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Amazon’s Latest Experiment: Retraining Its Work Force
- OedipusRex 7y agoThere are programs in the failing coal towns to teach former coal miners how to code. I'm not sure the stats on the success rate though.
- dotnetdemon 7y agoExtremely low: https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/23/1859813/-Students-Charge-Coding-Future-Was-Tech-Fraud https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2019/5/23/1859813/-Students-C...
- redleader9345 7y agohuh. who'd of guessed that coal miners can't code?
- Kalium 7y agoA lot of people would have guessed that a program running mostly on warm fuzzies and hope wouldn't be good at producing skilled workers.
- mywittyname 7y agoI suspect that most laymen find our line of work to be kind of trivial and think that success in this field is more related to youth than intelligence. To them, "coding" is more akin to carpentry (a trade) than physics (a science). Also, pointing out that not every coal miner can learn to code is seen as culturally insensitive and perpetuating the stereotype that rural people are dumb. Which I understand, but a little honesty could have seen these resources better leveraged to help these people in different ways.
- Ancalagon 7y agoYour suspicions are exactly opposite from what I can tell talking to a number of blue-collar people. A lot of the ones I’ve talked to seem very apprehensive about learning anything technical involving a computer, and it all seems kind of mystical in there eyes. Honestly I think a lot of what holds people back is a lack of confidence and a willingness to learn more than anything else.
- killjoywashere 7y agoI wouldn't say it's an unwillingness to learn so much as a paralyzing fear of failure, which they believe (rightfully so) is inherent in the learning process.
- seanmcdirmid 7y agoIs carpentry really that easy to master? Practical arts all require lots of practice. The only thing that makes coding very different is all the abstraction (so more like machine design than wood assembly).
- chadcmulligan 7y agoindeed, I'll stick to coding. Tried a number of times to do some wood work, a simple mitre joint is way harder than you'd think. But then there are few true carpenters left, its mostly low skilled work e.g. framers. Knew a guy who could do the most precise joins, its a skill people seem to be born with, or its grown somehow. If the only jobs in demand demanded the ability to construct a dovetail joint, I'd be in big trouble.
- mywittyname 7y agoI used carpentry very deliberately. It's a skill that's seen to require practice, but is still very accessible. Most able-bodied people can build stuff with wood. In fact, most of our grandfathers (assuming American) probably did wood working as a hobby. It used to be taught to grade school kids. I distinctly remember building adirondack chairs, picnic tables, and benches in wood shop, from dimensional lumber, for use in local parks. Thirteen year old kids can build practical objects using wood, with guidance. While physics is voodoo. Even genuinely intelligent people have difficulty grasping it. CS probably lies somewhere in-between, intellectually, but is seen as something that can just be taught to any person and they can be productive.
- filmgirlcw 7y agoIs that remark necessary? Honestly, the classicist/entitled bullshit about what we (technologists) do is completely unearned. What most of us do isn’t special and the gate-keeping many people in this industry do to prevent others from entering this industry (and I’m guilty of it too at times) is unearned. I’m glad Amazon is doing things like this. I’m glad programs are encouraging coal miners to learn a new skill. Programming wasn’t always seen as white collar work.
- mulmen 7y agoI have a pretty good tech job, my title includes the word “engineer” but I don’t think that is deserved. My coworkers seem to view this as a prestigious position but I’m not convinced. From my perspective this not much different than building pickups in Detroit in the 60s. I bet that seemed like a pretty awesome job back in the glory days. In reality most technologists are in manufacturing and we will eventually be replaced by robots.
- filmgirlcw 7y agoAmen.
- jgmjgm 7y agoI agree. There was a time it was normal for an organization to invest in its employees. Perhaps it's cheaper to externalize the costs of retraining for smaller firms. But perhaps for larger employers it is starting to make economic sense. I hope this becomes a real trend.
- dang 7y agoPlease don't post shallow dismissals here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- super-serial 7y agoI wonder what the success rate is for their retraining program to turn factory workers into coders. When watching Andrew Yang's Presidential pitch for UBI he said most government retraining programs only have a success rate of 17%.
- killjoywashere 7y ago17% strikes me as not bad. Not great, but not awful. People who take jobs that are at eminent risk of automation probably weren't exceptionally diligent in school the first time around. Add in the burdens of adulthood (parenting, bills, etc) and the odds of staying in a retraining program seem bleak. Does anyone have a better success rate?
- Waterluvian 7y ago17% sounds good to me. I did co-op at Elections Ontario and the place is just chock full of barely employable people who resist change to the status quo.
- jgmjgm 7y agoYou poor bastard. I worked for the federal government too. I remember being told that working for the government for more than a few years would make me unemployable in the private sector. The idea was one's work ethic would be irremediably damaged. I thought that was foolish at the start of my time there, but a year later I had a new respect for the heuristic.
- HSO 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419574
- HSO 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419574 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20419574
- kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
- mdorazio 7y agoIt kind of bothers me that there's always an assumption on HN that we need to retrain people into coders instead of any one of the hundreds of other jobs in high demand. You'd probably have a lot better results retraining warehouse workers into plumbers, electricians, and HVAC installers, for example. Or on the corporate side, QA testers, entry level IT support, etc.
- lojack 7y agoThe article only mentions software engineering courses, so I’m not sure it’s a result of this being hacker news as much as what the article states.
- burtonator 7y agoWe would have better success of giving them a choice instead of picking just one. People work better when they're passionate about what they're working on. The best way to control your flock is to let them roam free.
- k__ 7y agoTrue, while I think that's what Amazon should do, I can understand why HN like to talk about turning everyone into a dev.
- martinpw 7y agoIt is not just coding. This WSJ article has some more detail: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-its-u-s-workforce-11562841120 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-to-retrain-a-third-of-it... eg The training programs could help Amazon workers find jobs in different industries, the company said. It is expanding a program for fulfillment-center employees called Amazon Career Choice that pays 95% of tuition and fees for certificates and degrees in high-demand fields such as nursing and aircraft mechanics
- mdorazio 7y agoThanks. I missed that part in the article.
- istorical 7y agoHeadline might be more clear as 'Amazon to Retrain a Third of its U.S. Workers...'
- dang 7y agoWe've updated the headline to that of the article. NYT headlines often change, so I assume that happened here.
- musicale 7y agoI definitely read that as "retain."
- let_it_burn 7y agoIt's actually laughable to read this shit.
- pkaye 7y agoMy first job out of school 25 years ago they were big on further education and training. You actually had in your yearly objectives that you complete atleast 10 days of training. There was a dedicated campus for this purpose. And these were indepth courses that would spend 5 full days on some skills. I don't see that kind of thing any more and miss it.
- reaperducer 7y agoThe company I work for mandates a certain number of classes per employee each year and has a list of about 30 others that are optional. Some are as basic as Advanced Microsoft Word. Some are upper level management stuff, but are open to any employee in any role all the way down to the security guards. A cooking class is offered every other month. I always take those.
- pololee 7y agoI misread "retraining" as "retaining". My first thought was it must be a joke or I misunderstood it.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- martinpw 7y agoAmazon revenue in 2018 grew 30% over 2017, but headcount grew only 15%, which is quite an increase in efficiency per employee. That doesn't really make the headlines since there is still overall headcount growth. As they get larger it is harder to grow revenue that fast percentage-wise. If revenue growth rates drop below ~15%, and that rate of efficiency gains continue, then it would lead to net headcount reductions, which will likely generate much less positive press. So this seems like a good way to get ahead of that soon to be upcoming bad press. Whether it is just PR spin or a genuine effort to mitigate this is I guess open for debate.
- petra 7y ago>>Amazon revenue in 2018 grew 30% over 2017, but headcount grew only 15% Amazon outsources a ton of work,for ex. To it's 3rd party merchants. So it's a bit harder to measure productivity.
- irjustin 7y agoMaybe unpopular opinion, but I welcome this. The landscape is changing and Amazon is willing to try and put serious effort into keeping its current employees instead of just letting them be laid off only to be left behind.
- mrbonner 7y agoI am waiting for a day when “machine learning scientists” are the blue collar workers.
- joehandzik 7y agoBlue collar machine learning jobs center around data labeling: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-data-labeling-the-new-blue-collar-job-of-the-ai-era/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-data-labeling-the-ne... I don't ever see the actual modeling work around AI becoming blue collar. It's complex and worth the price to the companies that can build a business around it. The data labeling, however, can be pretty simple.
- killjoywashere 7y agoI suspect even the high-end labeling (e.g. cancer) can become blue collar with appropriate training, given adequate outcomes data to compare labelers against.
- opportune 7y ago"high-end labeling" for cancer is often done by undergraduates making $0-15/hr after a couple hours of training
- killjoywashere 7y agoThat sounds like an academic lab working from grant funding. Did the FDA approve those models for clinical use?
- opportune 7y ago> That sounds like an academic lab working from grant funding. Yes
- briga 7y agoIn a way that's already happened, though maybe not in the way youre thinking of. Machine learning data is more and more being collected by volunteers or paid content curators. These jobs are generally low pay and in foreign countries. There's a huge outsourcing of "blue collar" mechanical Turks going on right now that is essential to most supervised learning methods.