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Once again, manufacturing. Not design. You can teach anyone with a high school education (even less, see 3rd world factories) how to solder or how to operate

Once again, manufacturing. Not design. You can teach anyone with a high school education (even less, see 3rd world factories) how to solder or how to operate machinery efficiently. VLSI, circuit design, operating system development, FPGAs, even app development requires years of specialized training just to be competent at the fundamentals, usually taking the form of a degree. So if you want to hire designers with minimal costs you go to where the largest relevant talent pool already lives, and it ain't Toledo. It's MIT, Stanford and similar places. It's the same reason any company prefers to hire local when they can. Much easier to entice someone to drive somewhere else in town in the morning than to entice someone to uproot their life and move 1000 miles.

0x445442 7y ago
So I guess you don't buy into "just learn to code"?
- scottLobster 7y ago
  Haha, yeah it's the "just" part that's the issue. In all seriousness I'm actually helping my wife learn to code at the moment. Her last job was as a pharmacy tech, but she hated that job and isn't satisfied with me as the sole breadwinner. She hadn't even touched the command line until a couple of years ago. She's come a long way from zero and is now learning React, but it'll still be at least another year, maybe two before I'd say she's ready to produce something professional-quality on a professional schedule. And that's with me taking care of the bills, funding the educational resources she's using (not a 4-year degree), doing a LOT of tutoring in the first year and and passing along insights I didn't get until my first job. And she's put a minimum of 30 hours a week into it, often more. I can only imagine what someone with greater responsibilities, less time and no mentoring would go through. Not saying it can't be done, clearly it has. But just because a few talented/lucky/insane people can start from nothing and strike it big doesn't make it accessible to the average coal miner. If it did our salaries would be a low lower.
  - 0x445442 7y ago
    Yeah, the notion we were just going to make all those folks who work with their hands into web devs was doomed to failure from the get go.

0x445442 7y ago

So I guess you don't buy into "just learn to code"?

scottLobster 7y ago
Haha, yeah it's the "just" part that's the issue. In all seriousness I'm actually helping my wife learn to code at the moment. Her last job was as a pharmacy tech, but she hated that job and isn't satisfied with me as the sole breadwinner. She hadn't even touched the command line until a couple of years ago. She's come a long way from zero and is now learning React, but it'll still be at least another year, maybe two before I'd say she's ready to produce something professional-quality on a professional schedule. And that's with me taking care of the bills, funding the educational resources she's using (not a 4-year degree), doing a LOT of tutoring in the first year and and passing along insights I didn't get until my first job. And she's put a minimum of 30 hours a week into it, often more. I can only imagine what someone with greater responsibilities, less time and no mentoring would go through. Not saying it can't be done, clearly it has. But just because a few talented/lucky/insane people can start from nothing and strike it big doesn't make it accessible to the average coal miner. If it did our salaries would be a low lower.
- 0x445442 7y ago
  Yeah, the notion we were just going to make all those folks who work with their hands into web devs was doomed to failure from the get go.