That exists, and they are called community colleges and technical schools. (OK, most for profit technical schools are just means of transferring student loan money from the government to a private company, and if the student gets an education out of the deal that is just a happy accident.)
There is also the question of what are unnecessary courses? As far as I am concerned, any course that teaches writing, be it about English, history, etc., is necessary. Being able to write clearly and effectively is important in any professional field. For many disciplines math courses are also necessary.
Looking at a BS in computer science at my school. Graduation requires 128 hours, of which 116 are required by the degree program. So 12 hours of free electives. Looking through the requirements, I think you could drop 17 hours of natural sciences, and maybe half of the 18 hours of humanities/writing. That still leaves something like 90 hours of core classes spread between computer science, math, writing. and logic. Dropping a year off the degree plan is not trivial, but it is a long way from squeezing a BS into a year. Additionally, if the student wants to apply their programming to a particular subject area, then the natural science and elective courses all of the sudden become important. A programmer with a strong background in chemistry or biology is going to have different jobs open to them than one who is interested in OS or database programming or other computer focused discipline.
I’m also not quite sure what the hang up is about college. Yes, it is a barrier to entry and a gateway for many jobs, but in lots of cases those jobs actually require the additional education that is being provided. The same goes for many post-graduate degrees. I will readily admit that there are plenty of jobs where “college degree” is just a check box, and other than maybe some writing skill there isn’t a lot learned in college that applies. However, there are lots of jobs where that isn’t the case, and the more technical the job, the more likely additional education is required.
I also think that anybody who is motivated and willing to try should have the opportunity to go to college regardless of their financial situation. And they should be able to graduate without incurring massive debt. That can be a community or commuter college. It doesn’t have to be a highly competitive elite university. They can still get a valuable education that will open many career paths.
I have one of the better technical colleges near me, and they had an associates in programming. When I talked to the guidance counselor, he said that there really were no jobs available unless you transferred to UC and completed the BS. This was nearly 20 year ago, maybe it’s better now.
I ended up going into their culinary program instead.
I don’t entirely disagree, and the one thing about having attempted University and having 3 english credits does make me a better writer, but was it worth the cost and time I had to put into it?
And those are things that can be added in as you gain interest. I don’t know how they do it now, but it was actually very difficult to even get all your classes scheduled. I ended up having to take extra electives simply because the core classes were all on wait lists.
My hangup is the expense and time involved, along with the make it or fail model. If you don’t have the time and money to go, then you are stuck as a burger flipper. If you do go, but do not complete your degree, then you are stuck as a burger flipper with massive quantities of student debt.
If you do complete your degree, then you are, hopefully, an entry level employee, with massive quantities of student debt, but likely a burger flipper with massive quantities of student debt, looking for a job in the field that you studied for.
I agree, but that is not the case now. The financial barrier to getting even an associates degree is formidable, and a 4 year is simply unattainable for anyone who is not already solidly middle class. The structure of the school also means that if you need to work to support yourself, you can’t. Every professor will say that his class is the most important, and that you should spend 20 plus hours a week on homework. And if they don’t think that you are spending enough time, they will give you busy work, not to help you to better understand the material, but specifically for the purpose of ensuring that you are spending enough time outside of class.
And that comes back around to my point. The reason that there is a “scarcity” of educated professionals allowing those professionals to demand high salaries is because the barriers to getting that education are so formidable.
True. But there are also around 37,000 McDonalds stores. So 200 stores is actually a fairly small percent.
My point is that the math shows that even if you redistribute the entire wealth of the company, all you basically do is just make the executives poor and the poor slightly less poor.
The CEO also has a lot more responsibility than the average sandwich grunt.
I think it’s a combination of the high cost and the perception that a lot of highly paid upper level corporate jobs are “bullshit”, in that they don’t require any special education or technical knowledge and are largely doled out by “who you know”.
Whether that is true is debatable. Certainly some careers like engineering, law and accounting require having an education in those fields. Other fields not so much. For example, I know that Goldman Sachs’ program for hiring entry level investment banking analysts does not require an educational background in accounting, finance or economics. Elite management consulting firms like McKinsey, BCG and Bain also similarly hire broad educational backgrounds for their entry level analysts (providing they are “broadly” from the Ivy League). So one might question why one needs to show excellence in some esoteric degree from Harvard that has nothing to do with their job in order to land a six figure career right out of school.
This isn’t true. You may have made these excuses to justify your own choices/failures, but let’s not diminish others’ successes by pretending they’ve accomplished something impossible and are thus just incredibly lucky or rare superhumans.
You guys realize this isn’t a new phenomenon; right? In 1971 I was working full time on a 3:00 pm to midnight shift at a factory that made large industrial capacitors. They were union jobs and I as well as my co-workers, was earning what would be equivalent to $55,700 per year today.
There was no such thing as 24 hour banking in those days, and fully 20% of the workers came to work before their shift on payday to pick up their checks because if they’d waited until the next day to get them to the bank they’d have had checks bouncing.
I wouldn’t have done it even if I needed to. I felt like letting the company know I was so hard up for my paycheck would put me in a bad bargaining position but there were people lined up every week
Basically hasn’t changed since not long after the advent of money.
You can find biblical accounts of workers lining up to get paid.
The basic system and most of what goes along with it is at least 2500 years old. With no real change except some complexities that mask what’s going on to some people, and the nomenclature.
How? It doesn’t make poor people wealthier in any meaningful way. And it removes any incentives for people to do extraordinary things like create and lead multi-billion dollar corporations.
That right there is something the immense majority of people blow at. Some can learn it to a better or worse degree: many can’t.
One of the biggest realizations of my life was that the reason there’s so much information and training out there about “how to make plans”, and the reason that training is always about linear plans, is that an enormous amount of people can’t even figure out how to make a decent linear plan (I’m the Queen of What-Ifs: my plans have their own plans). To be a good programmer, you need to be able to create non-linear plans which obtain the desired result through every possible branch. For some people that takes years; some lucky few just have it and only need to learn how to explain things to others (which can take years); some will not be able to do it no matter how much time they throw into that hole.
Having been poor, a small boost income can have large and profound results.
CEO’s didn’t used to require eight-figure salaries to create and lead extraordinary companies. What changed?
I don’t mind the boss earning more, but ten times more? Or greater? That’s ridiculous. The CEO of McDonald’s makes one thousand times the wages of a minimum wage burger-flipper. Where’s the incentive for a burger-flipper or other minimum wage worker to do “extraordinary things”? Or does that only apply to the upper-class and not their serfs?
What’s the difference between Wang Computers and Dell Computers?
Wang and Dell. Namely An Wang and Michael Dell, CEOs. When home PCs took off, Wang and Dell were both positioned to be major players in the market. One took off and is a huge company, the other didn’t and we ask “remember Wang Computers?” It’s not like Wang Computers got hit by an asteroid, they made the wrong business decisions. Decisions that were ultimately made by the CEO, that’s where the buck stops.
I am all for increasing the minimum wage, and all for reining in the worst abuses of the CEO class, where you can lead a company to ruin and deploy your golden parachute. However, CEOs (and Boards of Directors) literally lead the company, they decide what business the company is in and how it goes about doing it. Don’t discount how valuable good leadership is to the fortunes of a company.
Yeah, but he only makes about 150x the salary of one of his mid-level managers at corporate.
I’m not sure that much has changed, historically speaking. For some reasons, we humans seem to tolerate allowing a small population of overlords to own most of the wealth. It’s been true for thousands of years.
But, specifically, at least during the past few decades of modern times, companies have been increasingly turning to technology, automation and outsourcing to drive down costs. And change is happening so quickly that companies no longer value the knowledge and experience of their employees.
IOW, companies can do more with a smaller work force and the work force they have is becoming increasingly segmented in highly skilled (i.e. a “full-stack” engineer from MIT) and no-skilled (i.e. a burger flipper).
For example, Amazon makes 30x the revenue of McDonalds with a quarter of the employees. Most of the corporate workers - engineers, product managers, Agile coaches and what have you, make well over six figures while much larger number of warehouse workers make around $12-$18 an hour. A bit better than McDonalds workers, but not really enough to afford to live near the new fancy headquarters in Long Island City (at least not anymore). An most of those workers are in danger of being automated anyway.
In spite of the lip-service a lot of companies make about “family” and “taking care of their employees”, most companies do not exist for the betterment of their larger workforce. They exist as an engine of profit for the owners and shareholders. While this may have always been the case, I think that during my dad’s generation, it was a lot harder for companies to measure performance or find and train suitable replacements. And there was less pressure to “constantly innovate” or risk “disruption”. So by necessity, they tended to keep employees unless they committed some egregious violation or the company as a whole was experience financial difficulty. Less of the constant churn I see these days.
The incentive to do more than flip burgers for a living.
I flipped burgers when I was in high school. Not for a living, but just to earn extra cash. Keep in mind, a significant number of people in those jobs are similarly school-aged kids.
Telling of what? That I live in a city where the average monthly rent for a studio is at least ten times that?
Per executive. I don’t know how many McD exec’s command 7-8 figure salaries, but each one of them is demanding the entire profits of hundreds of stores.
Tens of millions here, and tens of millions there, after a bit, you’re talking about real money.
You don’t have to redistribute the entire wealth, just a part of it. Could he make it on 11 million, or would he miss his car payment, have it repoed, not be able to get to work, and lose his job, then his house?
Those are the consequences of being poor, and being slightly less poor is actually a pretty nice thing. A dollar an hour to someone who makes 8 an hour is a much bigger change in ability to survive than giving someone who makes 8 million dollars another million per year.
Really? If a CEO makes bad decisions and runs the company into the ground, he still probably gets a pretty massive severance package. If a grunt messes up a customer’s sandwich, he may be fired and left with nothing.
Not just that the are bullshit. There probably is some value added by many of these positions. However, the value added is not as great as the compensation offered, and there is much greater redundancy in upper management than in sandwich grunting.
When I wrote the schedule, I had to follow specific guidelines based on projected sales. I was not allowed to have redundancy in case I had a bunch of call-offs or if I was busier than expected. Every person was expected to be working every second they were on the clock.
Sure, and those are the “sandwich grunts” of the professional class. They typically also work in smaller firms. MY lawyer and CPA, for instance, are both less than dozen people. Less fat, less waste, less ability to take compensation from “the commons” without returning value.
And that is all based on a “who you know” concept.
What part of it is untrue? I grant that the “simply unattainable” is maybe unjustifiable level of hyperbole, and maybe should be “highly unattainable” but I stand entirely behind the rest of the statement.
It is not something that is impossible, I am not saying that they are incredibly lucky or super human. That is entirely an unjustified assumption of your own creation.
I am saying that they are somewhat lucky, and honestly, their actual abilities are not much different from average. Swap a programmer and a burger flipper at birth, and they probably end up in swapped positions later in life too.
However, it does not take much “unluck” in order to not be able to accomplish something that others who were slightly luckier could. And the system is set up to limit the number of people going into such fields, specifically because there has been less demand for educated professionals than for uneducated labor.
What this has meant in the past, when there was a very high demand for factory workers and food service workers and such, was that you didn’t really have to get a college degree in order to have a reasonable income, enough even to raise a family.
Now that that has changed, and we actually do need more educated workers, and he uneducated labor is no longer able to make ends meet without govt assistance, the gatekeeping requirements for attaining that education need to come down. Yet, instead, college is becoming more and more unaffordable, and more and more people are graduating with useless degrees that do not get them into the workforce, but leave them with massive debt.
Still, no one has answered this question, and that is very telling to me: How much would I have to pay you to leave your job and go work at McDonald’s or Wendy’s as a grill operator or sandwich maker or fyr dropper?
What do you mean by meaningful? If you mean taking off a bit of the stress of trying to make things work with a shoestring budget, then yes, even a tiny raise goes a long way towards making their lives more meaningful.
How much less meaningful is someone’s life if they only get 11 million vs 22 million? Not even worth showing up for work, amiright?
I am building and growing my own business, and I hope that in the future, it nets me a comfortable income. If it ends up making me millions, that’d be cool, but it is not those “potential” millions that are an incentive to me, it is the actual act of creating and leading my company.
I don’t know much about the history of either of those companies, so were there any particular decisions that Wang made that were specifically poor decisions, or was there any luck whatsoever that played a role in which company came out on top?
I would guess the latter, but I am willing to be shown otherwise.
As the leader of a company that is seeing relatively good fortune, I certainly do not discount this. At the same time, just because they are providing the direction does not mean that they deserve such massive compensation.
What is actually interesting to me here, is that it is the desperation of many of these people who felt that they were shut out of the economy, denied the ability to have not just a better life, but even a tolerable one, is specifically what lead to many of them supporting trump.
If you (all) are a trump supporter, then, well, these are your fellow trump supporters, and you should care about their fate.
If you (all) are not a trump supporter, then the best way to get them over to our side is to work to remove their complaints about how society has left them behind to rot, rather than to look down on them because they were not able to take the same opportunities as you (all).
“Formidable” is too fuzzy to evaluate, but let’s give you this one since it also tickles my liberal feels.
which you have since caveated:
One of the reasons I like to hire college graduates is that the advanced classes have usually forced them to conduct some barest minimum level research. So that instead of just typing shit they think should be true, they’re capable of looking it up first, finding out that it’s not, and thus avoiding a [not actually Twain]removing all doubt[/not actually Twain] situation. Google is your friend. NCES has loads of data on graduation rates. Then there are all secondary analyses out there. Yes, students from poorer households are less likely to even enroll. Yes, students from poorer households who do enroll are less likely to complete. Those are true for both income and wealth. They face higher barriers for a variety of reasons – no need to get into them now because we’d probably agree.
The 6-year graduation rates for dependent new students who started 4-year college in 03/04 were:
73% - neither low-income nor a 1st-gen college student
56% - low-income only
54% - 1st-gen only
41% - low-income + 1st-gen
Are those numbers worth paying attention to for making our country more betterer? You betcha. Does anything there look “highly unattainable”? No.
Most college students work. It’s only ~40% for full-time students but ~75% for part-time. Maybe you couldn’t, but others do.
Is that 20 hours per class or total? You can look up what’s actually typical (we know you didn’t.) Nobody was giving me “busy work” – most of my homework wasn’t even collected outside of, for whatever reason, my lower-level linguistics classes.
What’s it’s telling you is that posters here are savvy enough to see and ignore a JAQ. You’re asking other people to make your argument for you instead of making it yourself.
Part of the problem is the unspoken assumption among many that once a burger flipper always a burger flipper.
I have a sister that was a “burger flipper” for several years, for yes, minimum wage. She went on to earn four college degrees, the last one an MD. Unfortunately, not everyone has had her same good fortune which was NOT just a matter of hard work (though there was a lot of that) but also some advantages she received form our parents that others do not have.
Work is a worthy use of time and energy. All jobs are worthy of respect, whether that’s flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets. The people do those jobs deserve more than being treated as disposable, losers, and failures.
So… how much did Wang Computers pay its CEO? Was it substantially more/less than what Dell paid its CEO?
Like, I keep hearing this argument, but it never actually makes much sense to me. The last company I was in was failing miserably - not because of the CEO, but because the production team was horribly overworked and the planning and marketing department were dropping the ball. Then the CEO got replaced, because of course they did, and things… did not improve significantly, because the problems were still there and weren’t replaced by the change in CEO. Eventually, a year or two later, we ditched the head of the marketing department, and we swapped out the head of construction, but it was still two pretty crappy years.
(In the meanwhile, I was getting paid a shitty trainee wage, well below minimum wage for people not in a trainee position, and due to my position in the IT department, I could have easily brought the company to its knees. Funny how that works, eh?)
In my current job, the CEO is responsible for the (quite frankly abysmal) decision to outsource our email support to India. This has been a fucking expensive misstep, costing us countless man-hours in the IT dealing with their incompetence and delays, and countless man-hours in every other department when email accounts suddenly stop working and we can’t fix them.
A report by MSCI sampled 429 large-cap U.S. companies between 2006 and 2015. It found that during that time, shareholder returns of those companies whose total pay was below their sector median outperformed those companies where pay exceeded the sector median by as much as 39%.
During this period, incentives were the largest element of CEO pay, accounting for more than 70% of total compensation. Study authors found during this time, CEO pay did not positively impact long-term stock performance. In fact, average shareholder returns were higher when a company’s CEO was in the bottom 20% than it was for companies whose executives were in the top 20% of earners.
Ric Marshall, senior corporate governance researcher at MSCI, told the Wall Street Journal that the highest paid CEOs had the worst performance by a significant margin. “It just argues for the equity portion of CEO pay to be more conservative,” he said.
I mean, the argument seems to make sense on the surface, but… Really? Were the decisions of the CEO, specifically, the most important factor in why Wang Computers is now an afterthought? It’s possible, but I feel like we’re just taking it for granted, when it’s entirely possible that there were completely different factors at play here. Just for an example of that, there’s a reasonable argument to be made that Sony’s video games division weren’t so much “really good at what they did” for the PS1 and PS2 so much as they simply were at the right place at the right time and got lucky - long argument here.
In general, everyone really loves to downplay how much of a role sheer dumb luck plays in how huge businesses get, probably because it reminds us of how fundamentally unfair it is that some people can buy the island of Lanai while we’re one missed paycheck away from losing our homes if we’re lucky, but… it’s definitely a thing. Like… Indisputably. Even if you can make every single decision right, sometimes that’s not good enough. Sometimes, your business model just doesn’t work because something else changed; sometimes someone else gets a first-mover advantage that’s fundamentally unbeatable. On the other hand, you can get phenomenally lucky when the competition keeps making stupid blunders, like what happened with Sony. And the CEO can only have so much influence on that. Just like the CEO can only have so much influence on whether there’s a crucial hardware crash and we lose a decade and change of crucial emails.
