Those jobs are gone forever | Hacker News Reader

Those jobs are gone forever

medium.freecodecamp.com

26 pointsquincyla21 comments

Manufacturing -> programming (particularly superficial web programming as taught at a bootcamp) seems like an awfully impractical leap for those people currently affected by this labour transition.

Manufacturing -> augmented materials handling, robot/machine maintenance, manufacturing configuration & system setup, fulfillment & distribution, etc. all make great use of existing skillsets & environmental familiarity in new and growing areas.

If freecodecamp/general assembly/app academy/flatiron school/... were serious about serving the market of aging factory jobs, they'd diversify their training options into those areas (a category overweight in opportunistic "private education" which _sorely_ needs disruption.) There's even a massive amount of government grants available to fund this training ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance ) and unions are eager to include it of companies as a requirement for major RIFFs (which lets companies write it off for departing workers).

Total strawman argument. Nobody is suggesting bringing back turn-of-the-century industries. When people talk of keeping jobs, they are talking about high tech manufacturing jobs.

When a company is deciding where to build it's next manufacturing factory, something many companies are doing, why not have policies in place that incent the company to build it domestically? This type of policy is prevalent in virtually every country across the globe (especially in China).

The argument that "some jobs are being automated, therefore we should make no effort to keep the jobs that are not being automated" is a ridiculous and nonsensical argument.

Furthermore, every manufacturing job (whether high tech or low skilled) adds all kinds of downstream benefits to the economy that add up to much more than just one job.

And finally, the author demonstrates a complete ignorance of the criticisms of the H1B program and cherry picks the highest salaried H1B workers in order to hold them up as some kind of example as to why there should be no reform, I guess?

Sure, we should be better training people to match the realities of the modern labor market, but that's the only point that makes sense - and it's an obvious one.

Oh, and by the way, those Apple profits? None of them actually go back to the U.S., they sit in foreign, tax exempt, bank accounts.

> for every dollar you spend on an iPhone, about two pennies go to the factories in China that assembled it. The vast majority of that revenue comes right back to the United States

If you're in the US and you buy an iPhone, the money does not sit in a foreign "tax-exempt" bank account.

> Nobody is suggesting bringing back turn-of-the-century industries.

Am I misinformed or was this the major talking point for Trump in several states?

its a mix of both, although he has never said "turn-of-the-century industries" and that looks to be a bit of bias on OP's part.

here is his speech specifically about jobs from his campaign [1]. long story short, he wants to focus on reducing taxes, reducing regulations, energy reform, and renegotiating trade deals. So its a bit more nuanced than what you probably think his positions are.

[1] https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/trump-delivers-s...

> We’re going to put our great miners and steel workers back to work.

> Oh, and by the way, those Apple profits? None of them actually go back to the U.S., they sit in foreign, tax exempt, bank accounts.

Those profits will come back during the next tax holiday.

In the mean time Apple is borrowing and distributing to shareholders an amount that partly offsets those profits.

Articles like these really ignore the true problem with jobs and technical fields. Most individuals who have to have factory worker jobs are not the same individuals who can spend years learning a highly technical and competative proffession. Programming is not something you just 'go to school' for, and even if it was, college is very difficult by itself for many, especially if you have kids. The mindset you have to have to partake in something like engineering, in any form, is years upon years of effort. For younger individuals, this can still be possible, but our education system is far too broken for that to work out for the individuals it should.

I don't think "everybody should program" is a realistic goal. Companies are not willing to invest in individuals to 'learn', because they don't have to. There's so many already that they can pick and choose individuals who already know how to solve the problem they have, even if sometimes that person lies and then somehow turns out a decent output. The time when places like Google or Microsoft hire people to 'figure out' how to do something is when they require extremely advanced skills, skills that by their nature maybe only a few hundred, or dozen, in the world have.

Oh stop it, we love to think of ourselves as special. Programming is simple, so simple factory workers can do it. With the right training, it's not complicated, I'm talking about the type of programming that happens in most places too, it's nothing more but digital factories, CRUD, gluing together framework, libraries, the DB, a queue, email, config files, very few original code. Very few people implement amazing novel algorithms & data structures in new projects.

>Programming is simple, so simple factory workers can do it.

Its simple when another programmer creates pre-packaged tools that are meant for pre-designed purposes. Even with that, its rarely done right. Its not ourselves that are special, but software is very, very complicated. All attempts to make it not complicated are designed for particular purposes that gradient to more specificity the easier they get. Creating software for others with a particular purpose without introducing the theory behind it all is expensive and difficult, and in many cases does not work.

Thats all assuming you need that many programmers (we don't). Programming is completely trended towards automation, much more so than robots. That automation requires a significantly high level of knowledge, and when known can create many more systems than any beginner can. Websites are only a very small part of software, and even that is trended heavily towards automated sites like Wix or SquareSpace.

While I think we're very far from "special", we are special in that we're good at programming.

Being (humbly speaking of course) very good at math, and a math tutor and TA, it took a while before I realized that lots of people just don't "get it". With effort and time they can manage, but math will just never be comfortable or intuitive for them.

Some people get music and rhythm and melody. I just don't. I can tell you a lot about music theory, but I can't string notes in a good sounding way to save my life.

They will come back in the long tail of manufacturing.

You'll buy a standard Toyota made by robots in Nevada for $8,000. But if you want to spend $50,000 you can get a custom car, with lots of parts manufactured in house.

There will be single humans who build a car from scratch using a couple of robot "helping hands". There will be a car company that uses no robotic tools, using only carefully designed winches, with a car designed specifically for ease of human construction. There will be a competition to build a complete car from scratch as fast as possible.

There will be cars that are unique to Paris, cars that are unique to Arkansas, and cars that are unique Long Beach.

Teenagers will make cars as a science fair project.

There are all kinds of interesting opportunities for things to flip flop. Robots take away easy work, but they make many more kinds of new work easy. I know it is easy to think "what's happening now will be the trend forever!" and robot manufacturing is in fact a major trend, but history is complicated and after robiticization the next phase will look very different again.

It seems dubious that those custom cars will ever amount to more than a very small niche market.

Each individual design will be a niche, but all of them together will be somewhere in the low double digit percentage market share.

Look at food: the majority is mass produced: McDonald's, frozen pizzas, etc. But there is a big long tail of one off experiences: home cooked meals, local restaurants, etc.

Here's what the chart would look like if the data analyst wasn't trying so hard to push their political agenda:

https://i.imgur.com/nlALPzj.gif

Why not go even further and make the right axis go up to 100,000? Then you wouldn't really even be able to see any decline at all!

</sarcasm>

But seriously, no, the chart doesn't have to go down to $0 in order to be useful. All you're doing is compressing the data. The original chart makes it very obvious that the manufacturing employment has gone significantly lower than it was back in 1947. Your new chart obscures that, makes it so if I just glance at it, I might come away with the impression that it's close to where it was in 1947, when in fact it's something like 20% lower.

That said, I wouldn't complain if you simply wanted to extend the chart a little downwards, maybe down to $8k or $9k, rather than dropping it to $0.

I don't see how Erik's chart obscures anything. Quite the contrary. And zero-based charts make percentage changes more obvious, not less.

I'm saying it obscures the change between the 1947 and the 2012 values. Zero-based charts make the percentage change between the lowest and highest points more obvious, but that's not really the interesting feature of this chart. The interesting feature is the change from 1947 to 2012, and the zero-based chart makes that harder to see at a glance.

The original chart makes it look like manifucturing jobs doubled from 1950 to 1980 and then fell by 90%.

Your complaint is that the zero'd axis makes it look like 1950 and 2010 aren't actually that much different seems weird to me, because the actual data seems to be that they aren't that different, and showing that is correct (rather than incorrectly hugely magnifying the differences)

Thanks for this! That original chart was disappointingly misleading.

What about the "old" jobs that aren't going anywhere soon?

There are a bunch of such in health care that are always drastically understaffed...

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