8 ms·

Did you deliberately skip the bit where a significant factor in my notional factory worker's situation is the "established, extended family"? If you also can't

by rosser 10y ago

Did you deliberately skip the bit where a significant factor in my notional factory worker's situation is the "established, extended family"? If you also can't move out of the place where there are no jobs left, that's an extra layer of fucked. I made zero assumptions about anyone else's situation. I merely point out that the assumptions tech people make about job mobility are, on the whole, a lot less applicable if you aren't a tech person. What tech people call "changing careers" tends to mean something like "Well, I do React now, but I used to do Rails." Trajectories like mine — I started my career writing C++, now I get paid for keeping people's PostgreSQL instances happy — are "uncommon", and mine happened gradually, over a few years. What much of the rest of the US means by that is often more like, "Well I used to be a salesman, but now I'm a tool-and-die machinist." And those jobs are disappearing, too. (And all that leaves aside pursuing things that might require a certification or degree.) Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling.

MrLeap 10y ago
I'm glad to see someone voicing this opinion. Empathy takes looking at why you're dismissing the plight of other people and seeing how hard you have to futz with the multipliers before you can't dismiss it anymore. If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us. Every industry is all about competition, consolidation, and maximizing profit. The older this one gets, the lower the wages are going to be for your run of the mill programmer. The societal message that "everyone should learn how to program!" is ultimately all about lowering wages. As regular ol' programming tasks become cheaper and cheaper, we'll keep adapting and doing more specialized work, right? So what there's no one wanting to pay you 6 figs for making CRUD apps anymore. Just learn some machine learning and away you go! A year goes by and uh oh, Microsoft just added auto-ML to excel at the price of 20$ a month. How long can your job last? Better change specializations again! Maybe it wont happen in our life times, but the wealth we're all capturing in this industry WILL dry up and get captured. And eventually there will be a new technological revolution that fills a new pond somewhere else. There will be a whole lot of callousness until a vast sum of us have to finally make that long horizontal migration. People who change from actionscript to rust are making tiny vertical migrations in career. It's not at all the same thing.
- thaumaturgy 10y ago
  > If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us. I'm going to avoid the whole blue-collar vs. the economy argument on HN, for once, but I do want to refresh people's memories here: this has happened, in 2000. I lived through it; purely coincidentally I decided to leave the software industry almost exactly the night before the house of cards came down, and the funny thing was that having "programmer" on my resume got me turned down for retail jobs. They assumed I was overqualified and would leave as soon as a software opportunity presented itself. More than one potential employer said as much. It really sucked and there was a lot of noise made about it on places like Slashdot. If you were an unemployed programmer then, you pretty much gave up after a couple of months and transferred to something entirely different. (Many seemed to move to law.) Unfortunately the folks that experienced that don't speak up in these threads and everyone else on HN is too young to remember it.
  - MrLeap 10y ago
    Thanks for the reminder. I started college in 2007 and there was still an echo from the dotcom crash in the air, but I didn't have to go through it. It's funny you mentioned that a lot of people moved to law. That industry should make it painfully clear that no one is immune to this. When I was a kid the societal message was "want to make money? Become a lawyer!". Enough kids listened to that message that the industry is in shambles today. I wonder what's next?
  - rosser 10y ago
    That wasn't my experience, and I graduated university in 1997. There was a period where there wasn't work to speak of, and the first job I landed after that was pretty crap (though it was also the job where I picked up the skills and exposure I needed to end up working as a Postgres DBA). But I had some savings, collected unemployment, and had the help and support of friends (who also worked in tech, and weathered the .com bubble's popping more fortunately than I did) and family. Not all — if even many — of those things are true for most of the rest of this country. I mean, seriously: the fact that such a large chunk of the tech workforce couldn't find work in ~2001-3, or whenever, ended up going to law school it became A Thing people noticed doesn't seem to me a particularly valid counter-argument to the economic wreckage that is the Rust Belt. Yes, it's a wonderful prima facie demonstration of career mobility being a thing that actually exists in the world, but it, specifically, is also largely only available to people who already have the knowledge and skills (to say nothing of connections) such that they're almost necessarily going to be better positioned for these kinds of situations.
Shivatron 10y ago
You make reasonable and just points. However, while I agree with everything you have to say, surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory -- as the subject proposal would likely do for the coal power industry. One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera, so that change becomes less dauntless. To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done.
- kelnos 10y ago
  > surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory It's not the solution, but it definitely is a solution. Imagine you're a coal miner in Wyoming. You have two choices: 1. Get your local elected officials (who have tons of other constituents in the same boat as you) to put together some anti-competitive legislation that lets you keep your job. 2. You move to a new place, possibly with gov't assistance, uprooting your nuclear family, likely leaving your extended family behind (who you've lived near all your life), to do the same job, but probably for less because the supply of such jobs is shrinking but the demand is still high. 3. You spend several years retraining for a new job, living off gov't handouts while you're unable to work. After you're done, you still have trouble because everyone else is retraining for a pool of jobs that hasn't gotten any larger. (Remember, a lot of these places are one-industry towns and counties. If one industry goes away, you don't have much else to do.) If I were in that situation, I would love to say that I would automatically jump at the chance for #3, or at least #2, but #1 is so so so much better for me and my family. You do the math, and you don't have a lot of savings, and #2 and #3, if they even occur to you, sound really really scary: "I might lose my house and be unable to feed my family" kind of scary. So you do the only rational thing you can in that position: #1. > One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera Unlikely. Public sentiment -- especially of the kinds of people who live in rural areas that are most hit with problems like this -- are very much against gov't assistance for retraining (or, even "worse", gov't-mandated assistance from the former employer). Remember, these are people who believe in the American Dream so much: you work hard, and you succeed. Getting a gov't handout is dirty to a lot of these people. Allowing other people to benefit from such handouts is even worse. > To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done. You seem to be under the misconception that people tend to do what is best for the community (and even themselves) over the long term, when the short term looks scary. That... just usually isn't the case. I'm not saying any of this is right, or ideal, or efficient, or long-term sustainable... but it's how it is. Some people don't have the time or resources to see or plan long enough into the future to make the right call in situations like this.
467568985476 10y ago
How does that justify a bill that essentially subsidizes the industry by banning its competitors? I understand _why_ people support it, but I think it's wrong of them to demand that their industry alone gets to be protected.
wonderwonder 10y ago
Agreed, another often overlooked part of renewable energy is the renewable part. Where coal requires people to get up and go to work every morning to dig up more because the power plants burn through it, renewables do not. Once a solar field has been established it does not need the majority of the workers any more, it has a functional life measured in decades. While in the beginning many jobs will be available, once the fields are established go away. Then those same people who retrained to be solar panel installers are either too old or to emotionally devastated to soldier on to another replacable skill set.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
>Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling. It's morally galling, yes. However, if we're talking politics, "Obey the free market or die!" is exactly what these very factory workers have been screaming at the entire rest of the country, in every single federal election year. This is what voting for unfettered capitalism means, and there's a level of moral gall in saying, "Capitalism for thee, social democracy for me".

by rosser 10y ago

MrLeap 10y ago

I'm glad to see someone voicing this opinion. Empathy takes looking at why you're dismissing the plight of other people and seeing how hard you have to futz with the multipliers before you can't dismiss it anymore. If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us. Every industry is all about competition, consolidation, and maximizing profit. The older this one gets, the lower the wages are going to be for your run of the mill programmer. The societal message that "everyone should learn how to program!" is ultimately all about lowering wages. As regular ol' programming tasks become cheaper and cheaper, we'll keep adapting and doing more specialized work, right? So what there's no one wanting to pay you 6 figs for making CRUD apps anymore. Just learn some machine learning and away you go! A year goes by and uh oh, Microsoft just added auto-ML to excel at the price of 20$ a month. How long can your job last? Better change specializations again! Maybe it wont happen in our life times, but the wealth we're all capturing in this industry WILL dry up and get captured. And eventually there will be a new technological revolution that fills a new pond somewhere else. There will be a whole lot of callousness until a vast sum of us have to finally make that long horizontal migration. People who change from actionscript to rust are making tiny vertical migrations in career. It's not at all the same thing.

thaumaturgy 10y ago
> If us tech folk looked at it truly thoughtfully, we'd understand exactly how hard the world is for most people, and how easily it could turn that way for us. I'm going to avoid the whole blue-collar vs. the economy argument on HN, for once, but I do want to refresh people's memories here: this has happened, in 2000. I lived through it; purely coincidentally I decided to leave the software industry almost exactly the night before the house of cards came down, and the funny thing was that having "programmer" on my resume got me turned down for retail jobs. They assumed I was overqualified and would leave as soon as a software opportunity presented itself. More than one potential employer said as much. It really sucked and there was a lot of noise made about it on places like Slashdot. If you were an unemployed programmer then, you pretty much gave up after a couple of months and transferred to something entirely different. (Many seemed to move to law.) Unfortunately the folks that experienced that don't speak up in these threads and everyone else on HN is too young to remember it.
- MrLeap 10y ago
  Thanks for the reminder. I started college in 2007 and there was still an echo from the dotcom crash in the air, but I didn't have to go through it. It's funny you mentioned that a lot of people moved to law. That industry should make it painfully clear that no one is immune to this. When I was a kid the societal message was "want to make money? Become a lawyer!". Enough kids listened to that message that the industry is in shambles today. I wonder what's next?
- rosser 10y ago
  That wasn't my experience, and I graduated university in 1997. There was a period where there wasn't work to speak of, and the first job I landed after that was pretty crap (though it was also the job where I picked up the skills and exposure I needed to end up working as a Postgres DBA). But I had some savings, collected unemployment, and had the help and support of friends (who also worked in tech, and weathered the .com bubble's popping more fortunately than I did) and family. Not all — if even many — of those things are true for most of the rest of this country. I mean, seriously: the fact that such a large chunk of the tech workforce couldn't find work in ~2001-3, or whenever, ended up going to law school it became A Thing people noticed doesn't seem to me a particularly valid counter-argument to the economic wreckage that is the Rust Belt. Yes, it's a wonderful prima facie demonstration of career mobility being a thing that actually exists in the world, but it, specifically, is also largely only available to people who already have the knowledge and skills (to say nothing of connections) such that they're almost necessarily going to be better positioned for these kinds of situations.

Shivatron 10y ago

You make reasonable and just points. However, while I agree with everything you have to say, surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory -- as the subject proposal would likely do for the coal power industry. One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera, so that change becomes less dauntless. To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done.

kelnos 10y ago
> surely the solution is not to legislate the existence of your notional worker's factory It's not the solution, but it definitely is a solution. Imagine you're a coal miner in Wyoming. You have two choices: 1. Get your local elected officials (who have tons of other constituents in the same boat as you) to put together some anti-competitive legislation that lets you keep your job. 2. You move to a new place, possibly with gov't assistance, uprooting your nuclear family, likely leaving your extended family behind (who you've lived near all your life), to do the same job, but probably for less because the supply of such jobs is shrinking but the demand is still high. 3. You spend several years retraining for a new job, living off gov't handouts while you're unable to work. After you're done, you still have trouble because everyone else is retraining for a pool of jobs that hasn't gotten any larger. (Remember, a lot of these places are one-industry towns and counties. If one industry goes away, you don't have much else to do.) If I were in that situation, I would love to say that I would automatically jump at the chance for #3, or at least #2, but #1 is so so so much better for me and my family. You do the math, and you don't have a lot of savings, and #2 and #3, if they even occur to you, sound really really scary: "I might lose my house and be unable to feed my family" kind of scary. So you do the only rational thing you can in that position: #1. > One would hope that the public would demand reasonable severance, assistance for relocation and retraining, et cetera Unlikely. Public sentiment -- especially of the kinds of people who live in rural areas that are most hit with problems like this -- are very much against gov't assistance for retraining (or, even "worse", gov't-mandated assistance from the former employer). Remember, these are people who believe in the American Dream so much: you work hard, and you succeed. Getting a gov't handout is dirty to a lot of these people. Allowing other people to benefit from such handouts is even worse. > To reiterate the second point in this thread, history has shown that "digging in" is usually the exact opposite of what should be done. You seem to be under the misconception that people tend to do what is best for the community (and even themselves) over the long term, when the short term looks scary. That... just usually isn't the case. I'm not saying any of this is right, or ideal, or efficient, or long-term sustainable... but it's how it is. Some people don't have the time or resources to see or plan long enough into the future to make the right call in situations like this.

467568985476 10y ago

How does that justify a bill that essentially subsidizes the industry by banning its competitors? I understand _why_ people support it, but I think it's wrong of them to demand that their industry alone gets to be protected.

wonderwonder 10y ago

Agreed, another often overlooked part of renewable energy is the renewable part. Where coal requires people to get up and go to work every morning to dig up more because the power plants burn through it, renewables do not. Once a solar field has been established it does not need the majority of the workers any more, it has a functional life measured in decades. While in the beginning many jobs will be available, once the fields are established go away. Then those same people who retrained to be solar panel installers are either too old or to emotionally devastated to soldier on to another replacable skill set.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

>Riding that level of cultural and social change is not something people know how to do, and might well look dauntingly impossible when you also have a family to feed. So to see people making six figures on the coasts talk down their noses about mobility and "intestinal fortitude" (from one of your comment's siblings) is, honestly, pretty galling. It's morally galling, yes. However, if we're talking politics, "Obey the free market or die!" is exactly what these very factory workers have been screaming at the entire rest of the country, in every single federal election year. This is what voting for unfettered capitalism means, and there's a level of moral gall in saying, "Capitalism for thee, social democracy for me".