A non-bachelor's education program seems like a great way to help. Many people attend university without a specific goal because they believe it's required in order to get a decent job. They believe that because for the most part, it's true. But perhaps employers just use it as a simple signal/shibboleth. If so, maybe "tech trade school graduate" would be just as good and hopefully more cost effective.
"New collar" is marginally skilled people who can fulfill a set of tasks without a lot of upward mobility. Support techs, call centers, etc. Employees get a job that pays better than fast food, employers get disposable employees who don't voluntarily churn.
Basically the next generation of mainframe operators, except with public funding of their vocational training.
This IMO is the major problem with funding job training. You shift the market to subsidize companies who don't do on the job training at the cost of those who do. Give it a few decades and all these companies just want a handout.
Call centers have really high churn because, while the pay is somewhat good for a job requiring no skills, it's a miserable job associated with exogenic depression.
My mother works at a call center, and according to her, the churn is caused by misplaced expectations.
Basically, fresh hires have to take calls without appropriate training. Then they make lots of mistakes, or redirect most cases to more experienced colleagues. Because of this, the service level isn't met, and everyone is let off again. Then the cycle starts with new hires, who - surprise - aren't any better.
Your time is so regimented and strictly tracked that you'll get scolded for trying to use the bathroom outside your scheduled break and you have to take scores of calls a day, many of which from people who are abusive (and to whom you can't respond in kind or even terminate the call). Also pay is heavily incentive based and the metrics are always changing out from under you.
It's a very thankless job. You get to deal with angry and frustrated people all day, every day. Their stress becomes your stress. You also have very little agency and authority because what you can and cannot do are strictly enforced by organization policy and closely tracked in a variety of ways. So unless the customer's issue fits neatly into one of several pre-defined categories and has a well-documented solution, you have to either route them to another department, or stall them long enough that they give up.
Call center work is one, maybe two notches above manual labor. You are (often) sitting at a desk in an (often) air-conditioned office, and your pay is only slightly below median. But it is soul-crushing in ways that manual labor isn't, which can quickly turn into depression.
Call centers are weird. They treat people like cattle, and expect good outcomes.
I worked for a company that was apparently some sort of progressive beacon about 20 years ago. They treated people well, trained them for a month before they took a live call, and even promoted people out.
There was an annual cycle (this business peaked from March-September), but many employees would return and re-qualify. We used to hire 3-4 a quarter as IT techs (out of about 300 agents), and probably about half developed into either IT professionals or went back as call center managers / escalation agents.
Exactly. IBM's business model these days is like that of a lot of other companies': Lay off your seasoned employees and replace them with lower-skilled low-benefits fungible contractors who cost half as much.
It's not "skills". It's "skills at the cost we want". Market forces will generally bring people with skills when the pay rate is high enough. If skills are so important, why not have a company train a person for the job?
Haven't you heard? Now universities are supposed to be glorified vocational schools where you pay for the privilege of company training that will be obsolete sometime in the decade after you graduate (but hopefully not before!).
I wonder why big companies like IBM don't just acquire large private universities and offer a traditional 4 year co-op experience.
They could subsidize education and 'guarantee' a job at IBM upon graduation. And shift the curriculum as needed for the company, provided they give a typical core education that you would find at any typical 4 yr college.
Heck if they get a D1 football school they can pump a bunch of money into it and leverage the exposure for advertising.
I did some mentorship at a P-TECH/STEM style academy here in Chicago a few years back when the idea was young. (http://www.goodestemacademy.org/)
About 75-85% of the mentors were in fact from IBM, and the rest of us were from marketing agencies. IBM is very, very highly represented at many of these sites and have enormous skin in the game to propagate the model further. See here: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2017/04/ibm_pre...
Now that IBM has a few years under their belt supporting said academies, and some analytics to determine whether it's benefiting them or not, they're pushing it to the next level.
If that's what they're up to, they're doing an absolutely terrible job of it. My primary motivation for going back to school for a Ph.D. was that I kept running into woefully underprepared engineers fresh out of school. They'd never been taught statistics, feared differential equations, didn't understand the physical models used by their fields, and couldn't write a simple data analysis script to save their lives. Some could barely use Excel. To be fair, there were also a lot of perfectly competent engineers, but the incompetent were a shockingly large minority.
I thought, "the academy needs my perspective! They don't understand that they're failing!" Turns out, it's not so much that they don't know as they aggressively don't care. I went to quite a number of "prepare youself to be a professor" talks in grad school at Big State U. Every single one of them presented teaching as a huge time suck and offered strategies for mitigating it. When I tried to explain my motivations to my advisor, he laughed in my face and told me I didn't get it. I finished the Ph.D., but I got the heck out of academia, sadder but wiser.
The academy would be a lot better off trying to do vocational training, because at least then it would be trying to do anything at all to prepare young people for life. You can get a great education at today's university, but nobody cares if you don't.
Have you looked at the curriculum of a CS Degree at a Uni? The first 2 years you're learning about geography and history with a little bit of modern dance and archeology. The last 2 years are barely related to what the industry needs and CS. My son who will be attending in the fall is still wondering why he needs to. His interest lies in Cyber Security and Programming and the curriculum is a joke.
The majority of American Universities are failing. They are becoming irrelevant at an alarming rate unless of course your interested in Modern Dance and Italian Art History.
The basic conception of the university is to give you a well rounded education and not turn you into a savant ignorant of anything not directly related to your major. I don't think that makes it a "joke" in the least.
That's the same old tired argument. So what does that say for folks who don't attend? That they don't have a well rounded education? I don't know what your experience has been or where you work but Uni does not give you a well rounded education and that should not be it's goal.
A place to learn about ones interests and to prepare the student with real skills employers need. No course should be forced upon a student unless it is directly related to his/her interest and choice of degree.
Instead they force their version of what you need to know to keep a tenured prof working.
University should start treating students like customers and not like they are doing you a favor.
The days of these backwards and obsolete institutions are numbered. More and more companies don't care if you have a degree because they have realized it proves nothing. They want to know what skills you have and what you have accomplished, not what grade you received in modern dance and Intro to Computers 101.
Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.
> Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.
Yeah, I've noticed, and I think it betrays a wrongheaded conception of what universities ought to be (namely, vocational schools to which companies can outsource employee training on the student's dime). The idea of students as "customers" is also wrongheaded, in my view (although you're far from alone in having it).
Indeed. I have no sympathy for massive multi-national corporations when executive pay and corporate profits are as high as they are now. The world does not need any more corporate welfare programs.
Maybe I missed it but there was no discussion of what skills go into a "new collar job."
Maybe it's called that because your job skills will change so frequently, and your job security is so low that your collar is always "new."
The whole discussion was basically water vapor - 11x increase in [metric] compared to low income schools. Wow great! What time period, what jobs, what skill sets etc...?
Sorry for being negative but this is an empty carb article when we need high protein.
I think that's exactly it. People need to be adaptable and it's not about teaching any one particular skillset, but moreso how to become a lifelong learner. The era of doing a couple of repeated tasks over and over again is gone, it is a new day where people do not need to perform menial jobs and can be freed for more creative/mindful pursuits. In the short-term this is going to have negative effects of people being displaced, discouraged and lacking purpose. As with a lot of complex problems I think this may be a generational shift in thinking.
There have been a multitude of generational shifts over the years. If you think that thinking it is happening (again) and that being hopeful that people move on is a bad thing, I'm sure you think of the shift away from subsistence farming was just as awful.
I think the thing that is awful is the inhuman speed at which those shifts are taking place, and the callousness by those pronouncing the change to the fates of those left behind, because they are sure they won't be. If we are about to put a whole bunch of people out of work for the rest of their lives, we better be damn sure we have a safety net for them. Hope is the greatest of all the evils that escaped from Pandora's box, because it soothes a guilty conscience but does not effect action.
It may be a shift in tactics, but definitely not in thinking. It's unsurprising that the corporate sector tends to favor policies that will provide a large population of fungible workers.
Nothing in the "lifelong learner" paradigm you note precludes employers from investing in facilitating their employees' learning.
One of the negative effects you left out is that companies are investing in training less and less and paying (adjusted for inflation) less and less. It isn't all on individuals to adapt to this new paradigm. It isn't sustainable unless the wealth-holders contribute.
Our schools simply do not teach critical thinking. Very few educational systems do worldwide, in fact. Students mostly just learn through repetition and rote memorization, and formulaic creative processes (standard five paragraph essay, multiple choice history tests, spelling bees, etc).
In addition, the state of our educational system right now (not just in the US, but worldwide) comes from an industrial tradition, not one in tune with the modern economy.
- Students are 'batch processed' in grades based on age regardless of ability
- Schools are designed to keep the kids somewhere while the parents work on a set schedule, with all school functions, programs, and systems assuming all parents have the same schedule, jobs, income, and parenting needs
- Students are taught the same things at the same rate--attempts to teach kids at their own level (tracking, advanced classes, special ed, etc) are often derided as 'unequal' or elitist. And yet we don't expect all adults to have the same skills or learn at the same rate or have the same talents, so why should we expect such of our kids?
- When it comes to higher education, liberal arts does a good job of teaching some degree of critical thinking but do worse at teaching hard skills. Vocational schools have the opposite problem. Either way, students aren't really equipped going into college to know what skills they will or won't need because their training up until then has been so misaligned with whatever path they may end up taking.
- Most importantly, students are stripped of their individuality in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. School uniforms, school dieting rules and food restrictions, sports culture, speech codes, pageantry around prom and various 'school spirit' initiatives and interschool rivalries, standardized testing, GPAs and school rankings, college admissions standards...
It's no surprise that kids who come out of this system become adults who follow all the processes and rules based on the rulebook rather than common sense (ahem, United), or fail to account for unexpected turns of events (2008 financial crisis), or fail to question authority figures (Bernie Madoff). And it's also not surprising that our graduates lack the sort of long-term strategic thinking and self analysis required to be successful in a changing economy with constantly changing rules.
We clearly need some sort of rebuilding of our education system to account for a modern economy where 1) Humans are not machines, 2) Adaptability and learning ability matter more than rote memorization, 3) Creativity is encouraged, and 4) Diversity in background, abilities, talent, and experience are strengths, not weaknesses.
Of all the educational axis, this is the one that I find most problematic and most promising. There is a movement afoot to teach computational thinking across all majors. This movement gets painted with "programming" rather than "how to problem solve" which is really the point.
> Maybe it's called that because your job skills will change so frequently, and your job security is so low that your collar is always "new."
Well, we need "employment security", not "job security". I mean, I like my job, but the important part is that I can be gainfully employed and support my family, not that I can keep this job until I decide to retire.
The article is fluffy, but I am generally for things that help reframe peoples' expectations about how careers work. We need employees that expect premium salaries from dead-end jobs. And we need employers who are honest with employees when jobs will be eventually phased out. I suspect shipping companies aren't pitching "we'll retrain you for the future!" when filling trucker jobs. Software shops seem to be better than most, but they're hung up on "cool technology" as if the aesthetics are more important than staying away from dead-end, high-risk tech stacks.
I don't understand why this is a problem. There have always been skilled technicians in the mechanical world. Welders, mechanics, lathe operators, craftsmen.
There are a huge number of jobs that you need to know how to use computers but dont need to know how to balance a binary tree. I'd think most of the new millennial generation would be perfect match already, and lots of other generations would be keen to do some night courses and/or on the job training to specialize in whatever is needed.
"We want someone with years of experience, but we want to only pay an entry-level wage." - If most companies were honest
A friend of mine is still struggling with this. Nobody wants to hire him, because he doesn't have years of professional experience and didn't have access to a good four-year college where he lives (Nowhere Wisconsin), and there are medical complications preventing him from moving away.
I personally taught him a great deal about programming and security. He's studied computers and networks for years before we met. He's talented, coachable, and willing to learn more.
Same. I've been programming 6 years now as a hobby, but the only "professional" experience I have is about 2 years of freelancing. On top of that, here in South Carolina, the market is trash and economic problems prevent me from moving to N.C. or G.A.
I haven't been able to obtain a job since graduating in May 2015 with a BS degree in CS. I can do lots of things. I'm even an official contributor for a large, industry project. The market is really brutal. It's geared toward the elite, the few who were privileged enough to be there at the right time.
Judging by the "millennials" (I guess I am one as well) I interact with, at work and through friends, they don't really know how to use computers. I regularly encounter people who finger-peck type very slowly and don't know how to take a screenshot or do simple Excel operations.
People often seem to make this false correlation between "using smartphone apps/watching netflix" and "can use a computer productively". Pressing play on the VCR does not qualify me to repair one.
There are similar programs that are used in the UK where kids do a ride-along at a tech firm and then after a year they disappear forever. It's frustrating because it is unwise not to shop around and all you get is a warm body for a year or so.
IBM does do some high quality development and research. However, many of their historical cash-cow businesses are in secular decline. Most likely, IBM will remain important, but smaller.
The funny reality is that every mid-sized company has openings for tech related roles. It's just that none of them are willing to pay for any level or skill or expertise unless it's geographically close enough to the bay area. I'm sure that there are a lot of ways to make companies more efficient with technology but at the same time they look at technology as a cost-center and not something that is generating money.
> unless it's geographically close enough to the bay area
I encourage this. Two observations. One, most companies hiring for these roles (i.e. growing fast) are in the Bay Area. Two, I've seen a material difference in performance between support that meets, in person, with the main office (e.g. management, engineering and sales) once a month or quarter versus those who just join on calls. The number of times a support person's recounting of some random interaction is overheard by someone who makes a decision based on that story is huge.
The big issue is the Bay Area's old timers are attempting to control the gains from this economic activity through their control of its real estate. This, in my opinion, is a national structural problem more than a local one.
I think they hit on a real tension, but their interpretation of what is needed is wrong. The shift I think we need to see is management as "doers" rather than everyone being able to do everything. That is middle management needs to have at least enough skills to identify problems and act as a project manager rather than management for the sake of management. With that you'll have teams that look like proficient generalists at the middle/top level and then deep dive specialists underneath them. It's kind of a failure of the modern big co. that the only way to advance is through management rather than some sort of journeyman expert track which is what is really needed.
Exactly this. Mixed with all of the RA's going on at IBM, IMHO, this appears to be a smoke screen to justify their search for a cheaper workforce. The talent is there (or was there, in the expensive, experience employees). They just do not want to pay for it.
I live in NYC and note that Google owns the 3rd largest office building in the city which is located in Manhattan and uses it for engineering. Many of the top technical people in the country want to live and work in Manhattan.
IBM HQ is located in NY State and headed by an engineer (Rometty), but I'd argue the difference in thinking between Google and their engineering leadership and IBM and their leadership is night and day. IBM has a lot of engineers and researchers in Westchester and other parts of the state, but not in the place that people want to live.
Notably, of the large tech firms of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, IBM, only Google has the right idea of having any meaningful presence in NYC.
If the firms other than Google are truly serious about hiring top tech talent, they like Google, would have a major presence in NYC.
I think the main thing here is an acknowledgment that automation will greatly disrupt the workforce. Simple, automatable work will be, and greater effort will be necessary to prepare displaced workers for the remaining opportunities. Not sure what skills this would require and whether this should be the responsibility of the government/universities or the corporations in charge of the hiring and retraining, but I think that's more the point than "IBM wants cheaper labor"
72 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadBasically the next generation of mainframe operators, except with public funding of their vocational training.
Basically, fresh hires have to take calls without appropriate training. Then they make lots of mistakes, or redirect most cases to more experienced colleagues. Because of this, the service level isn't met, and everyone is let off again. Then the cycle starts with new hires, who - surprise - aren't any better.
E: here's a longer article for reference. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.psychologytoday.com/blog/th...
Call center work is one, maybe two notches above manual labor. You are (often) sitting at a desk in an (often) air-conditioned office, and your pay is only slightly below median. But it is soul-crushing in ways that manual labor isn't, which can quickly turn into depression.
I worked for a company that was apparently some sort of progressive beacon about 20 years ago. They treated people well, trained them for a month before they took a live call, and even promoted people out.
There was an annual cycle (this business peaked from March-September), but many employees would return and re-qualify. We used to hire 3-4 a quarter as IT techs (out of about 300 agents), and probably about half developed into either IT professionals or went back as call center managers / escalation agents.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/31/ibm_bloodbath_conti...
That's been their model for a long time. They aren't known as "India Business Machines" for nothing.
They could subsidize education and 'guarantee' a job at IBM upon graduation. And shift the curriculum as needed for the company, provided they give a typical core education that you would find at any typical 4 yr college.
Heck if they get a D1 football school they can pump a bunch of money into it and leverage the exposure for advertising.
About 75-85% of the mentors were in fact from IBM, and the rest of us were from marketing agencies. IBM is very, very highly represented at many of these sites and have enormous skin in the game to propagate the model further. See here: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/on_innovation/2017/04/ibm_pre...
Now that IBM has a few years under their belt supporting said academies, and some analytics to determine whether it's benefiting them or not, they're pushing it to the next level.
I thought, "the academy needs my perspective! They don't understand that they're failing!" Turns out, it's not so much that they don't know as they aggressively don't care. I went to quite a number of "prepare youself to be a professor" talks in grad school at Big State U. Every single one of them presented teaching as a huge time suck and offered strategies for mitigating it. When I tried to explain my motivations to my advisor, he laughed in my face and told me I didn't get it. I finished the Ph.D., but I got the heck out of academia, sadder but wiser.
The academy would be a lot better off trying to do vocational training, because at least then it would be trying to do anything at all to prepare young people for life. You can get a great education at today's university, but nobody cares if you don't.
The majority of American Universities are failing. They are becoming irrelevant at an alarming rate unless of course your interested in Modern Dance and Italian Art History.
Instead they force their version of what you need to know to keep a tenured prof working.
University should start treating students like customers and not like they are doing you a favor.
The days of these backwards and obsolete institutions are numbered. More and more companies don't care if you have a degree because they have realized it proves nothing. They want to know what skills you have and what you have accomplished, not what grade you received in modern dance and Intro to Computers 101.
Haven't you noticed that the main complaint today from corporations are the Universities aren't teaching the skills kids need to know to be successful in Technology.
Yeah, I've noticed, and I think it betrays a wrongheaded conception of what universities ought to be (namely, vocational schools to which companies can outsource employee training on the student's dime). The idea of students as "customers" is also wrongheaded, in my view (although you're far from alone in having it).
http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2013/09/why_dont_wages.h... http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/04/how_can_there_b....
Maybe it's called that because your job skills will change so frequently, and your job security is so low that your collar is always "new."
The whole discussion was basically water vapor - 11x increase in [metric] compared to low income schools. Wow great! What time period, what jobs, what skill sets etc...?
Sorry for being negative but this is an empty carb article when we need high protein.
PM me, I have a modest proposal you might be interested in.
One of the negative effects you left out is that companies are investing in training less and less and paying (adjusted for inflation) less and less. It isn't all on individuals to adapt to this new paradigm. It isn't sustainable unless the wealth-holders contribute.
Our schools simply do not teach critical thinking. Very few educational systems do worldwide, in fact. Students mostly just learn through repetition and rote memorization, and formulaic creative processes (standard five paragraph essay, multiple choice history tests, spelling bees, etc).
In addition, the state of our educational system right now (not just in the US, but worldwide) comes from an industrial tradition, not one in tune with the modern economy.
- Students are 'batch processed' in grades based on age regardless of ability
- Schools are designed to keep the kids somewhere while the parents work on a set schedule, with all school functions, programs, and systems assuming all parents have the same schedule, jobs, income, and parenting needs
- Students are taught the same things at the same rate--attempts to teach kids at their own level (tracking, advanced classes, special ed, etc) are often derided as 'unequal' or elitist. And yet we don't expect all adults to have the same skills or learn at the same rate or have the same talents, so why should we expect such of our kids?
- When it comes to higher education, liberal arts does a good job of teaching some degree of critical thinking but do worse at teaching hard skills. Vocational schools have the opposite problem. Either way, students aren't really equipped going into college to know what skills they will or won't need because their training up until then has been so misaligned with whatever path they may end up taking.
- Most importantly, students are stripped of their individuality in ways subtle and not-so-subtle. School uniforms, school dieting rules and food restrictions, sports culture, speech codes, pageantry around prom and various 'school spirit' initiatives and interschool rivalries, standardized testing, GPAs and school rankings, college admissions standards...
It's no surprise that kids who come out of this system become adults who follow all the processes and rules based on the rulebook rather than common sense (ahem, United), or fail to account for unexpected turns of events (2008 financial crisis), or fail to question authority figures (Bernie Madoff). And it's also not surprising that our graduates lack the sort of long-term strategic thinking and self analysis required to be successful in a changing economy with constantly changing rules.
We clearly need some sort of rebuilding of our education system to account for a modern economy where 1) Humans are not machines, 2) Adaptability and learning ability matter more than rote memorization, 3) Creativity is encouraged, and 4) Diversity in background, abilities, talent, and experience are strengths, not weaknesses.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/kbrennan/publications/new-framew...
Here are some other books about thinking and problem solving that I've enjoyed over the years.
How to Solve it
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/669.html
Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Professional Judgement: A Guide for Lawyers and Policymakers
http://www.biblio.com/9780195366327
While the second may seem directed towards attorneys, I assure you, this book is outstanding for anyone who has to help with complex decision making.
Well, we need "employment security", not "job security". I mean, I like my job, but the important part is that I can be gainfully employed and support my family, not that I can keep this job until I decide to retire.
The article is fluffy, but I am generally for things that help reframe peoples' expectations about how careers work. We need employees that expect premium salaries from dead-end jobs. And we need employers who are honest with employees when jobs will be eventually phased out. I suspect shipping companies aren't pitching "we'll retrain you for the future!" when filling trucker jobs. Software shops seem to be better than most, but they're hung up on "cool technology" as if the aesthetics are more important than staying away from dead-end, high-risk tech stacks.
She's talking about vocational jobs that don't require four year degrees.
There are a huge number of jobs that you need to know how to use computers but dont need to know how to balance a binary tree. I'd think most of the new millennial generation would be perfect match already, and lots of other generations would be keen to do some night courses and/or on the job training to specialize in whatever is needed.
"We want someone with years of experience, but we want to only pay an entry-level wage." - If most companies were honest
A friend of mine is still struggling with this. Nobody wants to hire him, because he doesn't have years of professional experience and didn't have access to a good four-year college where he lives (Nowhere Wisconsin), and there are medical complications preventing him from moving away.
I personally taught him a great deal about programming and security. He's studied computers and networks for years before we met. He's talented, coachable, and willing to learn more.
The market fails people like him.
How? Doesn't this just imply that there is enough supply for those companies that want to pay a lower wage?
Preventing someone from entering the industry fails the person.
> Doesn't this just imply that there is enough supply for those companies that want to pay a lower wage?
If you ignore the human aspects entirely, sure.
There's no telling what heights he could climb to if given the chance, but nobody wants to do that.
They want years of professional experience before they hire someone. But they only want to pay entry level wages. This creates a catch-22:
If you have the professional experience required, you can find a better paying job elsewhere.
If you have no professional experience, you can't get an entry-level position.
People often seem to make this false correlation between "using smartphone apps/watching netflix" and "can use a computer productively". Pressing play on the VCR does not qualify me to repair one.
I encourage this. Two observations. One, most companies hiring for these roles (i.e. growing fast) are in the Bay Area. Two, I've seen a material difference in performance between support that meets, in person, with the main office (e.g. management, engineering and sales) once a month or quarter versus those who just join on calls. The number of times a support person's recounting of some random interaction is overheard by someone who makes a decision based on that story is huge.
The big issue is the Bay Area's old timers are attempting to control the gains from this economic activity through their control of its real estate. This, in my opinion, is a national structural problem more than a local one.
Have fun with your "new collar" - don't let it choke you too much.
IBM HQ is located in NY State and headed by an engineer (Rometty), but I'd argue the difference in thinking between Google and their engineering leadership and IBM and their leadership is night and day. IBM has a lot of engineers and researchers in Westchester and other parts of the state, but not in the place that people want to live.
Notably, of the large tech firms of Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Oracle, IBM, only Google has the right idea of having any meaningful presence in NYC.
If the firms other than Google are truly serious about hiring top tech talent, they like Google, would have a major presence in NYC.