As a professional coder who also trained as a machinist I think it's worth explaining what CEOs mean when they say that they can't make goods in the US because there aren't enough machinists, engineers, suppliers, etc.
In Seattle, a coder with a few years of experience and a few management skills can easily earn $200k/y. A good machinist with the same years of experience and solid management skills earns maybe $75k/y. Of course there are exceptions on both sides, but this is the trend. /thread
Since the 70s the US has transitioned from treating the trades as a valid career path comparable with knowledge work to treating the trades as the also-ran category for people who couldn't get into or afford college. We defunded many shop classes in high schools and we amplified the message that after high school *all* of the smart kids go to a university to study some sort of knowledge work.
So what CEOs mean when they say that the US doesn't have enough machinists, engineers, automation experts, etc for manufacturing is that for decades they've avoided paying taxes for schools that teach the trades and they've avoided paying salaries competitive with expert knowledge work and they also don't like the direct consequences of their actions.
@trevorflowers That's a really top down authoritarian view of the country that doesn't really reflect reality.
There's not really a the US at all. There are who knows how many different governments, local, state and federal, involved in education making those decisions, and each government is composed of countless bureaucrats and politicians making their own decisions.
Further, you seem to be suggesting that throwing money at the problem would fix it, but that's obviously not true. We spend tremendous amounts of tax dollars on education, and those countless politicians and bureaucrats probably waste a good bit of it.
So it's an unhelpful over simplification to describe the country the way you do, the state of education the way you do. It's neither true nor does it present us with any real solutions.
In the end it really doesn't matter what CEOs say. Here. We keep electing and re-electing bad politicians who keep directing education to be mismanaged.
That's not all CEOs. That's on us.
@volkris @trevorflowers I have gas with the notion that it's the government's problem to supply trained labor for industry, that bad politicians are the reason Acme Inc. "can't hire workers".
It wasn't always like this. Somehow the US ramped up manufacturing in the 1940s to meet a world demand for war production: we did it not through government programs to train Rosie to weld and rivet, but from companies training their own workers. By the 1950s, trade associations were doing it, funded from dues that companies paid. See attached.
Reasonable executives know that they need to manage their parts supply chain, and managing their labor supply chain is no different.
Somehow we've ended up with two generations of shitty MBA grads that feel entitled to having someone else train their workers, and get butthurt when those workers cost actual money.
@grumble209 and I would also reject that it's the government's problem to supply trained labor to anybody.
But I can simultaneously say it's not government's problem to supply trained labor and also government is failing in the jobs that it does take on, the programs that it sets up and then charges the population taxes to fund.
In fact, to some extent the two ideas are linked as maybe government is failing at the things it should do because it is distracted trying to do exactly this thing that it shouldn't.
