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The American working class is materially richer than the working class in every other developed country bar a handful of microstates (many of them beneficiaries of extreme commodity wealth coupled with a low population). Even those countries often have lower consumption per capita than the US. America is not poor, the average working American is not poor. The things that are expensive in America, like healthcare and education, are in substantial part expensive because of protectionism, regulation or extremely high domestic salaries.
The problems America faces compared to those countries - a feral, mentally ill violent homeless population, disgusting and unusable public transport, high crime rates, a ridiculously inefficient and expensive healthcare system, mass illegal immigration across the southern border, and an inability to build almost anything - are not the consequence of a free-trade-based economic policy. Many countries trade relatively freely (certainly with lower tariffs on the entire world than those just implemented) without them. Many are very civilized places and have service-based economies.
Downtown Philadelphia isn’t a dump because of trade policy. The Tenderloin in SF isn’t a dump because of trade policy. People don’t choose to avoid the LA subway because of trade policy. (In fact big coastal American cities are some of the most prosperous places in the entire world). New railroads aren’t not being built because of trade policy. Wokeness wasn’t imported to America but exported by it. The problem isn’t the policy, but the people and their incentives. People don’t overdose in tiny midwestern towns because the factory jobs went (in fact, speak to many factory owners still there and they’ll tell you they struggle to find workers who will show up, pass a drug test and work a normal 8 hour shift even for wages that are the envy of the world).
Let’s just be honest. This is happening because Donald Trump read or learned about trade deficits sometime in the 1970s and decided, personally, that any imbalance is a “bad deal”, and this is a man who sees everything in life in terms of deals. Over the last 8 years he went from outsider to king of the GOP and is now surrounded by advisors who know that the only consequence of disagreeing with him on this is getting replaced by someone who knows when to stay quiet. On abortion, on immigration, on tax, on trans rights, Trump is malleable. On trade, he’s not. This is what he really believes, and he will stake his presidency on it.
There is likely some level of economic damage that would cause Trump to rethink this, but it’s much worse than a lot of people think.
I think that the decline of blue collar work has caused or at least exacerbated many of our social problems. The reason that jobs you can get right out of college suck for a lot of people (tech is at the moment, an exception) is the absolute glut of college graduates. But why? Why did 80% of Americans decide that they needed to spend $60,000 to get a degree? What other options are there? So off we go to college and unless you are super talented, you don’t get much for it except the loan you’re paying off. Why is there so much homelessness? The good paying jobs aren’t there. Blacks in Detroit can’t get jobs at ford anymore, so they deal drugs and form gangs. Basically our economy only works if you’re one of the elite who can manage to get a STEM degree, do all of the unpaid internships and build a good GitHub. The rest will probably struggle to reach such milestones as “paying for rent and groceries on one paycheck without 6 roommates”.
Whether tariffs will fix it, I don’t know. But the economy is hollowed out and importing more workers when those at home can’t afford food and rent, so why not try it?
Tech internships are paid, and people don’t really care about your github in my experience. Having a good one never helped me, and I’ve never been told to look at the githubs for candidates when evaluating them or seen anyone else bring it up in hiring committees.
Honestly the entire tech hiring process is fucked and looks at the entirely wrong things. If I were doing hiring, my interview process would involve things like:
"Take a look at this (terrible) database schema. What would you change about the design and why?" If the dev knows what third normal form is and why it matters (and when it doesn't) that puts them in the top 5-10% of devs already.
"You've been assigned to build [hypothetical product]. Explain the overall design/architecture choices you would go for and why. Also explain some alternatives you might choose and why. What are some potential difficulties (both immediate and long-term) you might run into with your choices, and why you feel your choices are worth it in spite of the potential problems." Being able to actually consider pros and cons, think about the future, etc. also put a potential hire in the top 5% of devs.
Those just sound like system design interviews, which is something companies actually do. I’ve given and taken interviews like that. The database schema thing you mention is not quite one, but just like the answer to every whiteboarding question is a hashtable, a relational database with a reasonable schema is the core of every system design question.
I also think white boarding is a good thing to do. There are a lot of peripheral skills to being a software engineer, but if you can’t code you don’t belong in the profession. Whiteboarding is a good time boxed test of this.
I wish we would take stuff like github into account more for selfish reasons, but plenty of good talent has no open source presence so I understand why it generally isn’t factored in. I do think is a strong signal at the new grad level and should be weighed much more heavily there.
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