If it weren’t for government interventions and organized labor, you could, except in the few rare cases where workers aren’t just interchangeable cogs in the machine.
In the 1990’s, the buzz-talk in industry was “empowered employees.” The idea was to have well-educated people, who knew how to react in an extraordinary situation. They were empowered to shut down the assembly line, for instance, if someone got hurt, but, slightly more relevant, they were empowered to fix things on the line if they were obviously wrong. The management theory was to support them in this.
In the 2000s, this theory was pretty much replaced. Employees are to shut up, sit down, do their job, and not to think about it. The whole management philosophy changed.
Obviously, this was far from universal; there were and are numerous exceptions. (e.g., don’t point to XYZ corporation and claim, “You’re wrong!” I know that ought to go without saying, but you know the SDMB…)
Another pair of competing paradigms was nicely expressed in the book The Starfish and the Spider by Ori Brafman, pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of highly centralized, and highly de-centralized, organizations. I gave a copy of this to the CEO of the company I worked for as a going-away present, when I was let go in a downsizing event.
Basically, if you have good, intelligent, dedicated people, then empowerment and decentralization is great. They do things for you you didn’t expect. But they want to be rewarded for it, and that means money.
If you want a hive of ants, you can have it. They don’t cost much, but they also won’t go two steps out of their way to put out a fire.
The problem of course is that our future job growth is going to be in areas that require higher degrees. not in Roman literature but in things like engineerings and computer programming.
Characterizing most people are “just interchangeable cogs in the machine” demonstrates either a propensity towards hyperbole or an amazing misunderstanding of the nature of a modern workforce. The great majority of employees are not “interchangeable cogs.”
True, but that is how they are viewed by a corporate structure. Even the term “Human Resources” makes it very clear on this point. At the lower level, employees are selected not for personality, ability, or anything that makes them a unique contributing individual. They are selected for their level of adherence to a profile.
For example, a store manager might be hired based upon a lot of talk about creativity, ability to motivate employees, drive sales, and location independence, but what they WANT is someone to be responsible for the money, sign paperwork, and adhere to whatever structures the higher-ups figure out. Then they just match that up with certain “requirements” and call it a day. Whoever fits best and makes the least waves will get the job. Don’t like it? that’s cool; there are plenty of people who DO want the extra 3 bucks an hr. At this level people are simply interchangeable cogs. That only changes at the middle to upper level of management, where the actual person matters since they carry enough weight and responsibility to affect real changes.
This even occurs in highly paid professions like medical professionals and IT.
On the other hand companies that people want to emulate, like Google, are going in the exact opposite direction, even giving people a percentage of time to work on their own projects. And this isn’t an example of a randomly picked exception - it is one with high growth and a high stock price.
I’ve noted that dumb managers want to hire people stupider than they are while smart managers try to hire people smarter than they are. The dumb managers do fine in stable times - no churn - but they and their groups are the first to go during times of change.
A smart manager who inherits a dumb employee first tries to educate and train them, but eventually manages to transfer them - or convince them to quit. A dumb manager with a smart employee creates all kinds of conflicts.
I’ve mostly worked for smart managers, and it has mostly been great. And when I hire I hire the smartest people I can find.
Not everywhere. This is why you have to interview the company as much as they interview you. Anyone with half a brain (which includes pretty much all Dopers) can find someplace where this is not true. Heck, the interns I’ve hired have done original work that was visible at the vice-Presidential level.
I agree that someone only smart enough to be a cog is going to wind up as a cog - but they shouldn’t complain about it. But for anyone else, if the people you talk to during interviews are cogs, run.
This is good advice, but you are missing the x-factor of a depressed economy. Most People I know have significant student debt, and limited savings and means. Jobs just aren’t going round like they were several years ago, and people have to eat. Sometimes you keep looking, but then you get branded a “job-hopper”. The situation is more complex than you might think. Aside, is your location tech-heavy? that does make a difference in what you might see around you. Here in South FLorida, most industries are service, and nearly ALL of them operate in the manner I described.
I’m in Silicon Valley, but it is this attitude that has led to lots of job growth (and rising house prices and jammed roads) in the last year or so.
For the average person, a bad economy means less chance of getting work. However if a company is clever, when they can hire (for replacements, say) they can get better people. This is actually harder in times of prosperity. I’d say that companies are doing this, given the rise in productivity over the last few years. What they are not doing is giving the money earned back to workers, which is going to lead to a lack of loyalty and good people leaving as soon as possible.
When I hire I reject job hoppers also - in fact it is something guaranteed to get a person rejected by my management. But job hopping means a bunch of short term jobs. One short term job doesn’t hurt at all. I agree that if a person runs through a series of four or five jobs and leaves them all because the companies suck and don’t appreciate him, the problem is him, not them.
And I’m definitely not saying that stupid companies and stupid bosses don’t exist.
We certainly are not overeducated. To begin with, 15% of Americans didn’t finish high school. Only 22% have bachelor’s degrees. And earnings really do increase with each additional level of education attained.
In the meantime, the workplace is much more competitive. We are no longer just competing with other Americans for jobs. We are competing with the entire world, and the US has lost a lot of the geographic dividend that once kept our wages abnormally high. If we keep getting educated, we can keep our place as the managers, entrepreneurs, and tech experts in the world, as higher education is the one thing that the US really does have a competitive advantage on. If we don’t increase our educational attainment, we are screwed, because we are not going to be able to maintain our standard of living as the unskilled and semi-skilled labor in the world. This isn’t a mystery. China is pumping funds into their university system, because they know the manufacturing jobs they got rich from are not going to be competitive much longer now that Chinese workers want higher wages and better working conditions. If everyone is fighting to be more globally competitive, why would we take a regressive step?
They type of work we do has also gotten more complex. When I was a kid (not so long ago) there were jobs for typists. Being able to type, as your one and only skill, was enough to get you hired. Can you type and file? Great, now you can be a full-on secretary. but today’s office workers know how to type, have electronic files, schedule via Outlook, and have voicemail to pick up the phone. Nobody is going to hire a secretary with basic bare bones skills. They want someone who can communicate well, who can engage in complex analysis, and who can manage all that technology. In other words, the exact same things you typically refine in college. If you dumped yesterday’s secretary in today’s workplace, they wouldn’t last long. Heck, look at where you work. Most organizations have some older employees who have serious performance issues because they can’t operate basic technology, etc. The basic skillset for employability has been raised.
The real problem is that we are forgetting that college is a tool for preparing for work, not a means in and of itself. College students have amazing access to internships, career centers, recruiting events, and part-time work. We need to teach our students that they absolutely need to take advantage of it. Going to classes is probably 1/3 of what you need to do to set yourself up for post college success. If that’s all you do for those four years, you are screwed. Undergrads need to be hustling now to build those contacts, demonstrate transferable skills, scale the first rungs of the job ladder, get their head on straight and define their goals. I was a first generation student, and I had no idea of how to use the many free resources my campus provided, nor how necessary it was to give building a career an equal share of my energy as classes. When I started meeting more career minded folks, it was like a complete revelation. Building a career is WORK, and you need to be fighting for it from the beginning.
Preach. I live in Boston. *Everybody *has at least a bachelors. You couldn’t swing a cat even in my crappy neighborhood without hitting a PhD.
I know these people. They may be over-credentialed, but they’re sure as hell not over-educated.
I lost a lot of sleep last night after reading this. I’m thirty, I got a Master’s degree last year, people seem to consider me a savant in my field, and yet I cannot even get an interview. Of course, it’s hard enough to figure out what jobs I can do.
I want to add something insightful about my situation, but it keeps getting too long.
I don’t want to make excuses, but depression took a lot of my youth, and that hurts one’s career path.
There are generally two types of jobs out there.
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Jobs where the worker does not really need to know all that much about the company, the products, the customers, and partners. These are mostly (but not exclusively) positions where the level of skill is also low.
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Jobs where the worker must know all those things mentioned above in order to do their job. These are mostly (but not exclusively) positions requiring a high level of skill.
People in the first type of job are truly at risk of “racing to the bottom.” The best defense is to do the job better than someone else, and thereby justify a higher level of pay. Nonetheless, being replaced by the next guy from the street is a big risk. Unions mitigate this problem, but introduce the chance of a systemic failure. In that case, everyone loses their jobs at the same time.
People in the second type of job are not nearly so easily replaced. As someone who has had to manage people from the second group, it’s really a bit of a nightmare. Sure, I could have fired and replaced someone who I felt didn’t make the cut. But the replacement needs 12-16 months to get up to any sort of speed where I am actually making more money than with the first guy. And that’s still a maybe. So most of the time, if my guys were not actively losing me money, then I would not even think of replacing them. Maybe a nudge from time to time to try to get more efficiency. The only time it gets dangerous for the second group of workers, is when not enough work is there; the less productive ones are likely to be the first to go.
(I want to mention that “less productive” does not necessarily mean “worse worker”. Maybe we don’t have work in that area anymore, maybe personality problems are dragging down other workers. )
The issue is that peoples opinion of what “not smart”, “smart” and “very smart” constitute are very different. I’m not insinuating here that your friends are not “very smart” but there is definitely differing opinions, on different levels as well. For example in the UK, where I am, you are considered to have achieved academically if you obtain 5 grade C’s at GCSE. To clarify in order to obtain this accolade you only need to get 50% in 5 out of an average of 10 exams taken. To me that does not mean you are “smart” and most definitely should prohibit you from progressing on to higher-education in terms of college and university. Yet in the liberal society we live in, where everyone is “equal” despite obviously being unequal, these people are told they are “great” told they are “smart” and pushed on in to college and university. Here this delusion of intelligence is re-affirmed even more, compounding their sense of entitlement. We can’t then wonder why people come out of university expecting to walk in to a job as a high paid lawyer, accountant or consultant – because they have been told all their lives that they are deserving of it. Add to that the whole social issue of TV where you have a myriad of programmes showing the best parts of life and nothing that is real and that is the fundamental problem.
Sadly we aren’t equal, that is a fundamental of life there is a good book about it called “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”. We can’t afford to just keep expanding at a rate of knots in any direction we feel like, it doesn’t work. People need to be guided as to which path to take. Some people don’t trust their 16 year olds to decide what types of clothes to wear or what hair cut to get, and yet all seem happy to let them make one of the biggest decisions of their lives regarding their futures.
The fact of life is that some people are born to go and be top shot lawyers and earn the big bucks and some people are born to stack shelves in Wall Mart and get by, and that is a bitter pill to swallow but it would be a hell of a lot easier and cause a lot less problems if that pill was swallowed earlier rather than later. If people were honest with each other and took people aside at 16 and said - look your achievements so far suggest that you are suitable for “this role” and this is what you need to do to excel in it, instead of telling people to “shoot for the moon, because if you miss you will still be amongst the stars” - we would have much lower unemployment and far fewer dissatisfied graduates drifting around; because sadly if you aim for the moon and miss you don’t end up amongst the stars, gravity pulls you back to earth and you hit the ground, hard!
Would that it were so simple. The education system does a pretty poor job at spotting ability in anything other than the subjects they teach, and often not even those. If it were all about nature rather than nurture, we wouldn’t even need an education system - people would just become lawyers by osmosis because that’s what they were born to be. To shoot for the moon, first you have to point in the right direction (note that “right” in this analogy may not necessarily mean “at” - you should see the pathways to the moon that have been used on lunar missions!).
I don’t quite follow how you reckon lower unemployment would be a result of your pigeon-holing system. Fewer dissatisfied graduates, yes, as there would probably be fewer graduates in general.
If anything, I’d argue that pigeon-holing is a problem with the existing system as too many at the low end are effectively told that low academic ability equates to a lifetime of low-skilled, low-paid jobs; and then dumped by the system. What the education system should be doing is equipping everyone with the tools to allow them become high-skilled at their aptitude or desire, or at least to become better at anything. That it only attempts this for those with academic ability is a huge failing.
I’m also in the UK, and would say you’ve misrepresented what 5 GCSEs is generally taken to mean - it’s more seen as the minimum to be fit for the world of work (or at least to leave school and be capable of doing some work beyond shelf stacking). The push into university has largely been down to an arbitrary government target to get 50% of school leavers there. You usually need a B or higher in a given subject to do A Levels, which are usually needed to go straight into university. This isn’t necessarily the case for mature students, but that’s OK as we wouldn’t have any under your system.
The sense of entitlement is of little wonder when one considers the argument used here for the introduction of tuition fees - that they are justified because it is the key to “better” ie higher paid jobs. After all, you’ve paid up front (or at least gone into debt up front). The irony is that abundance lowers prices, so “better” isn’t as big a difference as it used to be. On my more cynical days I suspect that abundance was precisely what employers wanted.
There’s a place where it levels out. I have been out of work for a year. I have easily gotten lots of part time jobs. But I am well educated and could do a lot.
But no one wants to pay me more than minimum wage. I just had one employer ask me to do something outside my job description. I am getting paid minimum wage only 16 hours a week.
I told himi no, “Pay me what I’m worth.” He said, since I am working for minimum that is what I am worth. I told him, then find someone else to do it.
He came back with, “Well I could let you go.” And I said, “By tomorrow I’ll have another lousy job. Then I explaine, you can’t threaten anyone with a minimum wage job.” Even in this economy it’s always been easy to get one.
Sure I have to combine job to come up with 40 hours and I get no benefits, but employers are too stupid to realize at a certain point, the door swings both ways.
In regards to that job, I still have it, the employer still doesn’t have his work done and the next minimum wage job I see, I’ll just quit this and take that, since there’s no future in that company anyway.
If you treat people like garbage, I don’t see it getting better. But employers won’t learn.
It is a problem, and while it’s somewhat self-correcting, the current course for self-correction is a pretty painful one for a lot of people. I’d argue (and I have in past threads) that the problem is mostly created by the way we finance college education.
Many student loans are guaranteed by the government and can’t be discharged in bankruptcy. This is a huge win for the institutions making the loan. It’s incredibly low risk. It’s a huge (potential) pain point for the students. They have no market price information to point them in the right direction, and if they make mistakes, they will pay for it dearly, sometimes for decades. I consider myself very lucky that I was inclined toward a field (computer science) that’s quite lucrative, because I did not really understand the debt burden I was agreeing to at the time. I see some of my fellow students who also studied what they wanted to, but ended up struggling financially as they didn’t learn the high-market-valued skills I did.
If loans weren’t guaranteed, and were dischargeable, you’d see that getting an English degree was way more risky than getting an Engineering degree, since the banks would not be inclined to pay a whole lot for another English major.
There are obvious downsides to this approach: It’s probably much harder to get a loan to go to school, which means you reduce social mobility, and you may direct people into careers that they’re less suited for.
Maybe for your very first job, but even then, that hasn’t been my impression. In fact, I think that Silicon Valley is more meritocratic than most places. It’s easier to test for skill in software than in most fields. Want to get a job at Apple? Go write some cool iPhone software. Want to get a job at Facebook? Go write a viral game. Total capital investment is less than $1000, and you can prove that you’re awesome. No one cares if you even have a degree if you can make cool things.
I’m not saying that writing successful software or getting social traction are easy. They’re very very hard, which is why tech companies pay so much for the best. But determining whether someone is the best is very easy (you can just look at what they’ve made), so the value of the degree as a signal is greatly reduced.
I quite agree. Here is the thread on What will happen to the student loan bubble.
I think there is a strong correlation between the abundance of college grads and the availability and ease of access to student loans. As discussed in that thread, the people making the loans care not what someone is majoring in, as long as they can loan them money, they are guaranteed to get the money back some day, with interest. With the culture of everyone being told to go to college, and that the loans are an investment in their future, and that financing is easy to get, you can see where this leads - all the risk is transferred to the future. Perhaps there needs to be a degree created called “Job Creation” or “Entrepreneurism”.
Yes, the place counts for your first job, not so much for experienced people. However it is far easier to get a job at a Tier 1 company if you already have a job at a Tier 1 company.
For what I do people can’t show the software they wrote, because it is proprietary for their current company. The skills I am looking for don’t map well to the skills you need for game writing or App development. What I look for is not just knowledge of an area but understanding of an area, not just that we do something this way but why we do it that way. It is surprisingly easy to determine even on a phone call. Given that we can train the person.
My understanding is, however, that Facebook is looking for people from top colleges also. I guess if you have made a good selling game you’d be in, but that is pretty rare.
This might be an oversimplified/naive opinion, however:
I think if you have too many educated people, you’ll have problems when it comes to simpler yet necessary jobs for maintaining out current state of utility.
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For example, we like going to restaurants and being waited on, but people who are better-educated tend to stray away from manual work or work that doesn’t pay as well. However you can’t have a society full of nothing but investment bankers. You still need all sorts of jobs that don’t necessarily require huge levels of education to achieve.
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I don’t necessarily agree that having a bunch of smart people implies that the value of a given job decreases. You have to factor in the notion that having a lot of smart, hardworking people means a lot of stuff can get done more effectively/intelligently, which ultimately adds more value to society and quality of life even if you’re being “paid less” in nominal terms. Would you rather be a rich man 1000 years ago, or an average joe today?
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If we are to follow the points of #2, it might give an answer to #1. If you have a smart workforce, it may be possible to automate the jobs that don’t require much intelligence.