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I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.
Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?
Given IQ differentials what could they do at these auto plants? Arent cars today way more advanced with a lot of automation already taken place?
I don't know about cars but if pharmaceuticals and medical devices (I used to work at a place in Ireland making drug eluding stents) are of similar complexity then no you don't need to have much brains to be a line worker even if the final product is complex.
You perform one or two sets of movements 800 times a day and need to remember if you saw anything strange in a batch from an hour ago. There's a hierarchy of inspectors, technicians, quality control workers and engineers who worry about the complicated stuff.
Sounds like something they automated awhile ago then (or will be automated soon)
Automation had already been going on for 30 years by the time I was working there, the workers just get moved to another part of the process where relying on fine motor skills is cheaper than designing and building a new machine. A few technician jobs are created too as they need manual maintenance multiple times per day.
This can't go on forever but it doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. Checking the local news they're still announcing new expansions and jobs (although that was before these recent tariffs).
AI might cause some disruption on the lower levels of the quality control side as a lot of that just involves looking through a microscope and identifying faults.
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I have a degree, but in History. I'm completely self-taught in IT and software dev and am currently a senior dev at a highly dysfunctional megacorp (not a FAANG type, more of an old school megacorp but I guarantee every single poster here is familiar with the company). Simply having the degree (in an irrelevant , unrelated field) helped me immensely with getting through pointless application filters early on in my career. I'm sure it still does but now my experience counts for more.
I'm just annoyed because a lot of advancement for me seems to be blocked by my not having a degree in CS or a related field, even though the incompetent Pajeets that make up 90% of my coworkers have CS degrees from India but couldn't code their way out of a paper bag. In fact the technical debt they've piled up over the last decade or so in my subdivision of the company finally came to a head last week. Performance and stability issues with our software finally pissed off enough of our large customers that all new development has been frozen and our sales teams are no longer selling our products (instead some similar software made by a separate recently-acquired-by-us company will be getting pushed by sales).
After we do some work to stabilize and improve performance is done in the next year or two I expect our products to be kept on life support with a skeleton crew for security updates etc. As a result I'm strongly considering getting my masters in CS because the job market (and all of the retarded filtering done by HR and hiring managers) makes it so much harder for someone like me without a relevant degree to even get considered.
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Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.
Honestly the entire tech hiring process is fucked and looks at the entirely wrong things. If I were doing hiring, my interview process would involve things like:
"Take a look at this (terrible) database schema. What would you change about the design and why?" If the dev knows what third normal form is and why it matters (and when it doesn't) that puts them in the top 5-10% of devs already.
"You've been assigned to build [hypothetical product]. Explain the overall design/architecture choices you would go for and why. Also explain some alternatives you might choose and why. What are some potential difficulties (both immediate and long-term) you might run into with your choices, and why you feel your choices are worth it in spite of the potential problems." Being able to actually consider pros and cons, think about the future, etc. also put a potential hire in the top 5% of devs.
Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.
I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.
I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.
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Closer to 60%.
Not so; if you actually graduate, college makes financial sense for most degrees. It is perhaps true that there is some counterfactual world where you could get all the benefit and none of the cost, but we don't live there.
There's so much visible homelessness because we no longer allow police or security guards to beat the homeless back to the margins. And because we spend so much effort trying to keep them alive.
This is less true than it once was. More true than directly before the big runup to the GFC, but note that was already well after free trade policies and even longer after the rust belt.
Does anyone know what ended up happening to the kids Peter Thiel paid off to not go to college?
They did very well. Many founders, people who work for Thiel, some VCs. But he wasn’t picking the median college student, he was picking very intelligent kids who were skipping Stanford or MIT comp sci. They would have done well regardless.
Right, but I think "they would have done well regardless" implies that whatever value lies in a degree comes from filtering, so there is something to the original claim "so off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off".
Though I suppose to get a proper answer to the question, he should have randomly denied, but kept track of, half of them.
The go-getter smooth-talking company-founder types with at least slightly better than average intelligence are always going to succeed. Sometimes they'll fail big time but unless in doing so they seriously piss off the government or organized crime or the wrong nerd they'll bounce back up. They're just a completely invalid sample because their success is overdetermined.
A more typical programmer type will, unless they start out in a massively successful startup, be handicapped throughout much of their career by the lack of a degree -- their resume won't get past mindless filters. In good times they'll be underpaid for their skill level, in bad times unemployed.
The people getting "I went to college" degrees will do even worse, either working at a much crappier category of job or being unemployed much more often.
Scientific types will of course be completely unable to get a job in their field without a degree, and probably an advanced degree; when I was in college it was said that a B.S. in chemistry qualified you to wash glassware.
I admit I don't have an RCT of any of this, however.
N=1, but it's not all that bad. I probably got stuck in some filters, but I was never unemployed, and if these "average salary stats" websites are to be trusted, I wasn't underpaid either.
Maybe, or maybe you're of above average ability and so were in fact underpaid for the value you created.
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Except of course that crime in Detroit has fallen greatly since the 70s/80s.
Violent crime from 2700/100k @peak to 2000, not a big drop compared to falling national rates.
Actual number of murders has fallen sharply of course, because the population is almost a third of what it used to be.
Looking at the metropolitan area, which has a largely unchanged population, the murder rate per 100k is down from some 13-14 to 6.6.
The metropolitan area has also been experiencing a minor renaissance, with a new and different class of people replacing the previous residents. You’d need to somehow control for gentrification to get a true sense of the stats.
Crime has been falling steadily, well before (decades) the the renaissance. If anything it bottomed out before the renaissance.
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Because easy universal loans make it ‘free’ at the point of use and decades of culture make clear that college is (and let’s face it, it often is) 4 years of zero responsibility partying for free!
Even if you had a nice entry level manufacturing job in your small town paying $65k out of high school, what sounds more fun to a 17 year old: partying and getting laid and playing sports and hanging out with the boys all day at college for 4 years, or going to work in a factory?
America is so rich we basically pay for young people to party for four years. I’m not even ideologically opposed to it, but I think it’s a mistake not to admit that this is what it is.
Indeed. It’s moreso that than ever before - college professors complain they aren’t allowed to fail students anymore, and students know this, so they don’t show up to half their classes
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