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Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

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Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#261

Post by tanilama »

irrational wrote: post #189
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make very good points above. I really enjoyed college, especially my liberal arts classes. That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive? If you were a 22 yr old who studied from zero-level computing knowledge for 12 months and got the AWS Solutions Architect Pro cert (somewhat possible assuming 2 hours / day) I can already guarantee you’d receive a written…

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't b…

At the same time, maybe college shouldn't charge that much for a major/profession that might not pay off the student out of his/her student loan back, in like decades?

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#262

Post by halbritt »

deboflo wrote: post #75
halbritt wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backwater IT orgs deep in the heart of Texas that have heard that they have to move everything into the cloud?

No, startups in Silicon Valley are starting to look at these certs because they realize how expensive poorly configured cloud infrastructure can be. It’s a skill that few people have at this point.

As a hiring manager for an infrastructure engineering team in a startup in the Silicon Valley, I have some opinion about the value of these certs.

I'd likely never hire an engineer with one of these certs and no relevant experience into a full-time position. I might offer an internship, but that's not a six-figure position.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#263

Post by jgamman »

graeme wrote: post #94
mschuster91 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you could start out as a file clerk with a high school degree and work your way up into middle or even upper management (at least if you were white and male). That upwards mobility depends on one thing: that old people drop out of the workforce either by death or by pension, so that young people can rise up the ranks. Now, given that people in their 80s need to work (!) to survive, this "generational contract" is b…

This is the lump of labour fallacy. Rest assured that life will be harder for young people if a sizeable portion of the population is old, out of the labour force, and needs to be supported by a rising share of taxes from a small number of young workers. We should hope that older works stay in jobs as long as they're able. The coming demographic bulge isn't pretty.

aahhh, the ol' lump of labour fallacy fallacy

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#264

Post by seizethecheese »

drawkbox wrote: post #230

New business idea for transportation: HeliHelp. HeliHelp flies in low skilled workers via helicopter, quicker than commutes and allows you to keep paying "market wages" that don't allow employees for retail/restaurants/etc to live anywhere near the place of upscale upperclass community where you need your employees to be during work. Fly them in, then fly them out, way out. HeliHelp is not only an expense, but it can…

Should middle class wages keep increasing relative to everyone else forever? That’s clearly an absurd scenario. Middle class wages increased substantially comprared to upper class in the 50s and 60s. “Stagnating” could also be seen as “holding on to gains”.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#265

Post by vertexFarm »

fastball wrote: post #134
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

The top 1% of American's own more wealth than the bottom 90% and this concentration is only increasing. Soon no cities regardless of size will deliver for low skilled workers as there will simply not be enough of the proverbial pie to go around. As wealth is concentrated and rents and property values rise the vast majority of this country will (does?) live paycheck to paycheck. This is unsustainable and will either n…

Repeat after me: Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game. Wealth is not a zero sum game.

Sure, okay. What about inflation? If we have 1% of people with 90% of money and assets, either:

A.) The upper class are extremely rich and the rest are desperately poor, or:

B.) The masses have enough money to live comfortably and the upper class has 9x of that growth because that's how percentages work--thus this world has to have many times more total wealth relative to the world in option B. It works if that is feasible considering that world's industry.

But what about when inequality keeps growing as projected, and the 0.1% have 90% of the wealth? Then the 0.01%? For the rest of the people to have a similar quality of life, the total number of assets in the world would have to grow by 10,000x. Otherwise, some people have to get poorer for a perpetually smaller percentage of people to have 90%.

Wealth isn't strictly a zero-sum game, but at a certain absurd point the math doesn't work. At that threshold, cold hard physics kick in and physics is most certainly a zero-sum game. Physics is as zero-sum as it gets. Nature balances her books mercilessly. If wealth inequality is at reasonable levels and there's a reasonable amount of growth, it's perfectly possible for the middle and lower classes to be prosper while wealthy classes obtain much more money than they. But when the wealthy have an extreme majority of all assets--in order to keep the rest of society at a tolerable standard of living you'd be raising the total assets in the world by like ten thousand times. Obviously that wouldn't work. It assumes totally unrealistic rates of growth, which is a recurring issue for our civilization these days. Wealth does become a zero-sum game under specific conditions. Our civilization isn't a perpetual motion machine.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#266

Post by shawndumas »

SovietDissident wrote: post #234
irrational wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"That being said, with AWS Certs going for between $75-$300 how long do colleges think they can survive?" Colleges shouldn't be in the business of training people for jobs - that is what tech schools are for. If you just want to get a job, go to a tech school, don't go to college. College is (or should be) about expanding your mind, your horizons. It should be about exposing you to new ideas and thoughts you hadn't b…

Colleges sell themselves as providing remunerative employment training when it suits them, and hide behind this excuse when kids (esp. Humanities majors) can't garner gainful employment. "What, you thought you were paying $200k to increase your earning potential?! Crazy kids---this is all about personal development. Life is about more than money!" (Try not paying your student loans back, and you can see exactly how l…

the colleges are guilty of a motte and bailey argument

the motte being the liberal arts/wholistic focused learning (only a philistine would be against that) and the bailey being the economically useful learning salesmanship.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#267

Post by ThrustVectoring »

netcan wrote: post #10

" middle-class life to those without a college degree " Anytime you start delving into what has changed for a subset of people, over decades, the most important piece of the puzzle is decided ding who qualifies for the subset. I mean concepts like "middle class" or "without a college degree." A lot more people get degrees, in 2018. Does the graduates/nongraduates segment still represent a comparable group of people?…

College is fundamentally a positional good - many job markets will preferentially hire applicants with a college degree over those without, particularly for well-paying and white-collar jobs. What the college graduate earnings indicate is that the people you are willing to preferentially hire end up making more money. When you have more college graduates, this preferential hiring effect is less significant, since you're now looking at the top X% of jobs rather than the top Y% of 50 years ago.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#268

Post by abakker »

pytester wrote: post #62
abakker wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, critically as another comment a few days ago put it, "automation crowds out those who are just starting their careers, more than those who have already started". Automation can easily prevent you from entering the workplace and moving from low-skill to high skill through experience.

The outsourcing boom did this, not automation. Dogsbody type work is routinely offshored rather than being given to local juniors. Every company I've worked at in the last 3 years bar one has had a component of their workforce doing this kind of work - in the philippines or india.

Automation is just "Outsourcing to a computer" Seen that way, many outsourcing companies are just a halfway house to stuff that isn't quite fully automatable yet, but which might become so soon.

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#269

Post by gdubs »

pgwhalen wrote: post #233
gdubs wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Today it’s hard to make an economic case for a well-rounded liberal arts education — but I’d bet that in ten years, computers will be pretty good at everything except the stuff you get from a good liberal arts education.

Ten years? Do you really think software development as we know it will be gone in ten years? I think it’s important on hacker news that we have perspective on our place in society and history and that we don’t think of ourselves (speaking for software engineers mostly here) as gods or something, but it seems very extreme to suggest that what we do will be gone or severely reduced in ten years.

The timing is a guess. But I do believe that we’re not far away from a point at which computers are much better at generating a CRUD app, or finding the most efficient algorithm, etc, but are still far from crossing the uncanny valley of making a truly moving piece of music, or work of art.

I don’t think programmers will be obsolete; but I think the skill set will shift away from the analytical and mathematical traits that set programmers apart today, towards the fuzzier knowledge of the humanities. (Though my personal belief is that liberal arts educations must include science and mathematics as a core pillar.)

Specialization in algorithmic and mathematical thinking will still be of extremely high value, but the level of achievement required to be successful in that area will likely be crushingly competitive.

But, this is just a fun guess — let’s check back in ten years so we can see how utterly off base I was :)

Re: Big Cities No Longer Deliver for Low-Skill Workers

#270

Post by rifung »

pnw_hazor wrote: post #212
danmaz74 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wouldn't compare learning a very specific technology with college. The idea with college level education is that you get the foundations of what you study and a learning method, so that you can adapt to changes (eg new technologies) faster and better. Of course you can learn the foundations without college and not learn them with college, but on average it's much easier to do so with that.

In my experience undergrad programs can fail hard in this too because of the limited time to cover the subject matter. 14 chapters of Digital Signal Processing in 12 weeks w00t! For many of my engineering courses at a top tier public university it was in-one-ear-out-the-other. Though, the most of stuff I learned at community college (pre-engineering) did stick.

Even if it does stick unless you use it you will likely forget.. but I think it's still useful to have learned since you hopefully retain enough that you know things exist and can look them up
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