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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

This is in the class of problems that naturally corrects itself over time. When your firm can't hire anyone with experience, and there's no entry-level jobs, it will discover the same solution to that problem that has been discovered any number of times in any number of other situations already: Mentoring and something that looks like apprenticeship.

Compared to the prospect of there being no job at all because software ate the whole thing, at the societal level this is barely interesting at all. Yeah, it sucks if you get caught in that moment where the problem hasn't quite become acute enough for the field to realize it needs to do apprenticeships instead of expecting experience, but, well, there isn't necessarily a better solution than waiting for the field to figure it out.

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> When your firm can't hire anyone with experience, and there's no entry-level jobs, it will discover the same solution to that problem that has been discovered any number of times in any number of other situations already

Yes, hire a temporary worker with an H-1B visa or outsource it outright.

Guess what? There are other countries with people in them that can program too. Everyone has to compete with that fact. Don't be a hypocrite that dismisses people complaining about Mexicans, software, and robots yet gets upset that people from other countries are playing on the same field.

No one is entitled to be the only person that gets to do a job that many other people can do.

> There are other countries with people in them that can program too.

I didn't say anything that disagrees with this statement, I simply said that for the last decade the way to increase profits has been to bring in migrant workers from overseas, and lay off skilled domestic workers, and there's no reason wh the approach won't continue to be the same in the face of a hypothetical domestic skills shortage.

In fact, the idea that there are "other countries with people [...] that can program" is a strong disincentive to have an apprenticship/training program, and reinforces that the primary solution to expanding hiring is going to continue to be H-1B visas and not education.

Shouldn't an economist be able to figure out when such a phenomenon is happening? It seems like this should be quantifiable. It seems like a 21st century government should be looking for these situations to be arising with some regularity now, and that a "template" program for helping mentoring/apprenticeship practices to come about faster might make sense.

(Modulo one's faith in the (in)competence of government interventions and its degree. obLibertarian objection noted -- so please expand and not just repeat if you are commenting in that direction.)

Yes, and in countries like Germany there's a three-way relationship between government, employers, and unions, who seem to start from a broad assumption of being on the same team. That relationship is much more fraught in the US, where relations between business and unions are historically antagonistic (with both sides deserving some blame for this), and you have a large contingent of people that are convinced government shouldn't exist and is fundamentally incompetent to solve problems (but often simultaneously a highly effective tyrannical entity).

a large contingent of people that are convinced government shouldn't exist and is fundamentally incompetent to solve problems (but often simultaneously a highly effective tyrannical entity).

Well, yes. Nutters are louder everywhere. Not sure if it's worse over here. Not sure if there's as much pandering to the nutters all across the political here as elsewhere. On trips abroad, I did detect that many Europeans were aghast at our politics in the early 2000s and were still (but for different reasons) as of 2014.

No, they won't. Counterexample: Engineering shortage!

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