Absolutely, and you might argue Disney is one of those, but as I said, the system is a one size fits all monolith.
The Labor Shortage Myth
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Great post. Question - How do we prioritize computer science/application development skills in education? Does America begin to make it mandatory like social studies and language arts. Do we begin in elementary school? This could of course be scaled for more STEM related areas.
For my money I think we should start as early as possible. People may not like this but get rid of gym class. Replace it with computer science (I know that’s broad). It will pay off in fifteen years.
Not sure it would make a huge difference. This isn't Lake Wobegon. Half the people are below average. Is a bunch of additional schooling going to change that?
It sounds to me like you've considered in-house "apprenticeships" but have decided they don't work for you. Why? Are the people you having apply stupid -- as opposed to ignorant? How long would it take to bring someone up to speed? Is it a question of real world experience rather than schooling? How are newbs supposed to get any experience without being hired and mentored?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dogging you, just trying to gain some understanding. If it's a question of expertise and experience, why not build that yourself? Isn't that what creative and resourceful people are supposed to do?
i believe it just did.
there is no difference in generations.
ZERO.
only differences in age groups.
and every generation and age group contains the entire range of political philosophy within it.
always has, always will.
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You need those folks in the middle to mentor. You can bury a junior resource in a project team that has experienced people and bring them along by giving them the less complex tasks, but without the folks in that middle layer, they don't get the mentoring. With the wrong folks in the middle layer, they don't get the mentoring either. It takes 3-5 years for kid out of school to get to the point where they're up to speed. We just can't bring enough along at a fast enough pace to solve the problem.
In some of the other products we implement, it's less complex and it's easier for someone to come in and pick it up, but that's currently less than 25% of the business.
I think STEM is hard, and that is the problem. It takes a lot more work to study engineering or physics. Gladwell mentioned in a book that a high percentage of the lawyers graduating from Harvard are science dropouts.
What is the math on income, law vs MBA vs chemistry vs physics vs engineering? I know someone whose child had tons of scholarship offers for science after 4 years in science olympiad and having taken many math classes at IU. They chose business because that is where the money is.
if only they had been teaching everyone Fortran in elementary school when i was young, all old farts would be rich today..
or not.
problem is, skills aren't what commands pay.
supply and demand is how pay is determined outside ownership, and level of skill is meaningless unless scarce and in demand and monetizable.
that's why it's impossible to "educate" our way out of the jobs or earnings problem at the macro level.
and always will be.
if everyone had structural engineering skills, structural engineers would bring $7.25 hr. for those few lucky enough to have employment at all, since there isn't near the need for structural engineers as there is for fast food fry cooks or delivery drivers.
within ownership, the power to decide how the riches get divided is the determinant, and skills don't factor in at all.
what the world needs isn't ditch diggers, or rocket scientists, but rather ditch digger jobs, and a willingness or mandate for said jobs to bring a living wage.
So it's essentially chicken/egg for you. Can't find enough chickens and don't have the time to raise the hatchlings.
what exactly are the skills you desire?
and for someone with the skills you desire, what exactly is it that you bring to the table they can't do without you in today's self serve world?
and if mentoring someone for 3-5 yrs doesn't bring a substantial enough payback for you, how would it bring a substantial enough payback for them to acquire said skills on their own.
you wish to profit off the skills of others, and complain they won't work for what you're willing to pay.
laws of supply and demand say you aren't willing to pay the going price for their skills, and you aren't willing to train them so as to have an equity interest in said skills.
at which point you're just complaining others aren't doing enough to benefit you.
Our little 150 person company has more of these people than anyone else in North America. More than IBM, Accenture or E&Y. They actually come looking to subcontract us when they manage to win a project.
Supply and demand works both ways. It's a global economy and we're competing against other implementers who offshore all of their development, paying people a fraction of what we pay our North American employees.
What am I bringing to the table? An organization that can keep these folks employed in their chosen field without them having compete on their own as a sub where they have to cover their own benefits and taxes or find their next gig when their project is up. We're told we pay better that nearly anyone else, give them an opportunity to advance to a position that's north of 200k, provide a steady stream of new, complex and challenging projects (which is important to them) and still let them have a work/life balance in the process.
The pool of those folks in NA is at full employment. At this point everyone is trying to poach everybody else's good people. It's not a function of pay, as mentioned in the fact that we pay better than nearly all of our competition for these positions.
And read my post you quoted. We do mentor inexperienced people, we just can't do it at the volume we need to support our growth.
The other option we have is to also start offshoring everything, but that means we focus investment and hiring somewhere besides here where our current employees are. This option ultimately cuts their jobs and forces our clients and the team left in NA to deal with a development team that's 11-12 hours ahead of them, making the window for either to collaborate during local business hours non-existent.
Oh yeah. It’s why math majors end up working at hedge funds. Way better money than pursuing something in academia.
This part is entirely anecdotal. I’ve been involved in several projects over the past few years where I’ve worked closely with outsourced development resources (full disclosure - I’m on the mgmt side of a growing operation focused on providing back end services for financial institutions). Each time the developers are entirely Indian or Sri Lankan. Doesn’t matter if they’re joining calls from India, Europe or here in the US. I don’t really know what the answer to my obvious question is but why aren’t there Americans doing this work at a cost which makes sense for companies like mine? Are US developers so much better that we can’t afford them? I don’t think so.
To drag IGW’s response in as well, my earlier post was really meant to just start a convo on why we aren’t changing the curriculums of our early education programs to begin focusing more on STEM and computer science? Clearly some parts of the world are doing so and are providing services across the US. Hell bring toasted in too. We have to augment immigration policy to bring people in to do this work either because they’re cheaper or because we don’t have enough people with these competencies.
Agsin, I’m an idiot. But kids today are intelligent and they work just as hard (or not) as we did. They just do it differently. So why are we still focused on educating kids the same way we were educated. Not everybody needs to learn to code. Not everybody needs to learn a trade. And surely not everybody needs to go to college. Can we do a better job matching our educational systems with the needs of our 21st century society and economy? Probably yes. Education at the primary school level is too uniform. I think we can do better.
so what is the future in coding for a current elementary schooler.
will much or all of what he's learned in coding be obsolete by the time he's 25?
and how much are you willing to bet on your current best guess on that?
even if not obsolete, what will the offshore competitive landscape for them be 20 yrs from now?
how much of what coders currently do will be covered by software and/or A I 20 yrs from now?
and is coding not the thing that can most easily be done remotely, providing little job security to any location?
that said, what percent of individuals are cut out, intellectually, work desires, and life wise, to be coders?
point being, that's a really small and risky basket to think all our future job eggs will fit in it.
and 99% of people are not in the top 1% intellectually.
we need jobs paying a living wage for the masses, not just the exceptional.
by far the best way to achieve that, is to bring back a big chunk of our manufacturing, as manufacturing will always need people, and with most manufacturing, labor is a small percentage of per unit cost, thus employers can pay living wages without it being an overbearing cost drag.
and as i noted in above posts, whomever controls our supply chains, absolutely controls us, much more thoroughly than any army ever can..
but manufacturing can only be forced back by the govt, as the algorithm won't allow it's return absent force.
that said, once the political will is there, forcing manufacturing back is quite easy, and hardly rocket science.
and it's repatriation in of itself will make for a construction boom of large magnitude. (many thousand times plus all the pipelines put together).
just use tariffs to make it cheaper to manufacture here than import, and there will be a race back on shore the instant corps believe we are committed to that.
manufacturing will always be needed, as long as we consume.
it's jobs will span generations.
and once back on shore, factories will also support a huge peripheral array of businesses in communities.
and provide large community tax bases, even if only through those they employ, and those they employ peripherally.
on a side note, Medicare For All will make repatriating a lot more palatable for manufacturers.
another side note, manufacturers can continue to supply globally from offshore.
i'm only advocating forcing manufacturing for the domestic market back on shore, as the US is a big enough market to provide needed scale for most things.
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I don’t necessarily disagree with much of your post. This though. Couldn’t the same thing he said for assembling TVs? Or cars? The answer is yes because it already occurs today. As to coding while it surely can be done easily and cheaply off shore - how much of that work do we want created or imagined off shore. Talk about being owned.
Thanks. I don't spend much time in the cooler, so I don't have the lamp posts figured out over here.
The US freaked out when the Russians launched sputnik. We proceeded to massively overhaul our school curriculum in favor of STEM. That was transformative for our economy and nation as a whole. Later we backed off.
Spot on. STEM is hard and that's the problem. it's also inculcated that it's too hard and scares many American kids away. perception becomes reality. So it's perceived as too hard which pushes kids away and it is too hard which kicks kids out.
You mention lawyers. I got an M.A. and was admitted to law school at wash u, notre dame, and cornell and accepted a scholarship to iub law. if i studied stem in undergrad i'd still be in undergrad. it was too hard. or i was too dumb. probably both. and based on my kid's education (best school district in missouri btw); they are more worried about MOOD MONDAYS and feelings than grinding kids out on STEM. i don't see things changing anytime soon. and stem certainly isn't doing much to attract minorities. i thought something like 4% of stem programs are comprised of minorities. it's a shame too because at this point, with the obscene cost of college, imho STEM is likely the best roi for an expensive college degree. grads will be coveted. not a lot of point in incurring $200k to get a communications or social work degree. Universities have priced out education for the sake of education.
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You missed "brought in a ton of Nazi scientists".
I’ve noticed the same thing in law. While the native intelligence is there fo most lawyers, applying it to the real world is lacking. I blame a number of things including lack of rigor in education, the intrusion of unrelated social values in legal education, and electronic research which reduces thinking about an issue to a series of key words and phrases.
Minds are different. Two of my best friends are mechanical engineers. STEM is easy for both of them. They see problems as equations to be solved. On the other hand lawyers see problem solving as making professional judgment calls. We need both.
I should probably clarify our issue with finding people. The folks who don't make the cut aren't dumb, they're obviously intelligent. Its absolutely the application of what they know to a real world issue that doesn't pass muster. Critical thinking and problem solving is what's lacking. People are all wired differently.
That was earlier and misses my point, which was directly responsive to your post.
The STEM generation from the 60s became the MBAs In the 80s, to say nothing of our computer programmers, etc. London used to be (and still is to some degree) the financial hub of the world. NYC took that mantle.
More children benefit from STEM than is imagined or feared by some.
Harvard Gazette (2007):
“Speakers at Thursday’s panel discussion about the educational impact of the Sputnik launch, sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), said that the nation responded to the security threat by targeting education, a reaction it has repeated since, including after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The post-Sputnik reforms were put in the hands of scientists, much to the dismay of some educators and concerned citizens who had previously had enormous input on curriculum design. Several of the changes, such as including hands-on laboratory experience, remain in use today, the speakers said.”
“Speakers at Thursday’s panel discussion about the educational impact of the Sputnik launch, sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), said that the nation responded to the security threat by targeting education, a reaction it has repeated since, including after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The post-Sputnik reforms were put in the hands of scientists, much to the dismay of some educators and concerned citizens who had previously had enormous input on curriculum design. Several of the changes, such as including hands-on laboratory experience, remain in use today, the speakers said.”
I think I was not clear in my point. I think we largely agree. I am just pointing out German scientists were heavily involved in our moon program, and our nuclear program. Without the Germans both happen far later.
The reason is simple, anti-intellectualism is huge in America and always has been. Asimov wrote about it. Richard Hofstadter wrote a book on it in 1963.
Simply put, if we polled American parents "do you want your child to be the greatest quarterback in history or the greatest scientist", who thinks scientist would win. It might, but not if we limit the question to sons.
Yes we had some success attracting people to STEM after Sputnik. But it was a rarity. Largely speaking Americans do not value scientists and engineers enough. We see what Tom Brady or Tiger Woods does as generational greatness we could never hope to achieve, we saw a Stephen Hawking and think "that's good, but anyone could do it".
Love this. Celebrity culture. Will be interesting to see how we evolve/devolve when kids are finding more and more emerging ways to make money. 20,000 Instagram followers and you’ve got a career.... Tik Tok. Etc. amazon. Resellers. On and on. work smart not hard blah blah blah
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Yes, I used athletics but it can be more. I don't get celebrity culture. I do not understand "influencers" or the rest of the modern celebrity culture. But there is a ton of money to be made by Hiltons and Kardashians.
Agreed but the broader point Marv isn’t the kardashians - there’s a ton of money to be made by nobodies using the same outlets. My ten year old daughter was showing me a kid making six figures who paints squishy toys. ridiculous. she's more her idol than anyone on tv. I think more and more kids are going to purse non traditional, entrepreneurial paths going forward thereby eating into stem and more traditional education and careers, especially if there’s no tuition correction in the offing. Some of these schools are 70k per year
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The market values the products that the scientists and engineers are able to develop, but the salespeople and CEOs and the suits make all the money, not the scientists and engineers.
Of course what you say about the German scientists is true, especially the ones who were called Wernher von Braun.
By the way, I think you’re talking about attracting STEM students on the university level. I was talking about K to 12. That curriculum change.
Even at that level it is hard. 1) parents need to encourage it 2) kids have to enjoy it. For too many kids taking classes that allow more time for certain extra curricular activities is important. We sign kids up at 5 for t ball or basketball, we need them attending science camps instead.
I wonder how many gradeschool teachers hated math and science. That would likely be another issue, conceivably worse. The thing with math and science related to vocational trades later on, is how much math and science do you really need? My guess is for most trades a good solid basis is all you need. Just tie it to reality. like construction. Building stuff. Measuring chlorine in the swimming pool. Talking about all the junk in our water. In our air. Stuff that can be made real to everyone.
Heck, how many grade school teachers have any subject matter expertise at all? At that level it's all about pedagogy.
HS Chemistry though.
True enough, it is pedagogy. And that can carry a good teacher through any content, I think. I’m looking more at, what if the teacher can’t even confront math or science because she’s so turned off by it?
I've taught calculus concepts to middle-school students. This was a remedial class for 8th graders who had failed the same class twice already, and instead of teaching the procedural steps I stepped back and started having them derive those steps from first principles. It was painful at first, but a good chunk of that class went on to pass the class and get caught back up despite the first quarter of the year making very little progress on the stated curriculum goals.
I've seen success starting even earlier than that teaching the basics of complicated math concepts that will come later, you can start talking about rates of change with toddlers. Deep subject matter expertise is really important and like this conversation points out it's often lacking especially at younger grades. Any reasonably competent person can learn to teach 3rd grade math, but to see what's coming and how to inculcate the kinds of logical thinking and problem solving that will make later grades easier is hard. We don't prepare our elementary teachers to do that, and it has lasting effects.
On a related tangent, I think the most important thing schools should focus on is learning how to learn. As a few folks pointed out above, we're going to make the same mistake as the last generations did if what we learn from the current reality is that kids need to learn the mechanics of coding. That profession is changing rapidly, any specific skills learned now won't be useful 10+ years from now, but very clearly computers are going to be even more central to a lot of jobs for current school kids so understanding them and understanding how to continue learning outside a structured school environment are what will really pay off.
