The truth is that most people regardless of education and job don't realize how they utilize the 168 hours per week that we all get to split between sleep, work, eating and leisure. When I used to teach, I had students give me the excuse all the time that they didn't have enough time to complete the assignment. I would ask others in the class how long they spent on average and then ask the students making the excuse to give me a rough breakdown of how they spent their last 168 hours. After account for sleep, other classes, other work, meals and liesure, they would routinely be unable to account for about ~40 hours. Most hours are squandered.
You have to be very clear and ready to tell people that they have to give that up if they want to survive.
Because in the end that's what people want. A normal life.
Not everyone is passionate. Or driven, or interested in those things that can pay well.
Which means that those hours must be stolen from a whole constellation of distractions (which get better at keeping you engaged) and interactions with other people.
So people have to be made aware that they are going to be more unhappy not doing the work, than if they did do it.
Most people aren't going to think like that.
Most people aren't going to think like that.
That people will mix up normalcy for being coddled.
So your kids have to take a STEM course, because that's the only option to earn enough money (ps earning money != contributing to society).
Or you have to learn to code, even though you don't have the ability or aptitude to do it.
do note that this is not at all about coddling, which is a luxury long lost. Making it about coddling is straw manning the argument. There's massive numbers of people who are unviable today, and can't be retrained in any practical amount of time.
Earning money != equal to contributing to society, but prices are society's most effective way to communicate which contributions it considers value.
Using coding and STEM as your sole examples is a strawman. Mike Rowe, for example, has demonstrated on many occasions that we have a skills gap for many jobs which society needs done that you don't need higher education to perform. There are many jobs that society wants done that aren't STEM or software engineering.
https://www.inc.com/christina-desmarais/young-americans-have...
Once many of these and other in-demand jobs are lost to automation, I'll buy the argument that massive numbers of people are unviable, but until then, there are many that still are very much viable that just aren't looking at prices to determine what contributions society finds valuable.
> prices are society's most effective way to communicate which contributions it considers value.
But its not perfect. Its vastly imperfect - for a variety of reasons involving joins/intersections of various systems.
For example - media will always move towards the grosteque or attention grabbing. The feedback loop between
AD -> Money-> Attention competition -> More Attention grabbing ads -> Repeat,
is near guaranteed to spontaneously create the echo chamber effect because of human neurology.
Other examples - the failure of environmental protection, which also involves the direct manipulation of the information by vested interest who spread and maintain FUD.
Not to mention the straight up impact of concentration of wealth, and the ability of a few to then signal value disalgined with the values for the majority.
I've also seen the various examples for other industries, and they too will fail because re-training itself is a torturous and difficult process- even when you have all the time and resources you need.
Tech is a good example because its one of the easier and better covered fields.
84+56 = 140. 168 hours in a week. That's 28 hours left for everything that's not kids, work, and sleep. Fixing stuff around the house, keeping your relationship with your partner healthy-ish, prepping for the next day so you aren't constantly running late to everything, cleaning, entertainment, learning, everything. In practice you'll have an average of 2hrs/day that's actually free, maybe, without neglecting sleep, and they'll be your worst, lowest-energy, lowest-motivation hours (work gets all of the best hours 5 days/week, kids do the other 2 days)
Chief among these is the arbitrary requirement of many employers that a college degree, and particularly a degree specialized in the career field, is mandatory before any employment can occur.
Not only does this incur significant financial cost, but it also incurs a completely untenable time cost for most people aged 25+, who need to provide both physically and emotionally for themselves and their families.
While one could argue such credentials are important for life-or-death fields like engineering and medicine, the fact of the matter is that most college grads come out with a degree in a soft skill that doesn't really hold a strong relevance to the job they go on to fill in the workforce.
In reality, a college education functions as little more than a class filter. If we want improve accessibility for the self-taught and make merit more meaningful, we should stop demanding arbitrary credentials for jobs that don't really need them.
Time, opportunity, survival needs, many things curtail the ability of people to study.
Which I pay for with money from...where, exactly?
That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access.
The people you should be worrying about are those that have no under-utilized assets to capitalize on such as a car or spare room.
200 bucks a lot for some people, and you have to pass a credit check to get xfinity access.
> That being said, most people participating in the gig economy need access to the Internet to even participate, so most likely already have both a company and internet access.
Cell service != general internet service.
Try bootstrapping yourself into a tech job with only cell phone access. That may work in the third world where the standards are lower, but not in the West.
You don't need to have constant internet access to be able to be productive on a computer. In fact, I'd argue that often not having internet can make you more productive, by not giving you any distractions.
Well, if you know your entire domain well, at least. At work I'm constantly fighting frameworks or APIs or reaching edge cases or error messages I've never seen before that I've had to look up, so I'd be a lot less productive without internet.
But I can program for quite some time in Python, vanilla C#, and to a lesser extent Swift without looking anything up. And back in the day I knew Actionscript so well I never needed the internet to be productive (I miss those days).
Really, you need to be able to not have to context switch a whole lot. All-in-one platforms let you stay in one context; most modern web platforms force you to context switch all the damn time.
I agree with you, if you know your domain, you can probably do it (with headaches). If you don't, it's very hard or functionally impossible.
And even without compilers and interpreters, all you REALLY need is a text editor. Or pen and paper, in order to write code. Granted, it helps to verify the code works with compilers and interpreters, but it's possible to step through it manually yourself to verify its accuracy.
It's not too uncommon for me to write a chunk of code in a simple text editor, and then test and fix it up later.
If you're just getting started, download some technical books (you can find free ones online) or some step-by-step tutorials and work through them.
I actually got started programming in classrooms on my calculator, or in Q-Basic/HTML in the days of modems where I had to get permission to dial in to the internet, and everything went so slow I had to know exactly what I was going to get ahead of time, so I often went a long time before finding help online (which was pretty hard to find back then anyway).
I still managed to learn quite a bit. It's definitely possible. Not necessarily a perfect environment for coding, and definitely not ideal for a company that pressures you to perform at peak efficiency, but definitely possible.
If people aren't prepared to give you money for it, it's obviously not creating as much value as you think it is. That's nobody's fault but your own.
How does a wild animal feed his family if he can't catch any food? He gets out-competed by more effective individuals.
Given finite resources and unbounded population growth, population must grow to the point where there are not enough resources to support everybody, and then some people have to start dying.