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America has more than 6 million vacant jobs, yet the country is "facing a serious skills gap," Labor Secretary R. Alexander Acosta recently said. And last week his boss, President Donald Trump, said he wants to close this gap by directing $100 million of federal money into apprenticeship programs. Apprenticeships in the U.S. are generally known for training workers for blue collar jobs like plumbers or electricians, but with a little tweak, they could be the path to lucrative, white collar tech jobs across the country. Not just in coastal cities, but also in the Midwest, South, and across the Great Plains.
But to get there we need to erase the notion that highly paid jobs require a college degree. It's not always true. LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner, among others, has called for a shift in focus: "skills, not degrees. It's not skills at the exclusion of degrees. It's just expanding our perspective to go beyond degrees."
An academic degree signals to employers that a person has successfully completed a course of study, but it does not provide a clear assessment of someone's skills. Companies, especially in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) industries, are shifting their recruiting process from "where did you study?" to "what can you do?".
Germans have long cited their apprenticeship system as a factor in their economic success. Would it help America and elsewhere, too?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:35PM (2 children)
As long as there is HR heads in the loop, this will just be talk and no business. Especially when generalists of any kind (MBA) are at the helm.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:49PM (1 child)
If you're hiring a trade guy to help with your crew, you ask "what can you do?" (or the Spanish/Polish/Armenian translation, if you like to save cash).
If you have an HR department with a pile of resumes, they need "what's the expected education" as a way to start sorting.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:01AM
And that is because HR is so clueless they need a checkbox to get anything meaningful done. They need to be sent to work with something that don't require thinking extensively.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:37PM (14 children)
You just don't have the youth.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:39PM (13 children)
I get lots of interviews but when they see my grey hair they start coming up with reasons not to hire me.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)
Clearly you should find your niche by claiming a disability to fill a diversity hire quota.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:18PM
I'm protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act but I have little doubt they'd find some other reason not to hire me.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:43PM (2 children)
Bit of hair dye, spot of makeup, and you'll look as good as fotie.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:41PM (1 child)
Shave everything and go with the Shinzon look.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:53PM
Hire a 30-something actor to go to job interviews, then show up to work as an old fart when the actor gets hired.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:08PM (3 children)
I'm finding the same thing. It's difficult to get hired as a fifty year old programmer.
I keep meeting people who, when I tell them I interviewed at a place they'll tell me they have a friend who was hired there and that I'm a far better programmer. Nice for the ego, but not so much for meeting the desire for a change. Kind of makes me feel like I've wasted a lot of time keeping up with new languages and technologies though (just kidding, I that on my own time for *me*, I enjoy it).
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:30PM (2 children)
Are you trying to do web/phone startups in San Francisco? Um, well, you may be screwed.
OTOH, that stuff mostly sucks anyway. Why work 90-hour weeks for a 1-bedroom studio apartment when you could work 40-hour weeks for a 5-bedroom on an acre? You need to find something like a defense contractor in a dirt-cheap state. You'd have room for a huge family, low taxes, and "constitutional carry" and/or "stand your ground" laws. Your coworkers might also be old... or do you not like associating with your own kind?
New languages and technologies normally don't matter. Perhaps RISC-V will matter in a decade, or Rust will matter in two decades. Until then it's C and assembly running on ARM, PowerPC, x86, x64, 8051, 6502, and MIPS. It is not normal to run the latest web framework on something like a pacemaker, bomb guidance unit, or tire pressure monitoring system.
Yeah, it's different. You'd likely be in Trump country. My workplace has a giant US flag in the cafeteria, probably 10x15 feet. A few times a year, we do a military-style flag-folding ceremony and pledge. I bet that never happens in San Francisco.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @04:49AM
Many co's are often happy to hire older experienced people to maintain legacy apps. It may not be glamorous, but pays.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:05AM
Are x86, x64, 8051, 6502 having a feature in embedded?
Hesitant about PowerPC too.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:16PM (3 children)
Just For Men?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:06PM
Read your comment, then saw your name: ROFL! ;)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Informative) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 30 2017, @12:11AM (1 child)
Get the Autostop kind. The regular kind modulates your shade depending on how long it's in and its easy to let an extra minute slip by, resulting in unnaturally dark hair.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday June 30 2017, @06:42PM
Do they do pink?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:38PM (3 children)
the claimed shortage now is a half million, and expected to be a million by 2020.
I cry bullshit on that. I know lots of coders who can't find work.
I've got an iPhone App I'm working on. Once it's in the App Store I should be able to get work as an iOS coder. But I won't qualify for Android despite having Java experience, and lots of other experience.
If a job post wants Python, they would do just as well hiring a Perl coder then training them.
There is no longer any budget for on-the-job training yet we are all expected to already have the required skills when we apply.
I once lost a contract because I didn't know GeoDjango. That job didn't really require GeoDjango, the client must have come up with that himself without asking someone who really knew Django.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by RamiK on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:21PM (1 child)
Or, a friend of a friend already knew GeoDjango so they tailored the requirements to his resume...
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:44PM
There's no shortage of fake jobs for internal promotions or H1B fraud.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 30 2017, @12:14AM
And I don't qualify for mud-hut building even though I have a civil-engineering degree. Ain't life a bitch?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @06:47PM (17 children)
Long past due. I've been bitching about this since the '90s.
Programmers, admins, data centre maintenance - all those and related groups could and should be trained by apprenticeship. A modern apprenticeship includes classroom time, so you can get in your classes on big-O notation, and computer organisation, and different classes of languages (machine code, asm, procedural, modular, object, flow, functional, logic, stack ....), management of network cables and electrical cables and fibre and all that good stuff.
And then you can go and put it into practice under the eye of a master who has a couple of decades of experience.
And then if you really want to, you can push for training in the sciences. Because hey, why not? But you don't end up with masses of study debt, you do have XX years of experience with real technology, and you're productive.
Makes sense now; made sense then. Should have been done when Reagan was in office, really.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:04PM (14 children)
It was done when Reagan was in office. I was self taught, as was about half the programmers at my company. Started with 8086 assembly, moved to C.
Decided to go to college in my mid-20's when I realized that if I ever wanted a different job I was gonna have to have that useless piece of paper.
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:09PM (8 children)
> I realized that if I ever wanted a different job I was gonna have to have that useless piece of paper
A bit self-contradictory, isn't it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:45PM (7 children)
No, HR departments rely on pieces of paper because they are incapable of doing their job.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:52PM (6 children)
If they rely on the pieces of paper, said paper is not useless, descriptivist-ly.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:06PM (5 children)
Wrong, they shouldn't be relying on pieces of paper. Who do you think would be the best employee for a programming role; a self taught programmer with a couple of reasonably successful open source projects to his name or a CS grad who never did any coding before he started his degree?
We don't know but assuming no serious personality flaws, the person who was already successful purely off their own initiative is the first guy I'd want to interview.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:21PM
When I started my coding career I feared all the competition from CS grads.
After a couple years I learned not to worry because in my actual experience, recent CS grads couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:55PM (3 children)
> Wrong, they shouldn't be relying on pieces of paper.
Yet they do, which makes the paper useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @12:47AM (1 child)
Maybe, but I refuse to participate in that game on principle. Others should do the same, or this stupidity will never end. If the employer requires a degree for a job that doesn't need it, they are not worth working for anyway.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 30 2017, @05:22PM
Well good luck with your idealistic one-man crusade on that.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Friday June 30 2017, @02:38PM
This AC obviously has never heard of Descriptivism :P
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:43PM (3 children)
It was not done under Reagan, he defunded and ruined the more open exploration of higher education. What you're imagining happened is that defunding education caused more people to pursue apprenticeship type programs. It was supposed to be the glory of the free market for people to educate themselves. "I was self taught" well good for you, not everyone can manage that and things have gotten more complex (and simpler). You are in the heyday of the digital revolution, your hobby just had extreme market value. Superiority badge denied.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @03:56AM (2 children)
How does that work? Colleges can operate without government funding.
Apprenticeship programs aren't self-education. And let us note that post-graduate education heavily features apprenticeship programs (that is, the graduate student-advisor relationship that is widely prevalent throughout masters and doctorate programs, no matter the field).
So what? Self-learning is an important skill whether you learn it in college or on your own. Someone who has learned it on their own should get some respect for that. It's hard to do (as you say, "not everyone can manage that"). Someone who can self-learn is superior intellectually in a number of ways to someone who can't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @05:02AM (1 child)
Colleges aren't affordable without a massive amount of financial aid and/or government funding.
Back in the '80s it was still possible to fund a college degree by just working hard in the summers. These days you can't do that. The government subsidies have shrunk to the point where it now costs far more than you could possibly hope to earn during the summer and without grants and loans you're basically out of luck.
It's even worse when you consider how many jobs have BS diploma requirements just to get an application read by a "human" in HR, let alone the actual hiring manager.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @05:43AM
Unless, of course, you go to colleges that aren't that expensive.
I'll note here that the grandparent post alluded to "open exploration" which apparently was some sort of experimentation in college that was abruptly halted by the cessation of government funding. I'd like to know more about this program or culture.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:08AM
Otoh, if you got a really marketable idea. Then that piece of paper won't matter much.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:23PM (1 child)
There seems to be a shortage of programmers with couple decades of experience with Scale or Go....
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:16PM
Right. Astute observation.
The idea isn't to have an apprentice Go programmer. The idea is to have an apprentice programmer. A programmer who can't move to a flow control language, to an aspect oriented language, to a functional language, to a stack language, isn't a real programmer. And that's what an apprenticeship should cover.
(Score: 1) by arcz on Thursday June 29 2017, @07:50PM (3 children)
I can tell the university system is not quite adequate to prepare people for real world work. Glad to see this change.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:43PM (1 child)
Is job training "for real world work" the only value you see in university education?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @04:10AM
Is asking loaded questions the only way you can argue? One can believe, for example, that there's value in using money to buy orange juice without believing that is the only use for money. Similarly, one can believe that preparing for the working world is a valuable application (perhaps even the most value application) of a university education without believing that is the only value to a university education.
But what of it if they do believe such? How much in error is such a viewpoint?
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 30 2017, @12:19AM
That's because it's not supposed to be. An internship or first job is. The problem is that everybody in America offers only either unpaid part-time internships or they demand a non-negotiable 3 years of experience for even entry-level jobs.
This is why networking and having a social-media presence are so heavily pushed now - they're basically admitting that your only job prospects out of college will be the result of nepotism rather than skill.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:03PM (1 child)
Apprenticeships.... aka "You ain't ever changing career fields again, baby!" aka "We'll train you in the job we want you to do, and when that is modernized away, you won't have any fallbacks and damme if we'll re-educate you as that's your own expense!" aka "Let's get you to do more work at less pay while you 'apprentice,' and then if we think you're a good enough boy or girl you might have a shot at the 10% of full time jobs we have for you - but more likely you'll be one of the 90% turned away after your apprenticeship is complete to starve somewhere else." aka "You'd better be young enough to be taken on." aka "You're FIRED!"
Those apprenticeships? Yeah, about what I'd expect from the Trump administration.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday June 30 2017, @12:18AM
Training is for animals and slaves, and soldiers. Education is for free persons. There is a reason it is called the "Liberal Arts". Liber-"free", so these are the arts of free people, those who are not tools or instruments for others. So, careful of what someone wants to "train" you to do!
And, Confucius says: "君子不器".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:29PM (4 children)
It's not about training or degrees, it's about IQ. Not all people are created equal, there are some training some people will never understand. This is true. And there are lot of things that even thou you could train a person of not the highest intellect to do, these things change OFTEN (due to rapid advancement in technology) and you may have to train them all the time if they can't understand the changes as they happen. This is why companies want to hedge by getting the smartest person they can. But the bell-curve is bell-curve and there is only so much area under the upper portion of the distribution. Nothing will fix this. All they can do is outbid other companies/industries to get a bigger share of the area, import the best from another country, or muck about trying to come up with half-solutions.
PS. Germany is over, stop referring to it like it's a place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:38PM (1 child)
You mostly can't test applicant IQ. It isn't exactly against the law to test, but you open yourself up to lawsuits. Courts have held that IQ testing is racial discrimination... incidentally showing that courts have racist beliefs about IQ. :-)
You can get away with demanding a particular education, even if the requirement is silly. It is a silly requirement if any degree will do the job, since the education obviously isn't being put to use, but the requirement stands in for an IQ test. It also serves as a class test, filtering out low-class people who might act in offensive ways in a whitecollar/professional/office work environment.
Unless the law is fixed to allow IQ tests, which isn't likely, employers will continue to demand otherwise-inappropriate degrees.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:12AM
You can test for skills in computer programming and hacking or maths as a proxy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:49PM (1 child)
I agree that not all people are equally intelligent, but IQ is pseudoscience from the bowels of the social sciences. We don't even have a mediocre understanding of intelligence, let alone how to accurately measure someone's intellect. IQ is, at best, correlated with several things, but we have no idea how much those things are related to one's intelligence. I'm really getting tired of people referring to IQ, especially in a place like this.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:22PM
I agree. One of the biggest problems with the idea of IQ is that it is a gross oversimplification. It's taking something complicated and reducing it to a single number. At least schools consider more than test scores on the SAT or ACT or whatever, which are pretty close to being just IQ tests, when evaluating applicants.
It wouldn't work well if we did the same thing with baseball players, tried to come up with a Baseball Quotient (BQ) to measure overall performance. Instead, there are a bunch of stats to measure players' performance in each aspect of the game, so that teams can make more intelligent decisions, and not, for instance, drop a great pitcher from the team because his batting average stinks and drags his BQ down to mediocre levels.
Moneyball was all about coming up with better measures. We should do something similar to replace the IQ measure, and to popularize replacements. At least D&D has two relevant stats: Intelligence and Wisdom. But I haven't heard of any serious attempt to define and measure wisdom, just the woolly notion that everyone slowly gains it as they age and accumulate life experiences. There's this idea of Emotional Intelligence (EI) that received some attention. Then there are these "no wrong answer" personality categories such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (most people on here are probably INTP), and Lowry's True Colors personality test, and for thinking styles, Gregorc's mind style model. We got to hoping that ability in chess was so closely correlated with intelligence that if we could create a machine that could win at chess, we would also have created a real AI. Instead, and somewhat embarrassingly, we found that chess isn't so strongly correlated with intelligence as that, that dumb brute force calculation at incredible speeds can win chess games, which in hindsight is rather obvious. The Alpha Go people were not laboring under that delusion, thanks to the results from chess.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:35PM (4 children)
What? I have nothing else other than the subject. I entirely expect Trump to choose an apprenticeship system over trade school because he's a retard and likes the word "Apprentice".
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Sulla on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:54PM (3 children)
When Obama even tried to do something remotely good I gave him praise for it. This "yeah well fuck him" isn't going to lead to positive progress, it just leads to the other side deciding to go it alone.
Why not, "This is a good first step, although greater investments in trade schools would be better"
Ceterum censeo Sinae esse delendam
(Score: 5, Interesting) by julian on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:39PM (1 child)
I'll give him credit if and when he ever does something deserving of it. Apprenticeships are not a good idea for this problem. I'll say this much: it is, at minimum, better than doing nothing at all. Even that is contingent on how it's implemented. Just as his financial situation is likely a state of indebtedness and negative wealth, Trump has an essentially infinite debt of good-will he needs to pay back before anything good he does actually starts accruing positive value. I'm more likely to believe anything that appears good is actually another scheme to funnel government money into his personal businesses, or the businesses of his family.
Fully subsidized trade school, and higher education besides, is a better solutions. Every student who graduates high school should be given the chance to go on to university, trade, or technical schools and it should be free at time of use. They pay back into the system when they start making money, through taxes. Fund health care the same way, and now we have a population with a sliver of breathing room to allow for investment in themselves.
Society should be organized such that basic needs are sufficiently met that they can focus on self-improvement to maximize the fulfillment of their own personal potential and rise as far as their own merit will allow. Conservatives are always banging on about meritocracy and then just expecting the world to naturally organize itself into one. A meritocracy is NOT a natural state. It has to be deliberately created and maintained.
Some people will fail, and some will succeed. Not everyone will be equal. Yet failure need not and should not be so brutal as to reflect poorly on the rest of society for what indignity and human misery we are willing to inflict on the unlucky. And success need not be so extravagant and out-sized as it is now in order to incentive progress and effort.
We want society and civilization to be more like a sport, and less like a war. In sport, the losing team isn't enslaved, starved to death, or killed. Everyone goes home regardless and the mere status of being a winner is sufficient to motivate everyone to try harder. It's a myth, though a well subscribed one, that we need a Dickensian sword hanging over the heads of the poor to motivate them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @03:39PM
Yes, society should invest in its own future. Sadly so many people don't care about such things, or they simply dont understand the importance.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Lagg on Thursday June 29 2017, @11:25PM
Obama also didn't rant on twitter about shit that people on bad trips do like people visiting them and bleeding from the face. He just expanded surveillance powers stealthily and had good PR. This guy however is bluntly unhinged and leaking with ulterior motive. Known to have a vocabulary and understanding level low enough to need memos composed of flow charts and with a page overhead less than what I had to write for high school essays. Known to love prefixing/suffixing in stupid ways and his truly sorry excuses for word play.
It's almost a certainty he's basing the call for apprenticeships on the fact that they're contracts with shit terms (and lockin to your teacher by nature, fucking anathema to autonomy these things) rather than any consideration or understanding of the similarities/differences between it and trade school. If it's not because of that it's because it's called an apprenticeship and The Donald(TM) likes things about apprentices. If it's not that it's because he does in fact mean trade school but is so disconnected from reality and being self-sufficient that he thinks they're the same.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:36PM
But how can this help with tech workers when the US already has a tech sector apprenticeship program: current tech workers train their H-1B replacements?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Beau Slim on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:41PM (7 children)
If there was a real shortage, companies would pay more or hire someone and then do in-house training.
Their real goal is to hire cheap foreign workers so they can pay less. So they tighten the job requirements to ensure that nobody qualifies, and then go to a hiring firm that claims a foreign worker has those skills even though they don't. Which is fine because the requirements were made up anyway.
Any politician buying into this nonsense is being played.
(Score: 4, Funny) by bob_super on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:58PM
> Any politician buying into this nonsense is being played.
You should proofread before you post, to avoid typos.
The correct spelling is "paid"
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:36PM
You misspelled "paid."
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:48PM
"Any politician buying into this nonsense is being paid."
FTFY
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Friday June 30 2017, @05:16AM (3 children)
There's a new opportunity opening up. Corporations run by generalists using cheap foreign labor with knowledge and without understanding. Don't considering them as assholes which they are. But instead future prey.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @12:30PM (2 children)
Wouldn't that be nice. Unfortunately, you are going to have to contend with monopoly power, the fact that your competition can outspend you 10000 to 1 just to kill off your enterprise, as well as a legal and political system that is rigged in their favor. Every new law favors large companies over startups, increases the cost of starting a new venture, and most of the places you can go to get the money you need live in that same culture. What gets "funded" these days is just as twisted as the operation of the large players.
And without the deep pockets, good luck complying with all the new regulations that come out on a continual basis.
Society has set up significant roadblocks to the creation of new businesses to protect existing interests from competition (obviously at the expense of the average joe).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @03:43PM (1 child)
This is the king of gov regulation that liberals would be fine with eliminating. Some regulation is necessary, and I agree bureaucratic costs to businesses should be kept minimal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 01 2017, @12:28AM
Both sides of the political aisle are guilty of competition-limiting regulation. Often it gets pushed as "consumer protection" or "punishing the big corporations". But every time there is any legislation that targets a particular industry, what happens is the "experts" on that industry are the ones who write it. Those "experts" are, you guessed it, people who have experience at the big players, people who are invested in the status quo. So the status quo gets institutionalized in the law. And as a bonus, the larger volume of rules requires a startup to have an ever bigger team of lawyers working overtime to figure out what needs to be done to comply.
For the big players figuring out the compliance process is a smaller part of their total cost, plus their people wrote the law anyway.
Some of the rank and file political left might be against this, but none of their leaders are. When it is billed as "punishing the big guy" it gets pretty broad support. But, punishing the big guy actually has the opposite effect. Funny how that works out, what a huge coincidence right?
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday June 30 2017, @09:34AM (3 children)
Skimming through the comments, I didn't see any from Europe, so let me add this: Most of continental Europe still has apprenticeship programs, and they work tremendously well. Many people are simply not academically oriented, and there are piles of jobs that are hands-on.
Apprenticeships here let kids end their formal schooling in the 9th or 10th grade. They then start an apprenticeship combined with special schooling that focuses on topics related to their jobs. So painters learn about the chemical properties of various kinds of paint, electricians learn about electrical topics, etc.. The apprenticeships pretty much guarantee them jobs afterwards, because they have practical experience. Moreover, the average quality of work is massively better that you get in the US or the UK, where any idiot can claim to be a contractor.
There is an IT apprenticeship track as well. Programming is part of this, but this doesn't generally lead to software developers, but rather to your sys-admins and network-admins. The ones who really want to program wind up going back to school to get a bachelors - in the end, the formal courses on data structures, algorithms, architecture, etc. really are important for software developers.
The commenter who said something like "everybody needs a liberal arts education" is just dead wrong. Remember: the average IQ is 100. Which means that half of the population is on the left of that line. I really don't think your average IQ 95 plumber really needs to analyse Shakespeare, or is particularly interested in Greek Philosophy, or Gender Studies, or whatever. Everyone will be happier, including especially the future plumber, if the schooling offers something practical and hands on.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @02:13PM (2 children)
The average IQ 95 plumber is also a voter, and therefore should at least have enough liberal arts education to be able to make an educated vote (remember, liberal arts is not about knowing Shakespeare, but about being able to interpret texts; it doesn't really matter whether that text is a play by Shakespeare of a manifest by a political party).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @03:48PM
Ding ding ding, looks like we've got an above average person here :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 30 2017, @11:25PM
It isn't about being able to correctly interpret texts. It's about being able to read something into the text that isn't there, then generate a liberal (politically correct) discussion about it.
It's about liberal "art" like the sculpture that recently appeared in front of the Trump property in Chicago.
Notably, clear and rational thinking is strongly discouraged. There are questions you can't even ask, and there are many answers that you just have to take on faith. It's an awful lot like a religion in fact, but with the prophets being Marx, Stein, Moore, Chomsky...
This brings negative value to our society.