And the best contributions tend to encompass many different fields. I’d use the term “silo” but try to avoid annoying buzzwords.
This is getting very far off into the weeds relative to the OP so I won’t continue that discussion, but if you want to start a separate thread I’d be happy to participate.
What I will say is that even the Leaf represents a tremendous technological advancement. The idea of an electric car is over a century old, but they became obsolete almost immediately due to the primitive battery tech. Lithium ion batteries are a recent invention and widespread adoption of EVs could not have taken place without it.
So forget the Leaf. How many humanities graduates does it take to convince the public to drive a Baker Electric? Or is it so slow, low-range, unsafe, and uncomfortable that it doesn’t matter how you frame the discussion?
The only thing we can count on regarding the social environment is that attitudes will ebb and flow over time, without any preferred direction independent of underlying physical environment. Technology however continues to ratchet forward. Sometimes adoption has to wait for the social environment to drift into a receptive mood, but it eventually happens given time.
I think the reason (at least what I’ve seen during my career) is that for most IT/STEM jobs, companies need someone to do a very specific thing with very specific technology. Like the company I used to work for, we needed people who knew technology like Spark, Python, and various Hadoop products. They would need to show up at a client site and hit the ground running fixing their problems immediately. I (and by extension, my clients) couldn’t use someone who “kind of knew something like Spark”. The client had plenty of those people who fucked shit up already.
Companies are also moving away from “shadow IT” where each department has their own guy who can build and maintain little crappy business apps that ends up running their entire operation. They are moving to the cloud or enterprise applications where their internal people mostly do admin and vendor management. So there is less demand of moderately skilled devs IMHO.
You can have all kinds of layers of middle managers, salespeople, project managers, business analysts and whatnot who “kind of know how things work”. But at some point you need someone who can actually code in this stuff and do it well.
Oh, for sure. I was just saying that merely knowing “how to code” isn’t really a ticket to much of anything. In general, your real developers are likely to be either college educated, or highly skilled self-taught people who can show what they’ve done in their prior work.
One thing that you touched on is that there’s a big market for technical people who aren’t strictly speaking developers- people like DBAs, system administrators, etc… Or who aren’t developers in the sense of actually develop applications or websites either. People who do stuff like set up/code enterprise service bus solutions (stuff like TIBCO, Java Caps, BizTalk, etc…) or similar stuff for other middleware apps. And again, some sort of basic cert isn’t going to get you in the door there either.
No, I think it’s silly to tell people to “update their skills” or “learn to code / data science” as if taking a few online courses will suddenly make them relevant.
One reason the humanities might actually make someone more competitive in the future IMHO is the fact that most tech seems to be being made more “user friendly” and getting pushed out to the cloud. Or at least to somewhere where only experts will need to / have access to deal with it. It will become less important to know HOW it works than it is to be able to know WHY it works and maybe how to pontificate about it at a level that salespeople and marketers understand.
In a way, landing STEM jobs is easier because it just requires checking off the right boxes of skills you can master to such an extend you can pass an interview. Many “Soft skills” jobs are a bit harder IMHO because in a sense anyone can theoretically do them. I say “theoretically” in the sense that they don’t require a specific degree in something the way an accountant or engineer does. But they require a more abstract approach of “networking” your way into a position by inherently “being impressive”.
I’ll give you an example. A job I had a few years ago, my Director promoted me to “Senior Project Manager” and gave me a bunch of direct reports after a month or two on the job. One of my reports asked me “why our Director thought I was so impressive” as it didn’t appear I “did anything”. Or at least I didn’t appear to do anything particularly special. I told him “well…you’re studying Zen, right? Does Buddha ‘do anything’? No. He just sort of sit’s there and half a billion people follow him.”
Man, I’m retired now, but does this bring back old horrible memories.