Comment by billjings | Hacker News Reader

Comment by billjings | Hacker News Reader

Allow me to play the contrarian (if that's okay):

1) Supply of training is probably limited.

2) Not all of these folks need training. There are a lot of people who are older, but not of retirement age yet.

3) Just because those people are trained doesn't necessarily mean that there will be jobs for them. There is a flat out lack of work out there for people - people with college educations, even.

To elaborate on that last point, lots of people (most notably Paul Krugman) contend that the recession is fundamentally caused by a lack of demand. So keeping folks on unemployment, paying rent and playing XBox instead of homeless and dumpster diving helps to prop up a segment of the economy that would otherwise have to completely drop out.

Having said that, there has to be a better way - being unemployed is miserable, even if you're receiving unemployment checks and playing XBox with your free time. It just happens that unemployment benefits are easier to defend politically than government works programs of all kinds.

The older workers are the biggest issue. When they show up at interviews they are basicallly saying "hi, i have 25 years of experience in a completely unrelated field, probably making 2.5x the salary you're offering for this entry level position. I have no real interest in this industry, but i did just get a certification from university of phoenix online during the year i was unemployed. So will it be me or the recent grad?"

"I have no real interest in this industry" just doesn't fit with the other items in your argument. It's unfair and it plays to emotions not facts. And, even without that facetious addition, you'd probably convince me.

It does, though. Faced with two options, one employee who is passionate about computers and has been playing with Photoshop since he was a kid, and one employee who took a "two week" course and obviously is just looking for a paycheck anywhere... Who would you chose?

Insufficient data to draw conclusion.

Passion is nice, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. People who are "just looking for a paycheck" tend to be very interested in staying employed and are highly motivated to learn. We all like to talk about the person who only wants a job so they can survive while looking for other work, but we ignore that many of them realize they won't get another job, and their best bet is to do well in whatever position they can find and move up.

I'll take a steady, reliable, hard worker over a "passionate" precious and unique snowflake any day.

3) is the problem here. We are doing more with less people and that trend won't go away. Unless we can create new things that require lots of humans to do, were not going to reverse that trend.

We've been doing mostly fake work for more than a century. When mechanized textiles first arrived, they were going to revolutionize everything; instead it just made it so that if you wore clothes that have a tiny stain or tear in them, you appear to society as some kind of leper and you have to throw them away and replace them stat.

The trend of mechanized work has been happening slowly for a long time now, however, what is important is the rate of job mechanization vs. the rate of job training/education. If job mechanization happens faster than job creation we experience unemployment.

To compound this, not only are we mechanizing jobs faster than before, but job mechanization tends to eat up the jobs that take the least training first. So not only are we losing jobs for people to do, but the jobs we have left require an increasing amount of training.

So, even if we come up with new doodads to buy, any of the human work that will go into making them will require an increasing amount of training.

... if you wore clothes that have a tiny stain or tear in them that wasn't put there by the factory.

I'll never understand the mindset behind pre-ripped jeans. What's next - underwear complete with skidmarks right off the rack?

this would be a funny thinkgeek.com april fools ;p You should pitch it to them.

regarding 1), i think the author's point is that we should be able to train ourselves given the resources available out on the interwebs.

And that's partially true. While freedom of access is an important step to a society of equals, if one thinks that's all that is needed to address education amongst the un-/under-employed, then one needs a better understanding of human psychology/sociology/education :P

RE: Krugman & Demand, i think that's the fundamental problem right now. We need to take things that currently have no monetary value, and build something that somebody is willing to pay for. If the consumer economy has collapsed and we can't rely upon individuals to buy your product or service, you gotta find a business that will, or you've gotta lower your price point and go for volume.

"Don't need training"? This idea is incompatible with my world view, but particularly when it comes to unemployed people.

'Limited supply of training' is falling as well, with no small thanks to a series of projects like Arsdigita that have put knowledge online. Anyone who has internet access and isn't learning is being held back by personal culture issues.

There's lots of poor culture issues at work in this recession. For example, there's a population of homeowners who have paid for houses and now find the value them to be underwater. They don't want to realise the paper losses. This prevents them from moving for work.

I mean "don't need training" in the sense that it's hard to argue that the reason there's no work for undergrads as a whole is that they aren't trained well enough. As individuals, these folks can probably stand out from the crowd of undergrads by going and getting their master's, but as a group it's not like this economy will suddenly have 1 million more jobs just because 1 million people went and got their master's degree.

As far as self teaching goes, well - that's a whole argument in itself. I'll just say that I don't believe that the haves in this country are all autodidacts, and the have nots aren't.

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