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The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

randfishkin.com

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Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#11

Post by jimmyjim »

Encosia wrote: post #8
Vivtek wrote: post #3

I question his (somewhat oblique) assertion that people in their 30's are too old to train effectively in new skillsets.

Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible. My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but it's exactly the kind of retraining that's rele…

I had a guy in his late 70s in my accelerated Calculus II class this summer at a community college (power series, curve arc length, determining convergence/divergence, etc.) -- with a class full of students from second-tier schools. He was one of the few students to ace every test and exam.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#12

Post by JSig »

The BLS does a TERRIBLE job of managing the unemployment stats. The birth/death model just does not work at cycle changes. For a detailed look at these issues check out Mish's many posts at http://bit.ly/9yjUjN

Additionally, there is something going on beyond a flawed model. From zerohedge.com => http://bit.ly/b5AJsz

"Readers may be surprised to discover that beginning in April, of 2010, continuing through today, there have been 22 out of 23 consecutive upward prior weekly revisions! In other words, the BLS has a definitive mandate to underrepresent the "current" weekly data and to allow it to catch up with reality once it has become "prior", and thus no longer market moving, when in reality should the BLS present true data it would have likely missed estimates on more than half the occasions it has "beaten" and caused ridiculous market spikes like the one experienced earlier. Furthermore, combining all individual weekly data, demonstrates that the BLS has underrepresented initial claims by roughly 80,000 year to date."

Check out the post for a nice chart.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#13

Post by motters »

This article highlights something which I think will become a growing issue. Higher education is becoming prohibitively expensive for many young people, and often doesn't deliver (and isn't intended to deliver) the sort of training which employers seem to want. There's a need for better and more accessible vocational training, but at the same time a reluctance from government and employers to get involved with it - both seeing it as someone else's responsibility.

Probably this is an opportunity in disguise for some new kind of vocational training system to emerge.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#14

Post by candre717 »

motters wrote: post #13

This article highlights something which I think will become a growing issue. Higher education is becoming prohibitively expensive for many young people, and often doesn't deliver (and isn't intended to deliver) the sort of training which employers seem to want. There's a need for better and more accessible vocational training, but at the same time a reluctance from government and employers to get involved with it - b…

While it might be a new opportunity, I think there is too much lobbying in Washington to protect the interest of the status quo and not the students'. Education is a big money machine, and since there's enough groups and individuals who want to keep it as is, it may very well stay as is.

We live in a world that has outgrown the current education system.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#15

Post by JoachimSchipper »

wccrawford wrote: post #4

He is 1 step away from saying that the government should be telling people what education to take, and what jobs they'll fill. (Remember Gattaca?) Some industries (not all!) have a shortage of workers. This has -always- been the case. Each generation feels a different pull when they are children, and so has different goals for later in life. We even encourage children to pick a career in Elementary school! By the tim…

In fairness to the author, engineers of all stripes have been in demand for a long time, and English majors or people without any real education have always had trouble finding a job.

Yes, the 15-year lag presents a very real planning problem, but that doesn't mean that the current distribution of pupils creates the highest possible employment/value.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#16

Post by rbranson »

JSig wrote: post #12

The BLS does a TERRIBLE job of managing the unemployment stats. The birth/death model just does not work at cycle changes. For a detailed look at these issues check out Mish's many posts at http://bit.ly/9yjUjN Additionally, there is something going on beyond a flawed model. From zerohedge.com => http://bit.ly/b5AJsz "Readers may be surprised to discover that beginning in April, of 2010, continuing through today, the…

Disclaimer: zerohedge is a bunch of hysterical Austrian economist nutcases.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#17

Post by terra_t »

randfish wrote: post #7
wccrawford wrote: post #4

He is 1 step away from saying that the government should be telling people what education to take, and what jobs they'll fill. (Remember Gattaca?) Some industries (not all!) have a shortage of workers. This has -always- been the case. Each generation feels a different pull when they are children, and so has different goals for later in life. We even encourage children to pick a career in Elementary school! By the tim…

That certainly wasn't my intent - I was just brainstorming a list of ways one might fix the shortfall of math/science/engineering professionals. Salaries: Maybe we're still low, but looking at http://gigaom.com/2010/11/10/stat-shot-the-results-of-silico... - we're paying between 10-20% above these figures (generally) for our engineers, so I suspect that's not the case.

Rand, your post is repeating the same garbage about job training that's been universal for the past 30 years (See "The Job Training Charade" by Gordon Lafer,) with a little dash of age discrimination just so you'll fit in with the hacker news crowd. (I know a lot of people who are in their 30's, 40's and 50's who've successfully learned new skills)

Communications of the ACM has hand-wringing articles in every issue about "Why don't students want to study CS?" They never mention the elephant in the room -- that these students are hearing from computer professionals in their 30's and 40's who all of a sudden find they are working a dead end job.

There's a huge demand for inexperienced out-of-college engineers that will work for cheap (for instance, equity that probably won't materialize), not demand health insurance, and work 80 hours a week on "charge of the light brigade" projects that lack any semblance of project management. There's very little demand for experienced engineers who realize that management is full of it.

There's no educational institution that produces people with the skills it takes to develop today's web sites. Often CS graduates get a bunch of 20-year old pap about algorithms and never learn a thing about project management, modern distributed systems, and all the little details from CSS to the management of social systems. People get those skills working in the school of hard knocks, and a lot of those people (like myself) have been doing it for 15 years and we're not going to take crap from anybody.

When it comes to inequality, it's dawning on people that higher ed is part of the problem, not part of the solution. The few remaining "good" and "secure" jobs in this country are open to people who graduate (as undergraduates) from Harvard and Yale. The entrance of women into the workforce has doubled the opportunity of employers to play out their racist and classist impulses.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#18

Post by SkyMarshal »

rbranson wrote: post #16
JSig wrote: post #12

The BLS does a TERRIBLE job of managing the unemployment stats. The birth/death model just does not work at cycle changes. For a detailed look at these issues check out Mish's many posts at http://bit.ly/9yjUjN Additionally, there is something going on beyond a flawed model. From zerohedge.com => http://bit.ly/b5AJsz "Readers may be surprised to discover that beginning in April, of 2010, continuing through today, the…

Disclaimer: zerohedge is a bunch of hysterical Austrian economist nutcases.

Ad hominem, try again.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#19

Post by reynolds »

I'm not sure that I agree with the claim that retraining someone for a short while can place that person at a similar level of mastery as his or her high-tech peers. It may work for entry level positions. And even then they may not have the same motivations as someone devoted to their craft.

Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

#20

Post by pedanticfreak »

If you can teach high school students to be decent programmers surely you can teach a intelligent art history or English majors as well.

Solution: Hire anyone intelligent to do the job for a fraction of the pay. They learn a new skill and you avoid paying a premium for hard to find skilled workers. You also get fiercely loyal employees instead on entitlement filled prima donnas.

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