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 executive suites are subject to fads and there was a fad for sending labor away to places where it was much cheaper (and much harder) for many years. The very wealthy don't want to pay anybody else to do anything and if they can't manage that they will at least pay as little as possible.
I wouldn't describe not wanting to waste money as a fad.
Do YOU want to spend money unnecessarily? Do you want to pay twice as much for whatever you might buy today?
No, that's just as natural and part of humanity as any other expression of wanting more stuff.
@trevorflowers
@volkris @trevorflowers miserliness seldom saves money; it often wastes it and is often cruel as well. Often it is more expensive and serves only to justify cruelty.
We are trained to be misers and value miserliness; this is a cultural failing which may yet destroy us.
@ravenonthill I mean if you want to burn your cash, Well it's yours to burn.
@volkris @trevorflowers There is a great deal of money spent to … save money. Often it would be more profitable to be less cheap. (The US health care system is a fine example, managing to spend twice what is spent in other high-income countries, while providing poorer care.)
@ravenonthill so are you saying maybe we should... not spend as much money? :)
@ravenonthill yep!
And so companies also agree with you, they think they should spend money in sensible ways, and that's why they invest in CEOs sometimes with very large salaries, because they worry that trying to save money when hiring a CEO will leave them worse off in the long run.
So there you go. Pretty good explanation for CEO pay.
@volkris @trevorflowers after the long history of financial failures due to mismanagement one would think this idea would be less than credible. But it just keeps hanging on.
@volkris @trevorflowers I'm saying, maybe we should spend it in sensible ways. It's well-known in computer science that greedy algorithms often fail, sometimes producing the literal worst possible solutions. This also applies to finance; sometimes cheap is expensive.