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there was no pathway across to engineering without getting a degree.

DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation, makers of the PDP and VAX computer series) once had such a pathway, and electronic technicians could advance to engineering. That wasn't retained after they were acquired by Compaq, then by HP, then downsized.

> The solution in the past to this problem has been unions.

How? Does a union provide a path from the factory floor to being an engineer without needing a degree, or... what?

I honestly don't see how unions would even be relevant here.

Unions negotiate for better wages, stable hours, and benefits. Often those benefits include tuition reimbursement, but the other things are just as important for establishing a predictable career path so that factory work can be a step to something else, if you so wish it to be.

Unions do nothing to contribute to productivity (in the broader economic sense). If anything, they are a hindrance to it.

I would rather see a focus on a "union" we already have on the scale of entire states or the entire country called the legislative process. Through it we can argue for basics like guaranteed livable income (so you have the time to better yourself), universal healthcare (so you're not always one accident or sickness from being destitute) and a high quality educational system. A livable income, healthcare and education are the foundation upon which most other opportunities rest.

> If anything, they are a hindrance to it.

Yes, by doing things like get us the 8 hour working day (parts of what is not the AFL-CIO were the largest driver for that, taking decades, and having members die in the process, and leaving us with May 1st as the international day for labour demonstrations as another direct result).

Productivity is not a measure of the success of a society.

by doing things like get us the 8 hour working day

How do you figure? To me it seems that most of the union jobs were simply automated away, moved to third world countries, or heavily supplemented with illegal immigrant labour. None of those arrangements maintain an 8 hour working day limit.

The remaining positions are generally high-skill or based on independent contractors. No wonder they command higher wages and have better working conditions.

Unions rode the tide of technology and globalization but didn't actually cause it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

From your link,

Although there were initial successes in achieving an eight-hour day in New Zealand and by the Australian labour movement for skilled workers in the 1840s and 1850s, most employed people had to wait to the early and mid twentieth century for the condition to be widely achieved through the industrialized world through legislative action. [And many other countries followed the same trajectory.]

How come? I'll take a guess: because it was only made possible in practice in the 20th century by a sufficient increase in productivity, mainly through automation but also economies of scale. And as the process continued, those jobs went away completely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc

To clarify. I never said they never contributed to productivity. At one time they did, but these days they have largely succumbed to the shirky principle:

“Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.” — Clay Shirky

The same can be said of the organizations that have typically opposed the unions too. The world has too many zombie organizations that have outlived their usefulness and are now a drag. The effort being spent on unions would be better off spent on increasing support for a guaranteed minimum wage. We've now got universal healthcare (or at least some flavor of it), but there are a lot more ways we can improve equality of opportunity and fairness and I don't see how the modern unions contribute in any way to the bigger picture (like the 8 hour workday)

Productivity is what allows more and more of us to pursue activities that make us happy for more hours of the day.

http://kk.org/thetechnium/2010/04/the-shirky-prin/

> Unions do nothing to contribute to productivity (in the broader economic sense). If anything, they are a hindrance to it.

Yes, unions are (supposed) to defend the interests of workers. Not to make it easier for bosses or shareholders to profit from the workers' work.

Whether or not today's unions are still doing that is up for debate though.

No, unions make it so "cocky, educated" engineers can't tinker with "the way things have always been done" without a big fuss.

So they entrench methods of doing things that may be highly inefficient in the face of changing requirements. Sounds great.

I've worked in such a situation. You could make your own coffee (could cost someone their job, you see). You couldn't park your foreign car at the plant (later acquired by Daimler).

We were in the engineering building offsite and there were union guys working there too. I enjoyed working with everybody there, despite the bit of wackiness around the corner.

Unions allow for a "cocky educated" technician.

>How? Does a union provide a path from the factory floor to being an engineer without needing a degree, or... what?

They tell the management that the current situation is really dumb and won't fly, and they have the power to back it up. A union should ideally work for the self-interest of the workers and fight for a larger piece of the pie that is the company, but also try to make the pie bigger.

That dynamic sounds somewhat similar to the NCO-Commissioned officer relationship. The race to put everyone through college promulgated IMHO a concomitant, deplorable attitude shift that the line/floor had little to nothing to offer. You even see glimmers of this in the API sub-thread on this discussion. Once your automation efforts are down to a "game of inches" (see Al Pacino's performance that expounds on that term), iterative feedback from the line/floor saves you a ton of design time.

I think we also have to recognise that the days of working in the same company for 40 years or until you die are long gone. For many people, career progression is not something that happens within the same organisation, but by moving from one job to another. Perhaps this is just the other side of the same coin -- in order to 'hop the gap' in career progression, you actively have to seek another job on the other side.

That doesn't solve the problem, it merely changes its name. There has always been the need to match workers to tasks.

In stable, large companies this was done with middle managers and human resources departments, which meant that you nominally got to keep the same "job". Remove that, and there's still a need to allocate resources, that now will be filled with things like the API's the article talks about, or "freelance-like" human resources companies.

Workers will still keep a stable relation to the APIs they know (as learning a new one takes time and effort). The only thing lost in this name change is the safety network of a legal work contract.

Why do we have to recognize that? There's some evidence that Millenials are changing jobs less quickly than previous generations.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/millennials-changing-job...

I think a lot of young-ish folks experienced rapid job changes over the past 15 years, because we lived through the explosive early growth of the Internet. But there's also evidence that that time is over.

http://www.gallup.com/businessjournal/180431/american-entrep...

The tech industry is consolidating, and there are plenty of huge stable companies to provide long-term careers. I don't see any reason that a young engineer couldn't sign on with Google or Facebook out of college and stay there for 40 years.

Instead of waiting for the unions, startups usually just drop the degree requirement.

Because it suits them at the time. Not because they are egalitarian endeavors hell-bent on human welfare and equality.

Because it makes sense to ditch an inefficient company structure when starting from scratch. Why would the motive matter anyway?

Why would the motive matter anyway?

Because we have absolutely no reason to believe they won't change their minds down the road. Which is exactly what usually happens.

Once you have a large enough volume of candidates, not differentiating between the candidates based on a degree is ignoring a useful signal.

And once you are sufficiently large, you can probably afford to immediately turn away anyone w/o a degree (or whatever other signals yield high return).

Complex systems don't give a shit, and it sadly makes sense.

As a process improvement expert, one of the most significant modern breakthroughs was leveraging the intellect and experience of front line employees.

This was fundamental in enabling Toyota to go from cheap unreliable Japanese garbage to the biggest most reliable car manufacturer.

Reach out to me if you'd like to know more, we can have a chat or I can recommend some reading.

The path is not hard to find. Ask the graduates what they did and copy that.