7 ms·

The article contains an implicit contradiction, especially in its praise of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during

The article contains an implicit contradiction, especially in its praise of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during their teens or 20s, and therefore, whatever is learned during that apprenticeship, the skills can potentially be out-of-date 20 years later. Therefore, apprenticeship can not explain the absence (in Germany) of a "skills mismatch", especially if one accepts the description given in the article: "With new technology transforming work across a range of sectors, more and more businesses are struggling to find workers with the skills to man new machines and manage new processes." How would apprenticeship explain why a 40 year old German machinist is more likely to be employed than a 40 year old American machinist? There are many people, in the USA, who are in their 40s and 50s and who are unemployed. Apprenticeship, in its traditional form, would not help them. There is another way to look at this, which is to say that the German economy is really weak, but the weakness of the economy was hidden by the introduction of the euro, and the irresponsible lending that German banks engaged in, which allowed an unsustainable debt-fueled bubble to appear in Southern Europe, which created a huge market for German capital goods, which gave Germany a big export surplus. Consider the summary that Paul Krugman gives of Wolfgang Münchau description of the situation: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/german-weakness/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/german-weakness/ Germany came out the big winner of the euro, therefore its export industry is strong, therefore industry can still engage in long-term investments in its workers, and the labor unions in Germany are very strong, so they can force corporations to spend on training programs. All of which helps. But the roots of German success, in 2014, originate with the great financial changes of the last 25 years, and that success makes German's training programs look great. But to suggest that Germany does a good job training its workers, and therefore the Germany economy is strong, is probably wrong on at least 2 counts: 1.) it probably reverses cause and effect 2.) the German economy is not really strong

yen223 12y ago
I think you overestimate the rate at which skills become out-of-date. Industrial machines which are based on designs ten, twenty years ago are still in wide use.
- ams6110 12y ago
  Computers which are based on designs ten, twenty, even forty years ago are also still in wide use.
  - logicchains 12y ago
    I wonder if machinists familiar with older technologies command a premium similar to that Cobol programmers receive.
    - serf 12y ago
      I'm not sure about machinists, but my father is an 'old-school' drafting table/slide rule (both of which he has since relinquished) mechanical engineer, and he commands a premium due to his 'hands-on' nature with problems. He can sketch a picture and create a tool from the sketch in essentially the same day, whereas his counterparts take just as long just to sketch the tool in a CAD program of some sort. He has always had a problem with CAD design. He can navigate it, but he has difficulty with actual modeling. Luckily he is at such a rank in his profession to where he has an intern assigned to him to translate his graph paper sketches into document-able CAD files and do other computerized clerical work that he's not up on.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
      Oh, no they don't. Sure there are some times when knowing how things were done decades ago is useful if you have to repair something, or do something unusual. But what drives machine tools today is throughput, throughput, throughput and the techniques used by today's CNC machining centers completely obsolete entire categories of tools from years past. What is more likely is that a machinist who was experienced in operating manual machines, and who has modernized his training can command a premium because his skill gained in doing things the manual way give him a better ability to program a controller to do it more efficiently (CAM software is only so good).
  - notastartup 12y ago
    Software too! I was shocked when I learned that a local glass manufacturing company used DOS operating system which was running some esoteric job estimation enterprisey software from the 90s. They had no intention of upgrading.
wahsd 12y ago
What you seem to be overlooking and really not realizing is that the difference between American and German society really couldn't be any more different among peer societies, which is what causes what you interpret as the "implicit contradiction". The two societies and economies are fundamentally different and almost incompatible. Think of it as if Germany is Exxon (ignoring any personal opinions about their business sector) and the USA is Facebook. Sure, Facebook is all hip and dynamic and energetic and "innovative", but it really is not long for this world because it's fundamentals are rather sloppy and fickle; whereas Exxon has stupendous institutional capacity and depth of fundamentals and resources that swallow any capacity facebook could ever even fathom to have or make.
- learc83 12y ago
  On what are you basing your Facebook/Exxon analogy? > Exxon has stupendous institutional capacity and depth of fundamentals and resources that swallow any capacity facebook could ever even fathom to have or make. Exxon is a much bigger company than Facebook, but the U.S. is a much larger economy that "...swallow[s] any capacity [Germany] could even fathom to have or make". How does your analogy hold again? Furthermore, many economists don't agree with your proposition that Germany has strong fundamentals. Just look at the Paul Krugman post at the top of the thread. Edit: removed first sentence because it was too aggressive.
arh68 12y ago
I agree there is a contradiction. In light of your comment, it seems Germany may have created an industrial training/apprenticeship bubble, feeding temporary artificial feedback for a long-term benefit for working population skillsets. But how can the US just transplant the skeleton of the training program, when they suffer negative feedback, with dropping enrollments in vocational programs? There is no apparent solution for the manufacturing decline, hence the grimacing suits at the end. The funding will never come, not from revenues. The author acknowledges the dilemma that to maintain competitiveness, the US will have to do something substantive. To match the Germans in skill set infrastructure, the education system will have to reform to look more German, in a way. Exactly how seems unclear.
- ysopex 12y ago
  There is no contradiction. You're assuming the American model. German workers and their unions work hard to ensure that they're always updating their skills. I worked in Germany for 8 years and I'd estimate that at least 10% of a workers time over a year is spent on training updates and cross training. They're dead serious about keeping workers for life.
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
>2.) the German economy is not really strong The German economy is strong compared to many other nations. Currently the German economy is the strongest in Europe. The German economy was also for many decades before the Euro the strongest of Europe, that was one reason for the strong currency (German Marks). The sayings of the "weakness" of the German economy was and is a political claim that was made to reduce the workers costs in Germany. You must also distinguish between productivity (which always was high in Germany in the last decades) and attractiveness to the financial sector (stock etc.). And the second thing is, I guess, what Krugman/Muenchau really meant. And yes, Germany was not so attractive for some time, because growth and ROI where not so high as in the US for example. But I think, that are two different things. One is about productivity and strength of industries and the other is about the capitalistic demand for more and more growth.
- jordanb 12y ago
  Germany has a strong export sector which is driving German employment but that doesn't result in strong fundamentals. The United States is a net importer, if it quit trading with the world tomorrow American employment would go up. The opposite is true of Germany. Its domestic demand is nowhere near sufficient to absorb current production. Moreover, Germany's trade surplus is substantially the result of trade with Eurozone basket case countries whose trade imbalances are not sustainable. You also conflate the strength of the Mark with the strength of the German economy. The Mark was a strong currency in the postwar era because the Bundesbank tended to pursue "strong Mark" policies, often to the detriment of the German economy. As recently as 1990 Germany was considered the "sick man of Europe".
  - vacri 12y ago
    Neither Germany nor the US is about to 'stop trading with the world'. The only way that's going to happen is with another world war, and as the past has taught us, it's hard to predict the socio-economic fallout of world wars.
    - eru 12y ago
zanny 12y ago
> apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during their teens or 20s, and therefore, whatever is learned during that apprenticeship, the skills can potentially be out-of-date 20 years later. This is strictly a cultural bias, in the same way in the US apprenticing at all is antagonized, and can easily change. I know you mean that Germany has that cultural perception still but still has higher employment matching, I'm just saying it is not a technical problem that you can only apprentice in your early years.
Spooky23 12y ago
Germans have trade unions all over the place and a commitment to lifelong employment. So they don't move the plant to South Carolina at 60% pay. Germany has been an industrial powerhouse for a long time, and their focus on utterly owning niche markets has been a huge competitive force for many years. The euro helped, but the story doesn't stop there.
- 67726e 12y ago
  Not for nothing, but my old office overlooked the Port of Charleston in good ol' South Carolina. There were an awful lot of BMW X5s being shipped out of that port on a daily basis. To underscore that, my German professor, a former VP at several German multinationals would always trot out that one in five jobs in the state comes either directly or indirectly from German corporations running factories and operations out of the state. I'm sure it isn't out of the goodness of their Teutonic hearts.
  - musername 12y ago
    daimler is a multinational conglomerate, not simply a german company. globalisation yadda yadda yadda
    - vvvv 12y ago
      +likely difference in the cost of manufacturing/assembling locally vs. Importing (if at all possible) with duties slapped on top.
      - freyfogle 12y ago
        Labor is a tiny part of modern car assembly. Robots and machines are used everywhere. Avoiding/reducing currency risk is a major motivator - you want production costs to be in same currency as sales.
      - 67726e 12y ago
        In the case of the BMW X5s, all of the ones going through the port are destined for Europe, South America, and Asia.
musername 12y ago
the point with apprenticeship is, it asures a high level of quality as not everyone can get in. It's a form of secondary eduation and the selection process by employers simply ensures a high level of reliability (i'm idealizing, here) also, it's not uncommon for a 40 years old to take a new, shortened apprenticeship, before changing jobs. the effects you see reversed are in fact not hierarchical but in a feedback-loop, education is but a factor.
claudius 12y ago
> How would apprenticeship explain why a 40 year old German machinist is more likely to be employed than a 40 year old American machinist? The German 40-year old machinist also tends to have a right to continuous training, to be provided by the employer. Since the employer likely already spent quite some money on that employee, they’ll have a higher interest in securing this continuous training and make sure that their employee stays up to date.
- moconnor 12y ago
  Also it's extremely difficult to fire a German machinist; labour laws are employee-friendly in Germany and unions are strong. Many companies reduce working hours in difficult times rather than laying off workers.
  - ThomPete 12y ago
    As far as I remember that changed within the last 5-10 years.
    - Tomte 12y ago
      No, Kurzarbeit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_time) was one preeminent mechanism saving our economy. Other countries without that mechanism suffered much more. In Germany we basically loosened the rules for Kurzarbeit (not officially, I think, but the authorities were much more lenient than usual about the legal requirements), because it was a mechanism already in place. That last part is important. A mechanism that only works okay, but is already implemented everywhere is much better than the perfect mechanism, specifically tailored to your needs, but impossible to roll out on short notice.
      - ThomPete 12y ago
        Yeah we have that too in Denmark where I am from. Not so sure it's what saved the Danish economy. I think it's more to do with a fairly flexible workforce and that all agreements about salaries happen between the employer and the employee unions.
masklinn 12y ago
> The article contains an implicit contradiction, especially in its praise of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during their teens or 20s, and therefore, whatever is learned during that apprenticeship, the skills can potentially be out-of-date 20 years later. Sure, but apprenticeship means there's a culture of on-the-job learning and teaching, and strong trade unions lead to german workers being entitled to continuous learning and improvement.
Someone 12y ago
"How would apprenticeship explain why a 40 year old German machinist is more likely to be employed than a 40 year old American machinist?" Having apprenticeships means moving 'school' closer to the 40-year olds. Maybe that 40 year old is forced to stay up-to-date by his 20-year old apprentice? And your Germany/Southern Europe argument made me think of the China/USA relation. How good that analogy is? I wouldn't dare take a guess at.
- VLM 12y ago
  "Maybe that 40 year old is forced to stay up-to-date by his 20-year old apprentice?" As part of a master/apprentice relationship the master is expected to teach the apprentice how to use the brand new machining center or at least how to use it to make money. A master who can't teach, or at least set an example, is going to have employment issues. Life on the floor was not really different than my experiences in IT... boss selects a new tool, you will use it in at most a couple days of fooling around, or find a new job, doesn't matter if its machining or IT. If you're the wisest employee, you can expect to get assigned to the new toy and to train the other employees informally if nothing more advanced. There is/was a continuous and constant struggle between the school instructor component of an apprenticeship and the masters on the job. The instructors want cool sexy toys and resume stuffers like teaching cutting edge tools, but the masters on the job want the instructors to teach the basics. There is also a lot of general experience aka "we don't do centerless grinding machining here, so I hope your classroom instructor is covering at least the basics". And the masters continually complained about instructors who taught the kids the basics of g-code but not how to read a print, lots of "walk before you run" complaining. At least this is how it was at a former employer for machinists, tool and die makers, millwrights, and industrial electricians. I have no first hand data about plumbers and carpenters. Something that confuses youth culture on HN is it takes a kid 16 or so years of study to learn "2014 work". So they freak out that a 40 year old dude would have to stop working completely for 16 years to learn "2024 work". Reality of course is that things develop VERY slowly and most of the 16 years of school are focused on 2000-4000 years of human development. Actual development is so slow in most large industries like machining or IT coding, that its not hard at all to keep up other than anecdotes and complainers and people who've basically retired on the job.
lispm 12y ago
> There is another way to look at this, which is to say that the German economy is really weak, but the weakness of the economy was hidden by the introduction of the euro, In the meanwhile Germany added 20 million people from a collapsed country/economy... > which created a huge market for German capital goods, which gave Germany a big export surplus. Germany had an huge export surplus before, during and after it. > Germany came out the big winner of the euro, therefore its export industry is strong, therefore industry can still engage in long-term investments in its workers Germany did that before the Euro and is still doing it. > and the labor unions in Germany are very strong, so they can force corporations to spend on training programs. The companies are more than willing to train their workers. No unions necessary. > Germany does a good job training its workers, and therefore the Germany economy is strong, is probably wrong on at least 2 counts: > 1.) it probably reverses cause and effect There is no 'cause and effect'. It makes much more sense to model economy as a system with multiple feedback loops. The education and training systems constantly creates new workers with relatively high skill sets. You can guess the effects from that and you can also easily guess why the companies are doing this. > 2.) the German economy is not really strong That would not make any sense to say. 80+ million people, fourth largest economy in the world.
- antimagic 12y ago
  It depends a bit on what you mean by strength. At the moment, Germany's economy is very dependant on the strong export performance of the economy. But exports don't just depend on the quality of the goods produced, they also depend on customers being able to pay for those goods. If the customers stop being able to pay - something which is outside of Germany's control, then Germany will find itself in real trouble. This is the sense in which it's economy is weak. It's kind of like judo - the economy is out of balance and vulnerable to shocks applied in the right place.
  - lispm 12y ago
    > At the moment, Germany's economy is very dependant on the strong export performance of the economy. Not 'at the moment' - Germany has been a strong exporter for almost five decades now... > then Germany will find itself in real trouble. Since Germany runs this model since a long time, it has a lot of experience dealing with its effects.
bluedino 12y ago
>> There are many people, in the USA, who are in their 40s and 50s and who are unemployed. In many cases, the job that a 40 or 50 year old machinist in the US had, is gone. The company is gone. The plant is abandoned or town down. The equipment was shipped off to China.

yen223 12y ago

I think you overestimate the rate at which skills become out-of-date. Industrial machines which are based on designs ten, twenty years ago are still in wide use.

ams6110 12y ago
Computers which are based on designs ten, twenty, even forty years ago are also still in wide use.
- logicchains 12y ago
  I wonder if machinists familiar with older technologies command a premium similar to that Cobol programmers receive.
  - serf 12y ago
    I'm not sure about machinists, but my father is an 'old-school' drafting table/slide rule (both of which he has since relinquished) mechanical engineer, and he commands a premium due to his 'hands-on' nature with problems. He can sketch a picture and create a tool from the sketch in essentially the same day, whereas his counterparts take just as long just to sketch the tool in a CAD program of some sort. He has always had a problem with CAD design. He can navigate it, but he has difficulty with actual modeling. Luckily he is at such a rank in his profession to where he has an intern assigned to him to translate his graph paper sketches into document-able CAD files and do other computerized clerical work that he's not up on.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 12y ago
    Oh, no they don't. Sure there are some times when knowing how things were done decades ago is useful if you have to repair something, or do something unusual. But what drives machine tools today is throughput, throughput, throughput and the techniques used by today's CNC machining centers completely obsolete entire categories of tools from years past. What is more likely is that a machinist who was experienced in operating manual machines, and who has modernized his training can command a premium because his skill gained in doing things the manual way give him a better ability to program a controller to do it more efficiently (CAM software is only so good).
- notastartup 12y ago
  Software too! I was shocked when I learned that a local glass manufacturing company used DOS operating system which was running some esoteric job estimation enterprisey software from the 90s. They had no intention of upgrading.

wahsd 12y ago

What you seem to be overlooking and really not realizing is that the difference between American and German society really couldn't be any more different among peer societies, which is what causes what you interpret as the "implicit contradiction". The two societies and economies are fundamentally different and almost incompatible. Think of it as if Germany is Exxon (ignoring any personal opinions about their business sector) and the USA is Facebook. Sure, Facebook is all hip and dynamic and energetic and "innovative", but it really is not long for this world because it's fundamentals are rather sloppy and fickle; whereas Exxon has stupendous institutional capacity and depth of fundamentals and resources that swallow any capacity facebook could ever even fathom to have or make.

learc83 12y ago
On what are you basing your Facebook/Exxon analogy? > Exxon has stupendous institutional capacity and depth of fundamentals and resources that swallow any capacity facebook could ever even fathom to have or make. Exxon is a much bigger company than Facebook, but the U.S. is a much larger economy that "...swallow[s] any capacity [Germany] could even fathom to have or make". How does your analogy hold again? Furthermore, many economists don't agree with your proposition that Germany has strong fundamentals. Just look at the Paul Krugman post at the top of the thread. Edit: removed first sentence because it was too aggressive.

arh68 12y ago

I agree there is a contradiction. In light of your comment, it seems Germany may have created an industrial training/apprenticeship bubble, feeding temporary artificial feedback for a long-term benefit for working population skillsets. But how can the US just transplant the skeleton of the training program, when they suffer negative feedback, with dropping enrollments in vocational programs? There is no apparent solution for the manufacturing decline, hence the grimacing suits at the end. The funding will never come, not from revenues. The author acknowledges the dilemma that to maintain competitiveness, the US will have to do something substantive. To match the Germans in skill set infrastructure, the education system will have to reform to look more German, in a way. Exactly how seems unclear.

ysopex 12y ago
There is no contradiction. You're assuming the American model. German workers and their unions work hard to ensure that they're always updating their skills. I worked in Germany for 8 years and I'd estimate that at least 10% of a workers time over a year is spent on training updates and cross training. They're dead serious about keeping workers for life.

PythonicAlpha 12y ago

>2.) the German economy is not really strong The German economy is strong compared to many other nations. Currently the German economy is the strongest in Europe. The German economy was also for many decades before the Euro the strongest of Europe, that was one reason for the strong currency (German Marks). The sayings of the "weakness" of the German economy was and is a political claim that was made to reduce the workers costs in Germany. You must also distinguish between productivity (which always was high in Germany in the last decades) and attractiveness to the financial sector (stock etc.). And the second thing is, I guess, what Krugman/Muenchau really meant. And yes, Germany was not so attractive for some time, because growth and ROI where not so high as in the US for example. But I think, that are two different things. One is about productivity and strength of industries and the other is about the capitalistic demand for more and more growth.

jordanb 12y ago
Germany has a strong export sector which is driving German employment but that doesn't result in strong fundamentals. The United States is a net importer, if it quit trading with the world tomorrow American employment would go up. The opposite is true of Germany. Its domestic demand is nowhere near sufficient to absorb current production. Moreover, Germany's trade surplus is substantially the result of trade with Eurozone basket case countries whose trade imbalances are not sustainable. You also conflate the strength of the Mark with the strength of the German economy. The Mark was a strong currency in the postwar era because the Bundesbank tended to pursue "strong Mark" policies, often to the detriment of the German economy. As recently as 1990 Germany was considered the "sick man of Europe".
- vacri 12y ago
  Neither Germany nor the US is about to 'stop trading with the world'. The only way that's going to happen is with another world war, and as the past has taught us, it's hard to predict the socio-economic fallout of world wars.
  - eru 12y ago

zanny 12y ago

> apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during their teens or 20s, and therefore, whatever is learned during that apprenticeship, the skills can potentially be out-of-date 20 years later. This is strictly a cultural bias, in the same way in the US apprenticing at all is antagonized, and can easily change. I know you mean that Germany has that cultural perception still but still has higher employment matching, I'm just saying it is not a technical problem that you can only apprentice in your early years.

Spooky23 12y ago

Germans have trade unions all over the place and a commitment to lifelong employment. So they don't move the plant to South Carolina at 60% pay. Germany has been an industrial powerhouse for a long time, and their focus on utterly owning niche markets has been a huge competitive force for many years. The euro helped, but the story doesn't stop there.

67726e 12y ago
Not for nothing, but my old office overlooked the Port of Charleston in good ol' South Carolina. There were an awful lot of BMW X5s being shipped out of that port on a daily basis. To underscore that, my German professor, a former VP at several German multinationals would always trot out that one in five jobs in the state comes either directly or indirectly from German corporations running factories and operations out of the state. I'm sure it isn't out of the goodness of their Teutonic hearts.
- musername 12y ago
  daimler is a multinational conglomerate, not simply a german company. globalisation yadda yadda yadda
  - vvvv 12y ago
    +likely difference in the cost of manufacturing/assembling locally vs. Importing (if at all possible) with duties slapped on top.
    - freyfogle 12y ago
      Labor is a tiny part of modern car assembly. Robots and machines are used everywhere. Avoiding/reducing currency risk is a major motivator - you want production costs to be in same currency as sales.
    - 67726e 12y ago
      In the case of the BMW X5s, all of the ones going through the port are destined for Europe, South America, and Asia.

musername 12y ago

the point with apprenticeship is, it asures a high level of quality as not everyone can get in. It's a form of secondary eduation and the selection process by employers simply ensures a high level of reliability (i'm idealizing, here) also, it's not uncommon for a 40 years old to take a new, shortened apprenticeship, before changing jobs. the effects you see reversed are in fact not hierarchical but in a feedback-loop, education is but a factor.

claudius 12y ago

> How would apprenticeship explain why a 40 year old German machinist is more likely to be employed than a 40 year old American machinist? The German 40-year old machinist also tends to have a right to continuous training, to be provided by the employer. Since the employer likely already spent quite some money on that employee, they’ll have a higher interest in securing this continuous training and make sure that their employee stays up to date.

moconnor 12y ago
Also it's extremely difficult to fire a German machinist; labour laws are employee-friendly in Germany and unions are strong. Many companies reduce working hours in difficult times rather than laying off workers.
- ThomPete 12y ago
  As far as I remember that changed within the last 5-10 years.
  - Tomte 12y ago
    No, Kurzarbeit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_time) was one preeminent mechanism saving our economy. Other countries without that mechanism suffered much more. In Germany we basically loosened the rules for Kurzarbeit (not officially, I think, but the authorities were much more lenient than usual about the legal requirements), because it was a mechanism already in place. That last part is important. A mechanism that only works okay, but is already implemented everywhere is much better than the perfect mechanism, specifically tailored to your needs, but impossible to roll out on short notice.
    - ThomPete 12y ago
      Yeah we have that too in Denmark where I am from. Not so sure it's what saved the Danish economy. I think it's more to do with a fairly flexible workforce and that all agreements about salaries happen between the employer and the employee unions.

masklinn 12y ago

> The article contains an implicit contradiction, especially in its praise of apprenticeships. Apprenticeships are typically something a person engages in during their teens or 20s, and therefore, whatever is learned during that apprenticeship, the skills can potentially be out-of-date 20 years later. Sure, but apprenticeship means there's a culture of on-the-job learning and teaching, and strong trade unions lead to german workers being entitled to continuous learning and improvement.

Someone 12y ago

"How would apprenticeship explain why a 40 year old German machinist is more likely to be employed than a 40 year old American machinist?" Having apprenticeships means moving 'school' closer to the 40-year olds. Maybe that 40 year old is forced to stay up-to-date by his 20-year old apprentice? And your Germany/Southern Europe argument made me think of the China/USA relation. How good that analogy is? I wouldn't dare take a guess at.

VLM 12y ago
"Maybe that 40 year old is forced to stay up-to-date by his 20-year old apprentice?" As part of a master/apprentice relationship the master is expected to teach the apprentice how to use the brand new machining center or at least how to use it to make money. A master who can't teach, or at least set an example, is going to have employment issues. Life on the floor was not really different than my experiences in IT... boss selects a new tool, you will use it in at most a couple days of fooling around, or find a new job, doesn't matter if its machining or IT. If you're the wisest employee, you can expect to get assigned to the new toy and to train the other employees informally if nothing more advanced. There is/was a continuous and constant struggle between the school instructor component of an apprenticeship and the masters on the job. The instructors want cool sexy toys and resume stuffers like teaching cutting edge tools, but the masters on the job want the instructors to teach the basics. There is also a lot of general experience aka "we don't do centerless grinding machining here, so I hope your classroom instructor is covering at least the basics". And the masters continually complained about instructors who taught the kids the basics of g-code but not how to read a print, lots of "walk before you run" complaining. At least this is how it was at a former employer for machinists, tool and die makers, millwrights, and industrial electricians. I have no first hand data about plumbers and carpenters. Something that confuses youth culture on HN is it takes a kid 16 or so years of study to learn "2014 work". So they freak out that a 40 year old dude would have to stop working completely for 16 years to learn "2024 work". Reality of course is that things develop VERY slowly and most of the 16 years of school are focused on 2000-4000 years of human development. Actual development is so slow in most large industries like machining or IT coding, that its not hard at all to keep up other than anecdotes and complainers and people who've basically retired on the job.

lispm 12y ago

> There is another way to look at this, which is to say that the German economy is really weak, but the weakness of the economy was hidden by the introduction of the euro, In the meanwhile Germany added 20 million people from a collapsed country/economy... > which created a huge market for German capital goods, which gave Germany a big export surplus. Germany had an huge export surplus before, during and after it. > Germany came out the big winner of the euro, therefore its export industry is strong, therefore industry can still engage in long-term investments in its workers Germany did that before the Euro and is still doing it. > and the labor unions in Germany are very strong, so they can force corporations to spend on training programs. The companies are more than willing to train their workers. No unions necessary. > Germany does a good job training its workers, and therefore the Germany economy is strong, is probably wrong on at least 2 counts: > 1.) it probably reverses cause and effect There is no 'cause and effect'. It makes much more sense to model economy as a system with multiple feedback loops. The education and training systems constantly creates new workers with relatively high skill sets. You can guess the effects from that and you can also easily guess why the companies are doing this. > 2.) the German economy is not really strong That would not make any sense to say. 80+ million people, fourth largest economy in the world.

antimagic 12y ago
It depends a bit on what you mean by strength. At the moment, Germany's economy is very dependant on the strong export performance of the economy. But exports don't just depend on the quality of the goods produced, they also depend on customers being able to pay for those goods. If the customers stop being able to pay - something which is outside of Germany's control, then Germany will find itself in real trouble. This is the sense in which it's economy is weak. It's kind of like judo - the economy is out of balance and vulnerable to shocks applied in the right place.
- lispm 12y ago
  > At the moment, Germany's economy is very dependant on the strong export performance of the economy. Not 'at the moment' - Germany has been a strong exporter for almost five decades now... > then Germany will find itself in real trouble. Since Germany runs this model since a long time, it has a lot of experience dealing with its effects.

bluedino 12y ago

>> There are many people, in the USA, who are in their 40s and 50s and who are unemployed. In many cases, the job that a 40 or 50 year old machinist in the US had, is gone. The company is gone. The plant is abandoned or town down. The equipment was shipped off to China.