Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#161

Post by BjoernKW » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

briholt wrote: post #56

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy admin…

Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.

That's not true. It's a common complaint among engineers that developing line-of-business or CRUD applications is tedious and not challenging enough as it doesn't require a lot of creative thinking.

Truth of the matter is that most tech work doesn't involve AI, machine learning, self-driving cars or augmented reality but down-to-earth business applications. Developing those requires abstract thinking, empathy and problem-solving skills but it doesn't necessarily require a college-level IQ.

In fact a high IQ could even be harmful in that situation because apart from getting bored quickly highly intelligent people can display a tendency to overthink problems (which is probably how many notorious enterprise frameworks came about ...).

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#162

Post by s73ver_ » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

How many of these grants are going outside of already tech heavy areas? How many of them are going to coal country, or to the Rust Belt?

It's great that they're doing this, but unless they're going to be doing it in the places that are hurting, not much is going to change.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#163

Post by stale2002 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:39 PM UTC

baursak wrote: post #61

cm2187 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High labor cost just because of skill shortage may be gratifying and lucrative for the happy few but is not an efficient allocation of resources for the wider society. Increasing the skill supply is the right thing to do. Replace "developer" with any other profession to convince yourself.

The only people who care about efficient allocation of resources for the society are socialists and academics. Certainly CEOs with multi-million dollar annual compensations don't think they're contributing to allocation inefficiencies by negotiating their compensations. Neither do doctors and AMA, who we all love and respect. Neither do military leaders or politicians, who demand half the country's budget for militar…

Uhh, I do NOT love the AMA.

The AMA is responsible for maximum doctor quotas that drive up the cost of healthcare.

The AMAs decision to artificially increase the cost of Healthcare literally kills people.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#164

Post by WalterBright » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

vkou wrote: post #144

cromwellian wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"PERCEIVED lack"? Doesn't the fact that salaries are sky rocketing essentially disprove your point? Why are the salaries getting pushed higher and higher? Because demand for SWEs is outstripping supply. This to me looks like the same kind of privileged outlook that other professional guilds like the AMA desire. Do you want cheaper healthcare, or doctor compensation to keep going up? Hey, letting nurse practitioners t…

> Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate? Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing? They are…

> Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing?

You, too, can become an "owner class" by opening an online trading account and buying stocks. Commissions are often under $10 for a trade.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#165

Post by brudgers » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

I wonder how long it would take for Google to spend an extra $1 Billion by bringing janitorial, food service, and other non-technical jobs in-house instead of contracting it out to the lowest bidder.

To put it in perspective, $1 Billion is 10,000 times $100,000. Or 1000 $100,000/year jobs for ten years before discounting for the time value of money. Instead, big chunks of the money will get siphoned off to administrators and technical instructors and computer manufacturers and lots of other areas that already have plenty of money.

A billion dollars is less than half the annual budget of University of Nebraska for serving ~50,000 students [1]. Back of envelope turns $1 Billion into ~22,000 student years which is in the same people-helped ballpark as the 10,000 worker years, with the difference being that those 10,000 worker years come with actual jobs at $100,000 a year. And the 10,000 worker years are offset by the current cost of contracting out the work and the value that work returns to Google's bottom line.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Nebraska_system

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#166

Post by nerpderp83 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:40 PM UTC

briholt wrote: post #56

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy admin…

Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.

The vast majority of the population already has a "college-level-iq" for whatever definition of. Tech work is not a geniuses' only game.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#167

Post by nerpderp83 » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #151

Gargoyle wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast, vast majority of tech work doesn't require any exceptional intelligence. It just requires a system of thinking, one which can be...trained.

... and the ability to be trained into learning arbitrary skills is IQ. Higher IQ means its easier to train yourself into being able to use a new system of thinking. Like, being a soldier doesn't require any sort of exceptional intelligence either. It doesn't even require average intelligence. What it requires is an IQ of 85 - below that point, and the US army cannot effectively train you to become a soldier. Despite…

15% of the population doesn't apply to join the Army. And those that do self select. Using the Army rejection rates for determining the IQ level of the population isn't a good method.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#168

Post by scythe » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

briholt wrote: post #56

bradleyjg wrote: post #28

I'd be more impressed if they committed to hiring employees that don't already have the skills they are looking for and doing on the job training. That would be far more effective both in terms of actual skills transfer and in terms of future career trajectory than Yet More Retraining Programs untethered from any actual employer or employment opportunities. We've been doing the latter since at least the Kennedy admin…

Another major glaring problem that no one wants to admit is that lots of tech work requires (at the very least) college-level-IQ, which excludes the majority of the population. And the lower-IQ jobs are quickly being automated away.

IQ is standardized to a population distribution. As such someone with an IQ of 120 is not 50% smarter than someone with an IQ of 80; rather, they simply have a 50% higher "score". But there is no standard zero-point on the IQ scale; the "IQ of a rock" could be anywhere from -5000 to +50 or so. That doesn't mean IQ is meaningless -- it correlates with a variety of positive outcomes -- but that low-IQ people are not "proportionally" less intelligent as measured by the IQ. Rather the IQ scale is set up to have a seemingly normal distribution relative to the observed distribution of fluid reasoning in the human population. The standard deviation of IQs is arbitrarily set at 15, and the mean is set at 100. We could easily reform the IQ scale to have a mean of 1000 and a sigma of 1, or a mean of zero and a sigma of 100. The number, itself, is meaningless without context.

There is no evidence that a person with low IQ cannot accomplish the the tasks involved in e.g. software engineering, although they would probably do so more slowly than a person with high IQ. From Wiki:

"The prevailing view among academics is that it is largely through the quicker acquisition of job-relevant knowledge that higher IQ mediates job performance. "

Also, going to college has no effect on IQ, so "college-level IQ" is meaningless gobbledygook.

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#169

Post by s73ver_ » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:43 PM UTC

cromwellian wrote: post #104

swendoog wrote: post #27

Everyone hates a cynic so bring on the downvotes: I'm going to warn everyone of what's coming. Software engineer jobs will be blue collar, $40-$60k a year jobs, by 2030. The HUGE push from government, and private business, to fill the PERCEIVED lack of engineers, will come to fruition around that time. Make no mistake about it - there is NOT a lack of skilled engineers right now. There is a disinterest among business…

"PERCEIVED lack"? Doesn't the fact that salaries are sky rocketing essentially disprove your point? Why are the salaries getting pushed higher and higher? Because demand for SWEs is outstripping supply. This to me looks like the same kind of privileged outlook that other professional guilds like the AMA desire. Do you want cheaper healthcare, or doctor compensation to keep going up? Hey, letting nurse practitioners t…

"Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate?"

Does your employer have a natural, God given right to cheap labor?

Re: Google commits $1B in grants to train U.S. workers for high-tech jobs

#170

Post by s73ver_ » Thu, Oct 12, 2017, 9:43 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #164

vkou wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes, the good times for software engineering will come to an end. I'm a software engineer, this will affect me. But the question is, do I have a natural god given right to have a ballooning salary every year, while fighting attempts to increase labor supply that might cut that growth rate? Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing? They are…

> Does our owner class have a natural god-given right to a 6% return on their investment every year, for doing nothing? You, too, can become an "owner class" by opening an online trading account and buying stocks. Commissions are often under $10 for a trade.

You're forgetting the part about having enough money to make meaningful investments.