pervasive the “doesn’t belong in college” problem is.  What I have seen, however, with the benefit of having been in the civilian workforce since 1968, is the apparent skill level of American workers has deteriorated, both in terms of theoretical knowledge and the ability to use it, and in a practical sense, such as being able to work with one’s hands to create generally useful things.  Maybe that’s an unfair assessment—I tend to measure such things with a yardstick I acquired in an economic environment of another time.  However, despite changing technology and world politics, the nation’s fundamental needs have not changed and if anything, have gotten more complex.  If our economy and way of life are to continue, our workforce has to be able to do more than text, play video games and post nonsense on TikTok.

[sburrow]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

As someone on the outside looking in, I don’t know just how pervasive the “doesn’t belong in college” problem is.

Oh there is a problem indeed. It is true that not everyone belongs in college. I think what is going on is that most people "try" college and see if they like it or not. Big example is my brother, who was told to try community college, did terribly, and now owns his own business and makes way more money than me using a wrench in the field.

Because I teach at a community college, I suppose that many folks are just there because they really don't know what else to do. In fact, *most* of my students now-a-days are actually high school students, and many of them graduate with an associates degree alongside their high school diploma. What those high school kids go through is really tough honestly, they have twice the amount of classes than a traditional student and need to pass them all to even graduate high school. Nevertheless, a lot of them probably need to go make money right after graduating, instead of racking up a huge debt at some big-name university all to have *less* of a chance at getting a job that will most certainly pay *less* than a job they could have gotten right out of high school. What a weird situation we have here in America right now.

Thank you BDD, I value your wisdom.

Chad

[jgharston]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

The article focuses on the relatively large number of working-age men in the USA who have dropped out of the workforce, meaning not employed and not seeking employment.

Where do they get money from in order to pay to stay alive? I would *love* to not be employed or be seeking employment - I could get *so* much more work done. But, unfortunately, Being Alive Costs Money.

[jgharston]

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

The reality is we need a lot more skilled tradesmen/women than we have.

After university and working abroad doing software development, I took a break and got my Electrical Installation City & Guilds. I did some electrical work over the years, but I've had to drop it as my knees just aren't up to it any more. My latest job as been "IT Field Engineer", but is actually closer to furniture removal. It is EPOS replacement, and it has involved putting my knees and back through worse pain than anything I've ever done as an electrician. I'm actually using up my leave this week until my job terminates at the end of the month, as I just couldn't manage it any longer.

sburrow wrote:

Wanna hear an interesting statistic? 50% of our students who take College Algebra 101 fail the course. In particular, this College Algebra course is a STEM-major based course, so it is their first math course they will take in their STEM field.

Algebra? That's like.... basic maths. Pre-O-level stuff. First two years of secondary school, before you've chosen your course options, age 11 to 13. How on earth do they even qualify to *ENTER* college courses?

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

As someone on the outside looking in, I don’t know just how pervasive the “doesn’t belong in college” problem is. What I have seen, however, with the benefit of having been in the civilian workforce since 1968, is the apparent skill level of American workers has deteriorated ...
... If our economy and way of life are to continue, our workforce has to be able to do more than text, play video games and post nonsense on TikTok.

Before she retired ten years or so ago, my neighbour was an Art teacher in the local collage. She was getting students she described as too thick to do her course. They thought it was something they could coast through, and were upset - more than that, indignant - that the course involved actual work, researching art styles, attempting to reproduce them and explain why they were or were not suitable for certain results, etc.

There were also students who would turn up, demand she sign their register and leave. She flunked them - but was over-ruled by the administrators insisting that she was not allowed to throw anybody off any courses - even if they never turned up!

[BigDumbDinosaur]

jgharston wrote:

BigDumbDinosaur wrote:

The article focuses on the relatively large number of working-age men in the USA who have dropped out of the workforce, meaning not employed and not seeking employment.

Where do they get money from in order to pay to stay alive?

That, my friend, is a question that I and many others have posed.  None of the so-called social safety nets we have in the USA are intended to support able-bodied, working-age people who simply don’t want to work.  There is, however, an “underground” cash-gig economy, but from what I know about it, one has to have job skills in order to participate in it.  Someone who recently graduated with a BA in Etruscan Cave Painting probably wouldn’t fit that category.

A possibility is some are subsisting on Social Security disability benefits obtained by some sort of fraud.  For a while, there were law firms running adverts on both radio and TV in which they were offering help in getting someone declared disabled so as to get government benefits.  That advertising seems to have subsided quite a bit, probably because recent government policies have resulted in deeper digging on disabled claims, and fewer of them are being accepted.  Also, there was a high-profile case in which the CEO of one of those firms was prosecuted for defrauding the government and was sent to prison.

Something that may be skewing the intentionally-unemployed numbers is the presence of many illegal aliens in the cash-gig sector.  I see them hanging out at “big box” home-improvement stores, trying to get hired for the day by contractors who are picking up supplies.  However, with the recent crackdown on illegal immigration and ramped-up enforcement, that too is starting to taper off.  A lot of the illegals are fearful now of being in public and getting arrested.  Also, a contractor with an otherwise-legitimate business who is caught hiring illegals can himself wind up in jail and have his business’ assets seized on the order of a judge.

Quote:

Algebra? That's like.... basic maths.

Pretty much, from my perspective.  I was learning algebra in seventh grade when I was 12 years old.  It really didn’t seem to be all that difficult.  For some reason, however, I and polynomials had a hard time getting along. 

[BigEd]

I hate this thread. It's just a place to be grumpy, right? Share the dissatisfaction, share the negativity.

Just sharing my thoughts. I know it won't improve anything - just as this whole thread will improve nothing.

[Dr Jefyll]

Hmm. Under normal circumstances, anyone who doesn't like a thread is invited to simply not participate -- and appropriately so, IMO. If a thread puts you off, just don't read it... or at least move on and don't engage.

The same would apply here if the thread were 65xx-related, but it's not. I think this situation raises questions about the forum's mandate in general. Yes we have some tolerance for OT content, but within certain (somewhat fuzzy) limits. I believe it would be shallow to treat this as being simply about the uncomfortable reaction of one individual. There's more to discuss than that.

Speaking for myself, I'm interested to hear the insights about education. I'm also glad to gain some casual familiarity with the views and experiences of other members of this community. In other words, ... so far, so good. I've just given my take in favour of being tolerant of the OT thread! But I do get uncomfortable when the remarks venture into the realms of illegal aliens and Social Security fraud, for example -- for me, that's simply too pointed and too political. (Education is political, too, but IMO is less overtly inflammatory.)

Not sure what the answer is, or where to draw the line. I do hope to gain some casual familiarity with the views and experiences of the members of this community. But the key word is casual.

-- Jeff

[BigDumbDinosaur]

Dr Jefyll wrote:

But I do get uncomfortable when the remarks venture into the realms of illegal aliens and Social Security fraud, for example -- for me, that's simply too pointed and too political. (Education is political, too, but IMO is less overtly inflammatory.)

I didn’t intend for my comment to be taken as political.  It was a response to the earlier question of how an able-bodied individual might manage sans employment.

[teamtempest]

Quote:

In keeping with the general tone of this topic, I recently ran across this article.

Perhaps young men are discouraged from work by asking themselves if they can get what they want in life by participating. There are (presumably biased) videos on YouTube of young women describing their impossible standards men would have to meet to be able to have them for a mate. If that's a game men can't win, why would they play?

Maybe it's possible to make money by pursuing a trade career. If that's still not enough to even get you a date, let alone a life, so what?

[commodorejohn]

The amount of armchair quarterbacking here from people who are either long retired or in the end stages of a long and established career is honestly a little maddening. I don't mean that as a diss against the older members here, but if you haven't actually been looking for work in the last fifteen years you do not understand just how hard it actually is to get work in the 21st century, at least in the US - let alone achieve broader financial stability.

I spent the vast majority of 2018 unemployed, nearly ran out of money, and would've been on the skids and having to impose on relatives if I hadn't finally landed a job at damn near the last possible minute; even then, things were shaky for the whole of Q1 2019 while I was getting back on my feet. This was despite the fact that I was actively and consistently applying for the entire year and had ample job experience and demonstrable work history.

I had a brief stint at one job, where the whole company was in total disarray and management elected not to keep me on for "vibes" reasons, despite my showing up consistently and doing whatever fool thing they asked without complaint. I had interviews where dickweed MBAs called me "green" to my face (I'd been working in IT for almost 20 years) and made it overtly clear that I could expect the first 90 days to be a hellish cram-school for the privilege of keeping the job. I had absolutely no end of applications fired off into the void that received no response whatsoever, and constantly had to call HR directly to confirm that they'd even received them.

And to top it all off, when I finally did land something, in the last fortnight of the year? I had to leave that job a year later, because it was run by another lunkheaded MBA who didn't know anything about the line of business but was religiously devoted to bullshit "metrics" that indicated nothing meaningful about anyone's performance, but that I was too honest to game the way some of my coworkers did. Thankfully I ended up in a better place - by sheer providence, because I happened to run across the owner/president of a local business in an auto-repair shop one day and he happened to be talking business with someone where I could overhear it.

That is what it's like being in the job market in this Year of Our Lord 202X (and this was before the pandemic threw another half-dozen monkey-wrenches into the works, let alone the recent flood of LLM nonsense making it even more difficult to stand out from the sea of spam) - competing against a legion of other applicants for the attention of HR departments who can't be bothered, for postings that invariably demand at least a four-year degree and 3N years' experience in an N-year field several times over, to work for wages that don't go nearly as far as they used to at the pleasure of know-nothing suits whose only involvement with the day-to-day is to arbitrarily "manage" by sticking their fingers into what they don't understand, in hopes of maybe paying off obscene student loans at some point before you're old enough to collect on Social Security that might not even be there by then.

Even with the advantages of experience and work history, it's gorram exhausting and soul-crushing, and while I'm not going to offer a full-throated defense of people who just stop even bothering to try, I can't say I don't have at least a little empathy.

[sark02]

Some random thoughts from what I've seen in the Bay Area:

Some job postings with strangely specific requirements are often tailored to apply strongly to the H1-B renewal, transfer, or Green Card application of the candidate that's already in, or has been chosen for, the job. The law says these visas are for times when US engineers are unavailable, and there must be a documented attempt to fill the position locally.

A STEM degree is as much a demonstration of character as it is a technical yardstick. Successfully graduating means studying and passing in subjects that you don't like, as well as subjects you do. It demonstrates that you're likely to be able to push through and do work that the company needs, even when it's not enjoyable, or a grind, or paperwork, or meetings. Non-graduates can of course be excellent engineers, but when you have 50, 100, or more candidates for a single position, you can't interview them all and you have to start filtering. Non-graduates suffer this stigma throughout their whole careers, and it's very unfortunate... Especially as earning a degree can be a financial burden that many can't even take on, no matter how gifted they are in the field. Still, that said, the harsh reality is that nobody owes you a job, and so in a field where there's a bar, you have to do what you need to do meet and exceed that bar. If you don't, then there are a pile of other candidates who do.

I've been truly humbled by how smart young engineers can be. There might be wisdom and experience with age, but young people were never burdened with dial-up Internet, floppy disks, and 8-bit computers. Their 'floor' of what computers can do is so much higher than mine. So much so that how they think about computers and the Internet can be stunningly different. It's also possible to have a very successful software engineering career without any practical knowledge of what a bus is, or an address, or a register... And that fact that that's ok is not a bug, it's a feature of how broad the field is and how far we've come.

Layoffs can be terribly unfair. My last Fortune 500 had a company-wide layoff that hit every business unit and every group. Every manager had to cut X% $$, regardless of how much capacity they had. Managers with tight teams and no fat still had to choose people to let go, and the criteria would most often be criticality rather than specific performance or salaries. Absurdly, the company still had open positions throughout the company, and cut employees had a month to secure another position inside the company, if they wanted to exercise that option.

AI is all anyone is talking about. All BUs and teams, no matter what product they were working on, or whether or not you thought it was relevant to your product domain, were directed to learn about AI. Like a gold rush they're terrified to miss out on. At the same time, there's so much talk about LLMs taking over this or taking over that. Coding using LLMs is supposed to make us all X% more efficient and therefore require X% fewer engineers. It's simultaneously thrilling and demotivating. Vibe coding, anyone?

Everyone lies on their resume. Well, maybe not everyone. Maybe not you, but certainly everyone else. It's incredibly difficult to find good (not top-tier... just good) engineers in the floating sea of garbage that is silicon valley. Now with LLMs the lies are getting harder to spot, and more crap candidates are making it through the recruiters to the hiring team's phone screen... and (again with LLMs) more of those are getting through to in-person interviews, where the truth is revealed and everyone's time is wasted. The really bad news is that sometimes they make it through that, too. Sometimes directly, and sometimes through another team who try to "gift" bad employeers to another group. Different companies have different approaches to tackle this, such as hackerrank and such, but from the outside it must be incredibly frustrating.

The best way to get a job, at least I've found, is to be someone who people want to work with, and who people will want to recommend to the hiring manager should your paths cross in the future. In interview panels I've been on, personal recommendations outweigh a bad interview performance, and it takes a very strong "NO" to reverse that. The other side of that is maintaining your personal credibility: Don't recommend someone who can't get along with people or can't do the job, just because their your friend. You may get them hired, but your input will never be solicited again. The old saying, "A people hire A people. B people hire C people" applies.

Just want to finish here by saying Star Wars: Andor is a great TV show, and will make Star Wars: Rogue One feel like a new movie. Take a look if Star Wars is your thing.

[barrym95838]

It took me 17 interviews spread across nine years, but I finally got selected for a state job with better pay and actual benefits. The longer commute is going to be the only obvious downside, and I'm going to miss my current boss of 23 years (at least a little). I have been working for small businesses of five employees or fewer for the last 41 years, so I hope I will be able to fit in ... and I think I'm going to switch cars from my 1989 MR2 back to my much safer 2000 Solara for the cross-town traffic ... my son is a grown man, but I don't want him to be an "orphan" yet, and I still have some 65xx code to write in my spare time before I croak!