I’m an older guy with younger kids so to some extent I live vicariously through my friends, many of whom have children who are now entering the work force and some of those children can’t find jobs. We’re not in a recession, the economy is expanding, new positions are supposedly being added every day, but the sons and daughters of my friends aren’t generally getting those jobs so they are staying in school or going back to school, joining the Peace Corps., whatever. Everyone is rattled by this. Kids don’t want to move home and parents don’t want to have them move home. Student debt continues to increase. Everyone wants to get on with the lives they thought they were promised — the lives they’d signed up for and earned.
What changed?
Everything changed. Well everything except our personal perspectives, I suppose, which is why we’re so surprised to be where we are today. And to a large extent something else that didn’t change was the perspective of those people we count on, or think we can count on, to keep us out of trouble as a society.
This came to mind over the weekend when I watched an interview with President Obama by Kara Swisher of Re/Code and formerly with the Wall Street Journal. Obama had come to Silicon Valley for this and that including meeting with some Stanford students and, of course, with Kara Swisher. He’s a very smooth guy. I’d like to interview him someday, but I’m afraid he hasn’t a clue, really, about how technology and society actually work together.
The part of the interview that stood out for me was when President Obama talked about how we all need to learn to code. The video’s embedded above though you have to get about 19 minutes in to reach the tech part. President Obama’s two daughters are into coding, maybe a bit late but still into it, he said, and so should be every other American below a certain age and maybe above that age, too.
It’s computer literacy all over again.
About 20 years ago, for those who remember, we were all very concerned about what was called computer literacy, which was supposed to mean learning how to code. This was shortly after Al Gore had torn from the grasp of Bob Taylor and Bob Kahn the label of having invented the Internet. Personal computers were being sold by the ton thanks to $400 rebates from Microsoft, and just as Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce could only imagine a home computer being used for recipe storage (and so Intel passed on inventing the PC) the policy wonks of the early 1990s thought we all ought to learn to write software because that’s what computers are for, right?.
It didn’t happen of course and thank God for that. Imagine a nation of 350 million hackers.
The Wisdom of Crowds rightly interpreted computer literacy’s concept of learning to code as learning to use a computer. It was simple as that. Along came the Internet and the World Wide Web and we were off on a decade-long burst of improved productivity thanks to the new box on all our desks. Apps got more useful and browsers appeared and, yes, we could build our own web sites but that wasn’t coding, it was just using a menu-based app and creating for awhile 20-something millionaires along with our MySpace pages.
If this time is different, it’s because we’re being scared, rather than enticed, into coding. Malia and Natasha are supposed to be doing this to fight the STEM worker shortage that doesn’t actually exist and to justify immigration reforms, some of which (unlimited H1-Bs) will only hurt our economy. Don’t forget those kids in Finland who learn math better than we do, somehow without continual standardized testing and those German kids, too, who beat our asses while studying for only half a day right up to High School. Let’s all learn to code!
It’s time to be afraid, we’re told. Be very afraid. Every policy these days seems to be based in some way on the politics of fear.
I saw an ad the other day for a local college. Their pitch was “over 95 percent of our students are able to find work within a year of graduation.” A YEAR!!! I’m sure many of those graduates didn’t get the jobs they really wanted, either.
Here’s the problem. Smart kids can go to good schools, get a good education, go to college, get degrees and still unable to find work in their community or their chosen field. I have a friend who has two college educated kids who can’t find work. They have started a family retail business to help their kids make a living.
An alarming number of engineering graduates can’t find work. These students have taken all the important STEM classes society says are important. They have strong math and science skills… and they can’t find work.
We’ve been shipping millions of jobs offshore for years — lots of manufacturing jobs and the engineering and technical jobs needed to support them. We can improve education and double the number of college graduates who have math, science, and engineering degrees — and most of those will still be unable to find work. While education can be better, sure, the real problem is demand has dried-up.
US workers cost too much, we’re told. Benefit and entitlement costs per employee have gone through the roof. The biggest offender is of course health care. And what big industry is hiring the most people? Healthcare! What happens when the market and economy can no longer bear the cost of healthcare? That will be hit with serious cost cuts too.
Today if you want to steer your kids to a career with good employment — it would be healthcare. However when they are middle aged they’ll probably have to find new work, too. As more hospitals and medical practices are combined and consolidated there will be an increasing focus on revenue generation. Obviously this is in direct conflict with the market’s need to reduce the cost of healthcare. Something’s gonna give.
The intrinsic problem here is parasites, but what in our present society constitutes a parasite? Tony Soprano — one of my go-to entrepreneurial role models — was a parasite in that his success required a healthy host and Tony knew it. You can only steal so much before the host is compromised or even killed. If Tony was going to steal or extort or otherwise illegally take money out of the economy, well he wanted that money to be backed by the full faith and credit of the US government — by a healthy host. Same for the banking and mortgage crisis of 2008 where the bankers took more and more until the host they were sucking dry — the American homeowner — could no longer both pay and survive. Tony Soprano was smarter than the bankers.
As individuals — and even as a society — our greatest opportunity lies these days in entrepreneurism, in creating like my friends did a startup — a family business. We need jobs and startups are where most of the new jobs come from. What used to be freedom from a big employer and a chance to follow your dream is now more of a safety net for the creative unemployed. It’s more important than ever.
And I’m far from the only one to realize this. My PBS project I mentioned a few days ago is Startup America, a TV series that began with my Not in Silicon Valley Startup Tour back in 2010. We’ve been following 32 tech startups for five years and will present some of their stories thanks to WNET, PBS, and Salesforce.com. A lot of these companies fail of course, yet still they are inspiring stories that teach great lessons and give me real hope for the future of our economy and our country. It’s the opposite of fear. It’s the politics of optimism and hope.
Speaking as one with a home business… one of the essentials for being an entrepreneur, once you’re past the age of maybe 30, is health insurance even if you don’t work for a large corporation.
This is where “Obamacare” is helpful. Otherwise you have to marry someone with a full time job that comes with actual health insurance benefits.
Medical coverage is a major cost, in fact, I would estimate that last year it was my largest cost, overall (family coverage in the Northeast). So if you want more entrepreneurs and small businesses, you have to do something to seriously lower the cost of health care as well as increasing access, and Congress won’t allow that. Nor has President Obama seriously pushed for it since the negotiations ended.
Most of the Northeast already had high health care costs because of their overregulation and mandates. For most of the country, ObamaCare means much higher costs for someone in your situation.
It also has led directly to job cuts and more part-time work as businesses are penalized for every worker without health insurance, for those working at least 30 hours a week.
Some relief is in sight for those states that didn’t set up their own exchanges, as the Supreme Court is set to rule that the Obama Administration illegally handed out subsidies in those states. Without the subsidies, there is no employer mandate, and businesses would be free to hire full-time since they can’t be penalized for an employee who takes a subsidy if no subsidies are available. Also people would not be required to purchase government rated health insurance if the costs go too high.
This is nonsense. How will deregulating insurance make health care services one cent less costly? Insurance is expensive because the services are expensive, and because (subsidized) employee insurance (and medicare) keeps the costs up. Individuals cannot afford insurance unless they are in groups. The only real way, other than cost regulation, to keep costs down is to make insurance ILLEGAL so everyone has to pay out of pocket–we’ll see how much healthcare people decide to purchase then. But since we already have this system, we’re stuck with its bad affects. We can only minimize them by spreading the costs around.
After ObamaCare passed, why did insurance costs rise? It stands to reason that costs could go down with a reversal.
You have actually answered your own question, when you say everyone should pay for their own health care. This keeps costs down by making the payer consider cost more. The reason more regulation is adding to cost, is because the regulations are requiring insurance companies to cover more and more items.
ObamaCare effectively bans HSA catastrophic plans where the customer was paying more out of pocket.
MikeN, I think you are confused a little about the cost of health insurance. The cost of health insurance has remained steady for the past 3 years. You can check the BLS statistics for healthcare inflation to verify this.
What has increased has been the individual’s responsibility. Not only are the individuals are asked to contribute a larger proportion of the health insurance premium, but they are also being encouraged to forego care through the use of high deductibles, high co-pays and coinsurance.
Unfortunately, ObamaCare did not do anything to curb the rise of the high deductible plans that place barriers for care. The bronze plans on the exchanges are $7,000 deductibles plans per individual. That’s crazy as the people who can only afford a bronze plan are the ones who do not have $7,000 to cover the deductible.
No, they have not remained steady, despite what the BlS says. People could get family plans for $200 a month or less. Many of these have gone up by hundreds of dollars if not over a thousand. Also, the bronze plans that are supposedly staying steady in price or even dropping, is a bogus study. What they are doing is not comparing a plan someone has with the same plan the next year, but instead looking at the lowest cost plans in an exchange. So you could say, your price hasn’t gone up because you can go and buy a different plan at a lower price. These other plans are ones that are limiting networks and taking a chance to try and build market share while the government is footing the bill by offering a bailout of any losses.
Obamacare did one thing: It got rid of pre-existing condition clauses, which rendered all health insurance as conceptually something in the abstract. No other proposal this side of socialized system addresses that. With those provisions, face it, you are paying for insurance, but you didn’t know if you were covered, when you most needed it. This then lead to people not paying their hospital bills, going bankrupt, further driving up the cost.
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Those provisions drove insurance companies to hire tons of administrators and lawyers to work to try to deny you of coverage every time you had a major illness. The cost of those people ballooned insurance cost: Canada’s medicare system had less administrative cost than Blue Cross of New England.
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The easiest way to fix this problem is to remove 2 words from the legislation that created Medicare: “over 65”.
That would make us much like all the other first world nations.
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If you want to keep your existing private plan, go ahead – you’ll be double covered.
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I think some people get hung up on ideological implications instead of working the problem pragmatically. Some people just don’t want socialized anything, even if it is the pragmatic thing to do in some situations. And really, all forms of insurance are a form of socialism: I pay my insurance premium, you have an accident, some of my money goes to fix your car: or as Marx might have said, ‘from each according to their surplus to each according to their need’ (I don’t know if he actually said that). The reason the socialized systems make sense is because the biggest group pays the lowest per capita amounts, and the biggest group is the entire country.
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As a pragmatist, I’ve long held that ideology, adhered to, eventually leads to nihilism, no matter what the ideology is.
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Back in 2008 when this was a campaign issue, I found several OECD studies that list the public and private healthcare expenditures for all advanced nations. The U.S. government spent more, per capita, on health insurance than all the other governments, save Norway. By some reckoning, France has the Cadillac system: it is also very expensive. Yet, according to those OECD studies, if you could snap your fingers and tomorrow we woke up with France’s system, GOVERNMENT SPENDING HEALTHCARE SPENDING PER CAPITA WOULD GO DOWN. France’s expensive cadillac system would cover EVERYONE and you we could all get a TAX CUT.
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….Buuutttt that would mean we had a socialized system. However, for the true ideologue, you could still go out and buy your private health insurance if you wanted, but some people you don’t like, such as the poor and the ignorant, you know, “those people”, they’d have health insurance. So debates and complaints continue.
MikeN, you are confused. Health costs have risen even before the ACA was written and passed. Go back and look at the numbers, look at the news stories. The cost of healthcare are well documented and have nothing really in common with the ACA.
In fact, insurance companies are using the ACA against the public at large to make even more money.
At this time it may be all that an fix this is a single payer system.
Regarding deregulation as the cure for everything, it isn’t. We’ve seen time and again where businesses once regulated turn against their customers, the people paying for a good or service, and instead cater to their shareholders.
Look at the airline industry and see the state it is in as one example.
Tony Kyle, those are excuses being used to blame insurance companies for the changes made by ObamaCare. Sure health care costs went up before it passed. There has been health care inflation higher than regular inflation for a long time. However, there is a different between a plan going from $180 a month to $280 a month over 6 years, as mine did to going to $800 per month under ObamaCare.
Timka sums this all up well.
Some people just want to be right instead of get it right.
Politics of fear and arrogance versus reality.
Healthcare costs are expensive because the person getting the service is not the person paying for the service…simple as that. If someone else is paying, you don’t care what it costs.
And insurance SURE AS HECK WENT UP! I got lucky and was able to retire at 51. I had to buy family insurance and thought it was expensive at $780/month. Then came Obamacare and now I’m paying $1400/mo. with a ridiculous deductible. And oh by the way, I was one that didn’t get to keep my plan.
Listen first 15 minutes of Jaron Lanier speach and you will EXACTLY understand what is happening.
All should listen his speech.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzQNFcXnjrA
@ Milan I listened to it. He’s just whining that that he wants the benefits of technology to flow to him, without his having to make the effort to use it himself. He’d rather be playing his so-called new music.
How will deregulating insurance make health care services one cent less costly?
Because Obamacare (and decades of earlier government interventions) have loaded all insurance with mandates: birth control, pregnancy, free check-ups, pre-existing condition coverage, alternative medicine, drug and alcohol rehab, and who knows what else. Every mandate raises the cost of all policies.
I don’t understand how the economy can be healthy when over 46 million people are getting food assistance:
http://frac.org/reports-and-resources/snapfood-stamp-monthly-participation-data/
Something doesn’t add up…
Americans love to use selective composition to sound as if they’re fair and decent people while they’re selling you the idea of emptying your pockets as a ceremonial offering to Progress.
For every noun in a news article, you are well-advised to ask, “Whose ______”? Whose economy is doing well (and whose economy doesn’t exist to whom, and why)?
It has just become too damn hard for people to start up even the simplest of businesses in this country. When governments are issuing citations to kids who are setting up lemonade stands, we obviously have a problem. Think that’s extreme? Go and set up a hot dog stand and come back and tell everyone how many permits you needed to get just to sling an already cooked piece of meat.
Parasites are a problem, all right. The problem is that most of the parasitic activity is completely legal.
As long as you’re perfectly okay with health code being enforced by vigilantes, and you’re willing to lose limbs for serving bad product, I’m all for it. Dealers in bad faith would be more readily identifiable that way.
So? Are you willing to deal in a community, or are you just a whiny little entitled brat who wants to bully other people into giving you status and respect that you’re clearly unwilling to earn?
If think we’re comparing Apples and Oranges – the simple fact is that we have made “living” a lot more expensive these days. Think back to when you were in your 20’s … did you have a $600 phone, were you spending $120/month on cell phone service, $140/month on cable TV and Internet, Hugo Boss Jeans etc … when you add up the costs of living these days and even if you scale them back into 1970’s dollars – the plain fact is that we all spend a lot more these days. Sure – my health insurance in those days was about $120/month for a family and my car was a $800 machine that I was pleased to ride around in and cost $8 to pump gas into for the weekend.
Basically it’s not just healthcare – there are all sorts of costs these days that we didn’t have when we were our kids ages – if you wanted a job then you looked in the newspaper … these days you need to sign up on a job site, brush up your social media profiles and get a good haircut and a fancy suit for the interview.
I think you are looking at this problem from the wrong end – look at the people who ARE working and getting rich, bankers, lawyers, politicians, anyone with even minimal talent who can get their foot in the door to upper management – you get rich these days by exploiting other people. That’s the only real talent that has any economic value in America – STEM graduates are worth nothing because they can be easily replaced by cheaper workers elsewhere.
You want career advice kids? Develop a talent that can’t be exported, if you can’t become a banker, lawyer or politician then become an auto-mechanic or a plumber. As for learning to code … that’s handy if you want to learn to hack automated teller machines …
In the “old days” we had to spend hundreds to AT&T for long distance charges. We also purchased our food at supermarkets (high cost). Today we have Wallmart – and for all of its issues, it means that food and staples are cheaper than ever before. What I’m saying is that there is equivalency everywhere – living costs have shifted but remained nearly the same.
Your right about long distance charges but wrong that it mattered. Since it was so high no one make long distance calls except maybe twice a year. Also local phone charges were low with service packs for you area. Supermarkets brought prices down not up. Sure, Walmart has now brought them down even further.
Did you forget about near-zone, far-zone? True long distance calling was cheaper than calling across town! In-state long distance was prohibitively expensive, but calling just across that state border was much cheaper. Don’t forget all the charges for 3-way calling, call waiting, etc. The “telephone bill” was always over $100 and closer to $200 – in 1970/1980 dollars.
Recently I checked the price my father paid for a 1977 Caprice Classic – the car of the year. He shopped around, wanted no standard features other than crushed velvet cloth and air conditioner (he was a mechanic and added his own cruise control) forced dealers to bid against each other. He paid $5,500. It was a beautiful car, though the 305 engine was flawed, my father was able to fix it.
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Online calculators say that $5,500 in 1977 is worth a little more than $19,000 today. However, the same size car might cost about $21,000 today, but maybe you could get it for around the same. However, today’s cars are better. They have better quality thanks to Japanese Lean Manufacturing concepts, they fit better, have galvanized steel, get better gas mileage, but most importantly they are safer: anti-lock breaks, traction control stability control, air bags.
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So I agree with you. The cost of living is about the same. To help control my weight, I have a fairly consistent menu of a diet for weekdays. It generally cost me about $40 a week for that (in suburban Kansas City). In the scheme of things, that is incredibly cheap.
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You buy a great smart phone from Motorola today for less than $200 and buy comprehensive phone service for $40 a month. That includes long distance. I recall, roughly, my old phone bills 10 years ago were about $35 a month. But now when I’m at Target, and I see new tires on sale for $50, I can check my smart phone and see that they are $25 at some other place. So, the smart phone saved me money. If I still end up in an accident, I can use my smart phone to call for help. If the cost stay the same or increase slightly then we are still better off because we have higher functionality.
This is what is happening to American IT jobs. Corporate America is firing American IT workers and replacing them with imported temporary H1-B visa workers. Corporate America with the help of the politicians they’ve “persuaded” $$$ are doing this to American workers. Then they act SHOCKED, just SHOCKED that American STEM graduates are unemployed. They are selling us out, they are pulling the rug out from under us, and then they pretend to care. They go to schools to encourage students to study in STEM fields while at the same time they are doing everything they can to undermine their future employment. Crocodile tears!
Edison is one example, but other corporations have been doing this for years and it is getting worse for STEM graduates. Corporations tell their employees to have loyalty when the top executives are always planning on getting rid of them, changing the laws to make it easier to get rid of their staff and replace them with imported labor who will get paid substandard wages and no benefits and no retirement. The people at the top get grossly inflated salaries, fat pensions, lots of perks, and treat their workers badly.
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2886369/so-cal-edisons-it-layoffs-are-abuse-of-h-1b-program-says-us-lawmaker.html
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-20150222-column.html
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2879083/southern-california-edison-it-workers-beyond-furious-over-h-1b-replacements.html
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2888047/us-to-allow-some-h-1b-worker-spouses-to-work.html
This is what happened already to everyone else’s job years ago. You thought you were immune, but you weren’t. Now the other workers, whose jobs were outsourced years ago, at least get to buy cheap foreign-made stuff so they don’t need to earn as much. Get used to it.
Thank you for writing about this problem many of us are facing.
As we get older, Health care is indeed a growing business to get employment in.
Also, David’s point about the very high cost of health care in America must be frustrating for those wanting to start up a business for themselves. Many other countries of course, do not have this obstacle.
In Australia, it costs me about $1,000 a year for full hospital cover and even in “poor” countries like Italy, it’s free.
However, the best industry in Australia to get employment is in the building industry, as this country has so many wealthy people immigrating there and they all want new homes. Not sustainable of course, but easily pays the weekly bills, at least for a while but distorts the whole economy.
As you say, we need people to create new products and industries by people willing and able to do so.
For a number of reasons, this is happening less and less; sadly.
Madness has set in. Thank you for your relevant articles and staying sane, painful as it must be for you at times.
“An alarming number of engineering graduates can’t find work.”
Hey Bob, what do you think of Mike Rowe’s ideas about the push for everyone to “get a college education” has marginalized a lot of perfectly good jobs that don’t require a college degree: http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/poster/
Bob,
I don’t think everyone needs to learn to code so they can get a job coding. But I still think it’s good to try to teach as many people as possible to code at least a little bit. Why? Because there are millions of people in the US alone who don’t have the foggiest notion how computers work, and many of those people are responsible for making important decisions regarding computer-related projects, or providing specifications and feedback for projects that will be implemented primarily on computers.
In other words, people who don’t grasp the most basic concepts of computing are often in charge of making decisions about which computer-related projects to approve, or providing critical information to the people who’ll be implementing those projects.
If you can get people to understand the most basic concepts (e.g., computers are big calculators that do lots of obscenely simple instructions very, very quickly) perhaps you can improve the quality of decision-making and information provided by non-technical people.
Sure, there will always be people who simply can’t understand even the basics of computing, and there will be others who promptly forget everything they ever learned. But *some* people will learn a bit about how computers really work, and those people may some day be in position to make better decisions and provide better information to the people actually doing the work.
I can’t help thinking that will make some future technical person’s job just a little bit easier.
What would be the purpose to teach USA students to write code? A USA worker costs at least $50 an hour (pay plus all the extras). An offshore coder in a distant land costs $20 an hour. Which do you think any, and almost every use corporation choose to hire?
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Therein lies the problem. This problem is applicable to many technical fields. We can claim we need better education; more math, science, engineering, and coders. If we’re not going to hire them, what is the purpose?
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We need to do a number of things to level the economic playing field. Here are a few things we need to do:
1. Seriously reduce the cost of healthcare
2. Simplify the tax code. Give businesses tax credits for people paid above the living wage. Give them tax penalties for paying below the living wage or when sending the work offshore.
3. Limit the total amount a business can be taxed. Look at the total tax revenue generated by a business (federal, state, local, sales, and employee income tax). Set maximum rate that is reasonable and globally competitive.
4. Keep FICA, but eliminate most of the other overhead costs of having a domestic worker.
5. Put a tariff on good and services that come from countries without a social umbrella system. Apply that money directly into the social security and medicare trust funds.
All countries and regions should be as self sufficient as possible. That implies employing their own nationals before those from outside. When governments send too much aid overseas, there is an outcry. Why is it OK for commercial organizations to send so much “aid” overseas? Companies that do this simply to boost profits should be taxed out of existence (and let’s not use the vacuous excuse that it is just “business”). There is no difference between this and the massive tax evasion carried out by companies making profits in one country but only paying minimal tax offshore. I’m afraid I think it should be lampposts and piano wire for the culprits.
Put two items together:
1. The stock market is booming. Companies are doing well.
2. Income for lower and middle wage earners has stagnated or declined.
So where’s the money? The ONLY answer is that it’s gone to the upper classes, who are primarily financial managers. Managing finances is, of course, essential to running a business. But when finance takes the place of producing real products or services, you have a “tail wagging the dog” situation. Eventually, this system must collapse.
I gave up on the IT corporate world and started my own business in my early forties last summer. Its the best thing I ever did. And the need for my product and service is incredible, a total untapped market. BUT, it is so darn hard, not the business side but the government side. The rules, regs, taxes etc. Its almost like they DON’T want you to start a business. Now I am getting busy enough that I want to hire. But it turns out that will COST me. So where is the incentive. BTW I am in Canada so I can only comment on how it works here but if we are the engine of the economy, give us some gas.
This can’t be true. I just read that all the red tap kept people from starting any business?
Yup, Same darn thing here only ten years ago. Eventually stalled out and had to merge into a larger organization because a two person company firing on all cylinders sometimes just can’t make it over the start-up hump. It is called barrier to entry and to riff on other things Mr. Cringley has said, the large corporations (IBM) have a vested interest in keeping the barriers high. So while they may gripe about the regulations, they just mean when they apply to them. They actively campaign to keep those regulations high for small businesses. For instance, a million dollars of liability insurance is a significant cost by percentage when you are a startup looking at $100k in yearly revenue with the average receipt of less than $120. But it is nothing when you are a multi-million dollar transnational with average receipt on the order of $10k. Yet that is what large companies tell politicians/customers is the minimum they should be requiring. And there is no differentiation between whether you are selling drugs that can cause liver failure or staplers.
Just some edits… sorry, I can’t help myself: I think the younger daughter is Sasha, not Natasha and in the paragraph referencing Tony Soprano, I think it should be feed, not fee?
the operative word for enterpreneurship is “hungry.” as in sports cliches. “Well, Howard, if we’re hongry enough, we’re good enough, we will win.” Hongry. “We jest wasn’t hongry enough.”
the enterpreneur-to-be has to want it. be hungry enough. either highly desirous of making a change… or truly hungry, about at the end of the rope, desperate enough to try anything they think they can do.
I don’t have it. I hope I never get hongry enough to charge in there and run through that line. lots of folks get flattened before the second opponent. I am a smell away from a nice pension in a secure spot, and I am doing good work on our edge.
we have spent two or more generations teaching folks like me that they need to be good at something, they should work hard ( which has sort of fallen by the wayside, ) and if they are good, they will do fine, just fine. we’ve taught folks to not be hungry enough.
not excited enough about something to dive into it and put all kinds of fun stuff off.
I don’t know how you teach “hongry enough.” but that’s worth examining.
I’ve learned enough in a lot of things to make it if our outfit collapses. but I haven’t learned hungry enough to charge in grinning.
I share your anxiety. My 22 year old STEM graduate landed a good job, but there is another, a sharp kid, but not STEM on the way. A column by Robert Reich in last weekend’s paper (SF Chron) talked about how he used to like free trade agreements, because they were about expanding exports, and more jobs, but now they are all about corporations controlling their intellectual property while making it easier to move jobs overseas. Good for the companies, not for the people. This link probably does not work: https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/reich/article/How-trade-agreements-boost-the-rich-6090215.php
Coding, despite what was said in that interview, could (in the real world) mean something as simple as knowing how to build a spreadsheet, not necessarily writing an app!
The simple truth is that basic computer literacy nowadays means knowing your way around an application or two.
Learn the tools of business, and you will have a head start in any business no matter what your role is in it.
Bob,
First a disclaimer or conflict of interest statement, if you will. I work in academic medicine. You may think this the most hidebound and slow moving of situations, and in the main you would be correct. However, I am an advocate for disruptive technology and disruptive educational methods. In that way, and possibly in others, I am perhaps less hidebound, than some of my colleagues. I am a mentor to several tech startups, and I think we need to completely revamp much of our approach to healthcare or sickcare in the US.
I can say this unequivocally. The SINGLE largest impediment to quality improvement in healthcare is our utter dependence on IT personnel who can code and understand the guts of the system. Example: I find a weakness in our approach to critically ill patients in the ICU I run. The weakness can be eliminated with an update to our standardized order set. I put in the request to change our order set. It goes into a queue that is prioritized by a group of IT managers and business managers, and if there are any physicians on the group they are far removed from ICU work and don’t realize that a) we believe in moving fast when lives are on the line and b) don’t get that this little fix could perhaps save the lives of 20 people a year. It takes 6 months to a year to get a simple change made. The limitation exists because there are only so many people around (on the payroll) who actually have the skill to make the changes in the EMR. Only my colleagues and I have the knowledge and skill to determine what needs to be done to save lives, but the IT guys who don’t even get what may or may not be life saving are the ones who determine whether or not to take the action. They just see another request for a coding change. As you can imagine, medicine evolves rapidly on all fronts, so these guys are overwhelmed by the sheer number of requests. The IT tail is wagging the dog of caring for human beings.
I am a staunch believer that fluency in some coding language should be a pre-requisite for entry to medical school. Whether there is a true shortage of IT personnel, or not, they are not making it to positions where I see a dire need; in hospitals all over this country people die because there is not enough IT expertise deployed to fix electronic medical record systems that are now mandatory. In my mind, it is time for physicians to take back control of ensuring that patients get the best, most necessary interventions in a timely fashion – as in when the patients need them, not when IT finally gets around to it. I think we can only do that if we adequately speak the language and can actually do the taking.
Should that translate into all Americans being fluent in programming? I don’t know, for sure, but you tell me in this wired world how many times you bump up against a problem that you might be able to fix, if you had the coding know how (maybe you do). It’s daily for me, both at work and at home. And more and more of what we do on a daily basis finds its way to the cloud every day. How are we to work in our modern environment without the knowledge? Or do you hope for IT professionals to be what doctors once were – the sole arbiters of medical knowledge and wielders of it, leaving everyone else at their mercy and unable to determine their own fates? I control my own health, and we all have the opportunity to do that, because we all have the ability to seek out best health practices from reliable web-based resources. I don’t control my technology fate in any way other than that I follow blogs like yours, and I seek for the latest improvements and attempt to put them to work. That doesn’t feel to me like control.
You may ask why I haven’t learned code, if I so strongly believe that we should all have the knowledge and skill to determine our own fates. The simple answer is that I have tried. But I do not have the hours to devote. I am busy practicing, teaching, and researching medicine. Most adults actually are busy practicing what they already have learned or been trained in. That is why I advocate that coding should be taught in elementary school, right along with reading and writing in English. The thought processes would be invaluable to our populace. Think about that – a population who actually learned logic from the beginning of their education. Real control of one’s world and ability to manipulate it today and tomorrow depends on knowledge that is currently held by a tiny minority of the population. I think that should change.
Coding is like performing surgery. In your example, a simple code change that may save 20 lives per year might kill 200 lives per year if done incorrectly. Software is very expensive and difficult to maintain and enhance.
Should we also educate all our kids to be surgeons?
Steven , the key is not for everyone to be a programmer, but for some company to build a highly configurable EMR , that lets people like you that some extra education on the system – adapt it to your needs.
Maybe there’s such system. But my guess is that whatever the case is, it would be extremely expensive and complex for a hospital to shift systems.
There has to be boogieman for government (read politicians) to protect us (read citizens) from. If we are not afraid we do not need protection; if we don’t need protection, we don’t need them and they loose power. Fear is a politicians life blood.
I’ve spent a lot of time studying jobs in America simply because I’m a tech worker, age 57 with 3 decades of experience and I can’t buy an interview, and there are many of us.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/the-obama-administration-has-only-created-400000-jobs/
The link above will take you to a video I created that analyzes every major job occupational group and shows you the gains or losses in each occupational group from 1999 till now.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/did-the-obama-administration-create-any-jobs-at-all/
If you don’t like videos, the same thing can be found in an article via the link above.
http://eeo1charts.keepamericaatwork.com/?page_id=44
In the link above I attempt to tie all data sources such as jobs, GDP, IRS, Self Employed, etc. together to understand why this is happening.
Bob is very accurate when he mentions the jobs being sent offshore.
Problem is, this is only half of the problem.
Think of the jobs going offshore as Blue Collar jobs.
This should leave plenty of good paying white collar jobs, shouldn’t it?
Problem is, the temporary worker visa is displacing Americans in America.
No, I am NOT against immigration.
My last name is a German name and my family immigrated here to Texas many generations ago.
An immigrant is somebody that wants to come to america with whatever they own.
They have no job lined up.
Once they get here, they compete for jobs just like we do, or they form their own businesses, and they grow to become an American.
This temporary worker visa can best be described by analyzing how “scabs” were brought in to break union picket lines in decades past.
These folks already have a job lined up before they even come here, and in many cases, the american who is being displaced from that job is forced to train the immigrant before he, or she is fired.
All should be good for the temporary workers brought in via this, right?
Wrong, as Kumar will attempt to explain in the following video.
http://youtu.be/JdXkqVjsWlg
It turns out they themselves are being scammed by multiple “layers” as Kumar calls them.
In other words, every temporary worker brought in is supposed to be getting paid more than the prevailing wage for each job that they are brought in for.
What is happening is the “sponsor” bringing them in is being paid that money and the crumbs are going to the workers.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/2015_job_map.php
The link above will allow you to view all of these Applications on a map, and in a report that you can print out for any job in America.
http://keepamericaatwork.com/2014_job_map.php
The same thing can be done for any application filed in 2014 as well.
Great work, Virgil. Seems that the corporate liars are winning with regard to importing temporary (lower paid) workers.
Hi Bob,
I helped you out with the initial questionnaire for your Not In Silicon Valley tour – looking forward to finally seeing it on TV.
I do think everyone should learn how to code – but not for the reasons most people say. Just like I think everyone should be taught how to write well, and know math, and study a foreign language, and while we’re at it why not throw in a course or two in entrepreneurial skills. These things help you learn how to think and interact in the world even if they don’t directly contribute to your career choices. Let’s talk about two of them.
Coding helps you think in algorithms. A very useful skill in almost any kind of problem solving. And not everything in the world is defined by an algorithm but knowing them helps you see their limitations too.
Same with enterpreneurship. As a business coach/consultant for 20 years and an enterpreneur for longer I’m well aware that running a business is not for everyone. And thank goodness – if it were, there’d be no one to work for us. But knowing a little about how business works (and perhaps why it’s not for you) makes you a better employee and a more savy consumer. By “better employee” I mean someone who knows their worth to a company and is more able to be in charge of their own career – I don’t mean more subservient.
And on another note, one of the best things we could do for business in the US is to have a single payer health care (not free of course, but with the costs spread across all citizens not just the sick ones). Reduce the vig that the insurance companies take, insist on evidenced based medicine and take Health Insurance away as a line item on every company’s P&L – level’s the playing field in so many ways.
Bob, you hit the nail on the head when you used the term “parasite”. Certainly, many of our problems stem from the “financial shenanigans industry” and its influence on industry and jobs, but I don’t know how you ferret out parasitic activity from useful investment. Some piece of solving the puzzle might be making it difficult to extract wealth from tricking suckers, but I would like to know what a truly fair and free market would look like and how that would move in a society that understands the difference between social and private wealth.
Our country’s wealth is embedded in our skills and confidence and made manifest through the infrastructure that lets those capabilities flow. When we share the cost of that (useful government spending) the economy grows through demand. When money is removed from circulation through dubious investment games (at least partly through tax breaks for the wealthy), history seems to say we don’t do so well.
There is so much work to be done. We have to build out a new energy infrastructure. We have to guarantee our food source. We have to share the planet with a growing population. To do it where opportunity and freedom thrive will be difficult, especially given the headwinds blowing from Vested Interests that need the status quo. Learning to code isn’t the answer, though it’s good to understand viscerally that all technologies are the product of many individual decisions from people, not god boxes and bits that have sway over you. Entrepreneurship in a desert of demand is no answer either.
We need a bigger conversation. What is work, when machines will do more and more of the jobs of survival? What is a non-Marxian good society and how does it enable each of us to reach our potential? What is the point of a life? These questions seem juvenile and pointless, but I believe we are approaching an inflection in our trajectory where we must ask them and get good answers or find ourselves living in some dystopic future.
No recession, but since the last recession, the number of jobs held by American born workers has decreased. ALL of the job growth since then has been thru hiring of immigrants including illegal immigrants. This is despite a substantially higher population that should produce more jobs on its own.
The excess of student aid is causing tuition rates to go even higher as colleges raise prices easily when a third party is paying the bill.
Sorry Mike but excess student aide is not a cause for ever increasing tuition rates.
For example, in 1960 admission to all three levels of public colleges in California was free. Not simply subsidized but free with the exception of books and room and board. By 1986 fees had been added it cost me 66 dollars to attend my first semester at a junior college and 465 dollars to attend my first semester at a CSU. By the time I enrolled in an MA program in the year 2000 the cost of a graduate student had increased to over 400 dollars (six units). Today, a full time undergrad in the CSU system pays 6,400.00 This is an increase of over 10 times what I paid in the early 1990s.
Yet, as costs have increased by a factor of 10 total enrollment both as a percentage of total population under 30 and as an absolute number has continued to increase.
Thus, support for education has decreased while demand has increased.
Regards,
Joe Dokes
The amount many individuals are having to pay is less because of the expanded student aid, Pell grants, tax credits, etc. I remember when Clinton proposed a $10000 tax credit for college, and colleges turned around and captured much of it with tuition increases.
The colleges are finding it too easy to raise costs because a third party is frequently footing the bill, at least initially.
In the first place, the government reports about the state of the US economy are filled with purposeful lies and dubious estimates. They don’t use the methods from past years. These reports are, to put it bluntly, filled with a lot of BS. Politicians discovered a few years back that they don’t have to do a good job to look good. They just have to issue false and deceptive economic reports. If you want to know the truth about the economy, you should go to http://www.shadowstats.com written by John Williams.
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The reason why the economy in the US is so bad is because the government has been taken over by certain members of the rich and powerful. These horrible people are able to bribe and coerce the politicians and bureaucrats to create laws and regulations that unjustly favor the rich and punish the middle class.
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When the US and other governments instituted new trading rules after WWII, they had to choose between free trade and fair trade. Free trade would allow large US companies to profit from open markets and cheap foreign labor. Fair trade would have allowed countries with low labor rates to gradually catch up with the higher wage rates of industrialized countries while protecting these higher paid workers. The rich and powerful prevailed so we got free trade instead of fair trade.
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The only way to improve things, without having a revolution, is for people to vote out the corrupt politicians and vote in honest people. Then large campaign “donations” from corporations and rich people can be outlawed. However, I doubt if that will ever happen. Politicians are too good at hoodwinking the voters.
> the government has been taken over by certain members of the rich and powerful
This happened back in 1776.
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But they have such nice advertising (including movies) that you almost do not mind. Mostly.
1776 was the year of the Declaration of Independence, and the early days of the Revolutionary War. “The war had its origins in the resistance of many Americans to taxes imposed by the British parliament” : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolutionary_War So it was actually a rebellion against the rich and powerful British government.
It’s been know for over 100 years who the parasite is and who the host is.
OK, I’m gonna rant a bit. What changed? Wall Street declared war on the US middle class, that’s what changed. It’s called neoliberalism. Its agenda is real simple: the 0.1% plutocrats get more. More income, more wealth, more power. Everyone else gets less. Every single year of my adult life (I was born in the late 1960s) I’ve seen the plutocrats get more, and the middle class get less. Every. Single. Freaking. Year. Democrats or Republicans, it doesn’t matter — the two-parties-with-one-corporate-master have become twin sockpuppets of a single plutocracy, which spends billions of dollars to buy off our political class. And every single year, the plutocrats get away it. By lying. By saying, “It’s those poor drug addicts! Lock ’em up!” By saying, “It’s those immigrants! Deport ’em!” By saying “It’s those terrorists! Blow ’em up!” By saying, “You middle-class people don’t hack enough! You don’t code enough! You don’t have enough degrees!” Well, I worked hard to get one MA and two PhDs. I learned to code on an Apple II+ (Turbopascal be praised). I pay my taxes and obey the law. And my reward is a broken economy, an auction pretending to be a democracy, massive student debts I will never be able to repay, and a current salary of roughly twelve dollars an hour (I teach for a living). This is my fate, and the fate of tens of millions of other middle class Americans. But I do not counsel despair. Those of us who are American citizens must start fighting for our country’s middle class again. Tax the 0.1% like hell and spend on renewables, let workers join unions and get plutocratic money out of politics, boost funding for public K-12 and college education and get rid of the braindead scam called standardized testing, and 95% of our problems go away.
Neo LIBERALISM? Really?
A timely post since net new business creation is also now in decline for the first time in American history according to the CEO of Gallup. If entrepreneurship is our hope then I’d say we have ourselves a serious problem.
I have a friend that has been reading about most of the industries in the United States. Basically, they are all stagnate. It appears the government has taken money from big business and put barriers in place to hobble the competition. So we have big business that can not fail, rather than the normal replacement by upstarts.
The government has announced 180,000 additional workers to be approved for EAD work authorization in 2015. These are spouses of H1B visa holders, many of who will be working in the tech field.
1. Not many people are “cut out to code”. It takes a certain personality type to be interested enough to put forth the effort.
2. Although entrepreneurism and small business create most of the jobs in America, their pay is nowhere close to how much the big corps pay. If everyone could find a job for ten bucks an hour (almost close to reality) – what would that mean for our country?
I left a Fortune 5 company 8 years ago because I was getting paltry raises (<$1000/year) and for other reasons. Since then I have been unemployed 3 times and have not seen a raise. Now my age is factoring into my job prospects. At least I have a job (emphasis on least).
I see the concern about the “exporting” of STEM jobs to other countries, or H1B migrants. Why is this any different to the exporting of jobs in the textile / clothing industries? Or other manufacturing industries? Of course that means if these jobs were still performed by Americans, we would probably have to pay more than $20 at Wally world for a pair of jeans, or our flat screen TVs might cost a bit more. But we were happy to see all these “overpaid, lazy union jobs” off-shored. But now when they come for my job….
Yup, and you can bet that many of the people who are against the H1B, are all in support of amnesty for illegal immigrants. Maybe we should just declare that H1Bs are doing jobs Americans wont do.
MikeN,
If the H1Bs agree to mow our lawns for pesos on the dollar , sure we will condone the H1Bs too. But those goshdarned H1Bs are putting their grubby brown paws on my lunch money. No brudder , that won’t do…..
We need to get back all sorts of jobs, from manufacturing to coding and everything else. We can’t become a nation of army ants, policing the world and soldiering, while depending on everyone else for computers to clothing. The rest of the world is not our friend. We need to stop allowing ourselves to be intimidated by slander. Americans invented much of the modern world and we didn’t suddenly become stupid or lazy just because China and India wanted our lunch money.
This whole point of this post is to drum up interest in the PBS Startup America series I’m guessing. It certainly piqued my curiosity, when will it air?
Bob, learning to code doesn’t mean your going to become a programmer. We teach math even all the way though the middle of college even though 99% of the students learned all the math they will ever need by 8 grade. Learning to code give a student a glimpse into being a programmer that otherwise would never even consider. That’s what I took away from the president.
Seth Meyers said yesterday “the Kardashian family has signed a deal, keeping them on the air for 4 more years, and paying them 100 million dollars. So let that be a lesson…if you really work hard, and apply yourself…you are wasting your time.”
“if you really work hard, and apply yourself…you are wasting your time.”
Ronc, if that saying isn’t on a t-shirt or bumper sticker, it damn well ought to be.
And using the Kardashians as a benchmark for economic analysis is delightfully, rib-splittingly funny. Yet simultaneously depressing. It’s hard to be depressed while smiling.
As I stumble into my decrepitude, I find the answer to more and more of life’s problems, re your illustration of the Kardashians, is brandy.
Wow, another T-shirt: “As I stumble into my decrepitude, I find the answer to more and more of life’s problems is brandy.” As you walk by, wearing it, you can watch people pull out their phones to look up decrepitude.
Coding as a measure of computer literacy?
Waste of time. Apart from extreme optimization scenarios, the best code written today is automatically generated by machine. Most coding jobs (here or overseas) will be gone within a generation.
This has been a common refrain ever since assembly programming was invented. Assemblers freed programmers from writing machine code, compilers freed programmers from writing assembly code. Yet, programs continue to be written by humans (in ever higher level languages) and the complexity and bulk of these programs never decreases. So, no, machines did not eliminate programmers half a century ago, and they will not eliminate programmers half a century hence.
Way back in the 1980s, the UK had the “BBC Computer Literacy Project”, a series of educational TV programmes. It was about reducing fear of computers and one of the spinoffs was the BBC Micro (from Acorn). Schools and rich parents bought BBC Micros; less rich families bought Clive Sinclair’s creations; adventurers bought a Dragon or Commodore, whatever.
All of those micros helped to create a generation that was less afraid of computers. Some people became familiar with application programmes (even if it was just loading a game from cassette tape) and a handful learned to program.
The computers were accessible, ran BASIC in various forms. I’ve worked with many people who got the computer urge from playing with a Beeb or Speccy as a teenager. That sort of creative computing has been revived with the Raspberry Pi, and good luck to it.
The generation of programmers (and other various geeks) who learned on a micro has been very influential in the UK economy. They amount to about 0.1% of BBC Micro users in 1980s UK schools. They created games, OS emulators, mobile phones, medical appliances etc or just run services that work.
Of the other 99.9%, some didn’t get it at all and others found it interesting/useful to varying degrees. Most kids had so little exposure to make much difference. When the kids went to work or college in the late 1980s and 1990s, they’d have found an IBM clone or (much less often) a Mac on the desk. Most that they had learned about the BBC Micro and its applications was pretty useless. Hopefully there was the confidence to have a go at something different.
You can’t teach a child to code unless s/he is ready and willing to learn about logic, maths and (ideally) philosophy. Given that the world will have changed after teaching a child to code, why try to teach changing code? If you teach logic and maths well, young people have the basis to learn programming or system administration, whatever, at any time in life. Make mini engineers, not code monkeys.
Re: “Make mini engineers, not code monkeys”. Include a little probability theory, and all the casinos and lotteries go bankrupt. Would that I could live to see the day!
One cannot be more plain; one cannot be more simple than to speak the truth; something that we in North America just cannot do anymore. Giving China most favored nation status, removing tariffs on dirt cheap imported goods went so far beyond making lazy North American companies and workers more competitive. It set the stage for everything said above. Money leaves North America to Asia and we borrow it back to pay the Government’s bills. Making Asia the most financially powerful entity on the planet (determined by the flow of USDs out of the USA and goods made by someone else’s children flowing into the USA) is SIMPLY NOT A GOOD NATIONAL ECONOMIC STRATEGY!
How is it possible that America can get so hood-winked by their leadership as to believe a solution comes from their Leader talking about Healthcare jobs being the future, or Coding, or any other strategy that doesn’t deal with the underlying problem; nobody in the USA buys American made products produced by those kids looking for work. (…by anybody in the USA, as a matter of fact)
If Obama started a campaign to promote “Buy American made Products”, and to buy them at any cost, then and only then would their be jobs for everyone.
So go right on ahead, believing that Coding or technology for the masses will move America back to greatness… It’s so dead wrong a concept that until the American people learn the truth!!! nothing will change. So, when are you willing to start? 20 years from now, or tomorrow?
A recent Oxford University study projected that 45% of ALL professional jobs will be automated within the next 15-20 years. Add to that the population variable – i.e current population is just over 7 billion, and projected to just over 11 billion in 2050 (that’s only 35 years away. Additional variables are the integration of AI (including ASI); robotics, genomics/proteomics; and nanotech.
Just a few days ago I read about the Department of Homeland Security authorizing something like 150,000 spouses of H1B workers to apply for work permits – a privilege previously forbidden. Thus, in tech-heavy regions we are going to see a new influx of Southeast Asian workers (primarily, as they make up the bulk of the H1B population) competing for jobs. Many of those spouses have tech skills, and with the DHS authorizing an additional 55,000 H1B spouse work permits annually (after 2015), I can envision many “marriages” of convenience by H1Bs that will essentially mean that many H1Bs will be bringing an employable tech worker along with them. What’s galling is that American executives and their paid off American legislators have made this outrage possible. The depth of the betrayal to the American STEM worker, and future American STEM graduates (who will see lower wages, as a result; this is already beginning) is disappointing, to say the least.
I agree with Bob that increased entrepreneurship will play a role, but we are going to have to try out many innovative adaptive modes in order to adapt to coming changes. I see an increase in real sharing (not the BS “sharing economy”, race-to-the-bottom-of-the-wage-barrel created by Uber/AirBnB/etc.) – sharing that comes out of a realization that What demand variables are going to increase opportunity in the job market?
Americans got rich fast after WWII; we didn’t have any competition. We had a party that lasted for almost 4 decades, while the decimated regions resulting from WWII rebuilt their infrastructures. American corporations caught on to how they could decrease the line item for labor, and the outsourcing debacle began. Capital is on the wire, so those in charge on now free to chase the lowest material and labor costs. Just wait until 3D printing matures; we are going to see manufacturing radically transformed.
So, in addition to learning how to share more (real sharing); I see more adaptations that result in knowing what “enough” is – i.e. less striving for things. I think this will also bring about an increase in consciousness that puts more people in touch with just how connected we are, in every way – and in ways that we don’t understand (this is not New Age feel good talk; it’s more about connected populations figuring things out via thousands and millions of little experiments and social innovations – we’re a “plastic” species.
Anyway, our youth are going to need luck, social, skills, fortitude, etc. There is going to be more of a premium on the “right” kind of education and connections in the short term, as things tighten up; we’re not yet in enough crisis to motivate large scale change, but we’re headed that way. Good luck to all of us, and especially our youth!
Oxford needs to look up the definitions of profession and professional: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional & http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession
I´ve been been to the PBS site, when does it air?
Could someone explain how H1B has that much of an effect when there are only 85000 of them?
To 85,000 replaced STEM workers and their families and the towns in which they live, it certainly has an impact. In a larger sense, I am not as sure.
It is the dishonesty of the whole thing which bothers me. Stop saying there aren’t STEM professionals that you need. Be honest enough to say “It doesn’t make business sense to our shareholder to continue to pay the current prevailing wage for professionals in the US nor to train our COBOL programmers to work in an open source JAVA based continuous development environment.” Then our politicians, our voters, and our consumers can have an honest response.
But can it really remake the whole industry if there are just 85,000?
OK, so renewals are not counted towards the 85000 number.
That would make the approval of H4 EAD that much bigger.
Estimated 200k spouses entering the tech field as well.
There are more than 85,000 H1Bs. Here is a very measured estimate of well over 600,000
http://cis.org/estimating-h1b-population-2-11
Also, replacing U.S. workers with H-1B workers violates the spirit if not the letter of the law. Part of the application process to obtain H-1B approval from the Labor Department, an employer is required to attest to the following: “Working Conditions: The employer attests that H-1B, H-1B1 or E-3 foreign workers in the named occupation will not adversely affect the working conditions of workers similarly employed.” This statement is in Form 9035CP of the LCA.
Further, the Labor Department states, “The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) requires that the hiring of a foreign worker will not adversely affect the wages and working conditions of U.S. workers comparably employed.
Professor Norman Matloff (UC Davis) has studied the H1-B phenomenon, in detail; his very well documented studies on the H1-B and foreign worker visa problem claims that H1-B abuse has cost Americans **$10Trillion dollars**, since 1975.
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
H1-B workers are little more than pawns for American corporate executives and their paid-off collaborators in the Congress – all in a race to the bottom of the wage and opportunity barrel.
Knowing how to code will no more get you any job, save for coding, than knowing how to read will get you any job today. Coding at the levels being proposed is as useful as knowing how to build a pencil. It will not make you a better doctor, lawyer, teacher, plumber, electrician, truck driver or health care worker. Leave coding to the coders, white hat hackers and the people who spec the program requirements, and let everyone else get on with their jobs.
A column that is a good reflective moment.
In short we are becoming directionless.
If everyone goes to a 2yr college and becomes a coder then….
The demand for more ‘coders’ has a bit of “The King, the mice, and the cheese” feel to it.
1) Everyone should be computer literate. Most of our younger generation are highly smartphone-tech literate, but I wonder how many understand basic computer skills. Let’s not drop the ball on these basic, but important, skills.
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2) While I agree that learning to code is great for math skills and logic and analytical skill development, not everyone in any society can be a programmer, even at the most basic level. While I don’t oppose teaching these skills where appropriate, anyone who believes
a) anyone can code well, and that
b) coding promises great jobs to everyone
is simply not in touch with the real world.
There are more coders than coding jobs now. There are more degreed engineers than engineering jobs. Adding more people to an already saturated market simply gives employers more candidates to reject.
And adding more people helps to drive down their asking salaries. Of course, this makes IBM and other big globalist employers as happy as can be.
Here is an interesting web page listing Android programmers looking for work as freelancers: https://www.elance.com/r/contractors/q-%22Android%22 The interesting part is that none on the first page are in the US. This is probably because there are no US coders who want to offer their services at a competitive price. So if I were looking to hire an Android programmer with a 4 or 5 star rating, it would look like there are none in the US, so I’d be forced to hire non-US.
Yes, “no US coders want to offer their services at a competitive price”. Let’s take this from two angles, the first being price.
Skimming the offers you linked, I’m seeing rates from ~$14-$40/hr. Let’s split the difference and work from $27/hr. Presuming
40hrs/wk (as if it were a stable job as opposed to freelancing) that gives you a pre-tax income of $51840.
Is that a reasonable income in the US for an “advanced” job that generally requires a minimum of a CS degree (if you were looking
to get hired at a corporation with those skills)? My plumber makes more than that, and while I respect his skills, I think a
coder probably has a higher value than that. The far upper end of that range ($40/hr) comes out to $76800. That’s gross income
pre-tax and pre-health insurance, which is a law now remember. That’s certainly not a terrible income, I realize, but that’s the
very high end of the elance prices, and again that’s presuming you actually pick up enough work to get 40hrs/wk all year long.
The reality of freelancing is generally much different.
The second angle is quality. I ended up with a client who wanted a handful of minor tweaks to an existing website. This site had
initially been created by a group of Pakistani coders for something like $300-$400. It was a decent *looking* site, and had some
basic CMS functionality (ie the owner could log in and change the text on some of the pages). I noticed when I glanced at some of
the code however it contained a number of poor coding practices, errors, and generally bad ideas. When I contacted my friend
(who actually has the CS degree) to review it, he noticed almost instantly that he could simply open the page to create a new
administrative user, feed it credentials, and give himself administrative control of the content of the site.
Point being there does seem to be an element of “you get what you pay for” here, but there’s really no good way for the buyer to
actually assess the quality of the work beyond “it works”. Well sure it works, but if a thoughtful visitor can deduce how to take
control of your site, then it’s probably not a good deal. The client above ended up spendijng about $3k to have Americans reproduce the design as a wordpress site.
So you think a coder has a “higher value” than a plumber ? WTF ? Unless you have a stinky restroom due to clogged pipez you will not know the “high value” of a plumber. ( Learned the value of plumber hard way … story too embarrassing to share 🙂 )
Plumbing is the basis of a civilization ( …. that does not stink .)
But how difficult are the jobs? If you need to get a plumber, it shouldn’t be too difficult, or even to get 1000 plumbers.
Thank goodness we don’t live in a communist country, so we don’t have to debate the relative value of plumbers vs. coders, or apples vs. oranges, for that matter.
Developers ! Developers !! Developers !!! err… I mean
Coders … Coders … Coders.
Needs more Cowbell.
It’s pretty clear that the increasing automation driven by Moore’s Law is going to eliminate virtually all jobs at some point. One can argue whether that’s 10 years of 100 years – but it’s inevitable.
A Living Wage would seem to be the best way to solve all these problems societal problems that continue to mount and are driven by this automation. Why, for example, are corporations posting record profits while they continue to shrink their workforce? Technical automation is driving people out of work permanently and the corporation are loving it, it’s driving unprecedented profits and bonus’ for upper management – how can they not love that?
Mr. Cringley you should look writing an article on Living Wages, the time for such a radical redirection of our economy – the worlds economy – is now, not 10-20 years from now when civil unrest reaches a boiling point.
Rickg, If you’re counting on persuading the government or some other group to solve our existing employment problems, you probably will be disappointed. These people have their own agenda and that is what will get accomplished. If you haven’t noticed, certain members of the rich and powerful have bribed and/or coerced the government to favor their needs over the needs of the common people. That is why there is such an wide and growing income disparity between the super rich and everybody else. Ka-ching!
.
So, are the common people doomed? Not necessarily. But they will have to increase their self-empowerment and start their own money making ventures. They can be more agile than the big, bloated corporations. They can cater to the actual needs and desires of the people around them or on the internet. Ka-ching!
Hey Charles, rickg !! How y’all are doing ? I like, totally like agree with you, like.
I have started a Megacorp just to do what you want – to help ordinary people to “increase their self-empowerment and start their own money making ventures”. If the aforementioned ventures succeed, you will sign away the rights to the venture to us Self Empowerment MegaCorp Inc., if it fails, well, I’m sure your mortgage will cover the costs.. Like me on fakebook, will ya ?
While we are hypothesizing in Faery Land, ah , the Living Wage. Such a nice concept in theory, like Communism. It warms the cockles of my heart when neckbeards and armchair experts tha intertubez talk about it.
Who should pay the Living Wage ? The gubmint , of course. Where doth the gubmint get the money, precious ? This aint 1492 precious, no new Continents or civilizations to invade and plunder for riches.
So gubmint should tax own citizens or Corporates (). Cannot tax unemployed citizens whose jaaabs have been taken away by AI driven robots of Self Empowerment MegaCorp Inc.
Well, the gubmint should tax the MegaCorps or onepercenters then. Only like, there are a zillion problems and obstacles to that nice plan. Why should the Congress critters tax MegaCorps who fund their election campaigns ? How to know how much to tax the MegaCorps which indulge in Hollywood Accounting and eleventeen layers of shell companies and offshore entities ?
What will be a Living Wage anyways ? Whatever it is determined to be by the bowtie wearing economists, it can be still be taken away by the MegaCorps in the form of jacked up bills and service fees. Did President Blasio increase your living wage by 100$ / month ? well here is your new monthly Cable TV charges and Health Insurance premiums ahem… hiked by 100$/month …. Thanks for your business.
The optimism of 99%ers would be truly admirable if it weren’t so naive and foolish.
Oh man, coming home! Like here’s the deal, zim, zam. In the new financial order all debts are wiped out, zim, zam. Like everyone gets a million dollars up front — hey it’s like heaven, man! So count your blessings, zim, zam. I’ll be in the hammock and my personal robot will be doing all the housework, zim, zam. Heaven open your doors — the big boy is coming at you, zim, zam. Ka-ching!
Sure Chucky, why not ? As long we are all hypothesizing in la-la land, why limit to wiping all debts and giving a million greenbacks ? Make it a billion, Chucky’s printing moneyy zam-zim. Wooo-hooo. Chuky for president !!! yo Man. er… Ka-ching Ka-Ching Ka-Ching all the way.
Thanks for your support.
I don’t see what changed as the trends of the last 50 years of globalization, wealth accumulation/optimization, and shortages have continued in a trend any child of the ’70s should have well appreciated. It’s rather older expectations of infinite growth, rejecting a notion of an “era of limits” as Brown and others forewarned some 40 years ago, that didn’t change among some puzzlingly willfully ignorant portion of the population. I’m not sure who grew up among my age cohort (I’m a tad over 50) that expected anything different than what we’re seeing now.
Obama just expanded L1 visas too. No longer have to proof a specialized need, just make a decent case that USCIS is pretty much obligated to accept. Home country wages are acceptable.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/did-you-know-obama-just-took-new-executive-action-on-immigration/article/2562053#.VRRL4tcp_Nx.twitter