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Notes -
I'm starting with a ramble about historical city government
There's a tendency for fantasy settings(which is how most modern westerners are familiar with medieval operations) to portray everything as running according to very strict monarchy/feudalism- they're usually kinda confused as to the difference between the two things, but with enough oversimplifications as to make the distinction meaningless. But historically, that's not how any cities were governed- a hereditary lord just isn't how urbanites organize themselves. Instead, there's a largely-hereditary(but in the medieval case open to new admittance on a theoretically meritocratic but also super corrupt basis) social class which elects city leadership- usually a board of senior figures, a few magistrates doing specific tasks, and some generals. That class- which we call 'citizens' in Greece and Rome and 'burghers' in medieval free cities- makes up the military as citizen-soldiers who provide their own equipment(yes, even in the middle ages). The city might owe allegiance to some overlord, say an emperor, and might be in alliance with other similar cities, but it's probably not under the direct overlordship of a local noble.
It's the burghers that I want to focus on today. Entry into the burgher class required either guildsmanship or enough wealth to buy membership. Obtaining it practically guaranteed your sons full membership in a guild(acceptance as apprentices, not laborers). Their burgher status was tied to a specific town, and it was- by implication- tied to their service to a specific town. With the heretofore unprecedented pace of technological change beginning in the high middle ages, highly skilled work(and I do mean work, here- these people are largely technicians and skilled craftsmen, not engineers) becomes ever more important, and they naturally live in cities, which are ruled by corrupt political machines dominated by the guilds. Increasing technology and trade makes these cities more and more valuable, both economically and by enabling more effective military activity, giving the cities more bargaining power to wrangle special rights for their citizens. This is, as far as I can tell, the first time in history that it is prestigious to be meritocratic. There are roman accounts of wealthy freedman- invariably they are negative. But it seems that the medieval working class aspired to be guildmember burghers and not to be nobles. Now, you(maybe not you personally, but if you're an able-bodied twenty year old male reading this and you're not sure what to do with your life you should consider it- apply and take an aptitude test) can learn a trade today through a union which is functionally a guild, but nobody thinks of the IBEW or UA as aspirational, despite the high salaries. In non-european parts of the world at the same time as the middle ages skilled crafts/trades were passed down through clans, not guilds, and while artisans were often taxed differently from farmers there are straightforwards and obvious reasons for this in non-monetized societies rather than it being an expression of a special status.
Know your place. At the end of the day, society has to be made of lots of different members doing lots of different jobs, living in different ways. The high middle ages with its social classes- peasants who farm, nobles who fight, clerics who pray, study, and do white collar work, townsmen who do artisanal work, merchants who move things from point a to b, with wealthy and prestigious and respected examples of each(and there were wealthy peasants- the term 'yeoman' actually descends from one subcategory thereof). We have, as an urbanized and technological society, very similar roles in society that need filling. We need people to study and push the frontiers of theoretical knowledge. We need people to do white collar administrative work. We need people to move things around. We need people to physically make things and do things, many of them highly skilled. We need people to defend us. Etc, etc.
But increasingly, the only roles which are prestigious in modernity are those of white collar undefined-what-the-value-add-here-is jobs and those of pushing the bounds of theoretical knowledge(much of it actually more the philosophy of fartsniffing). UA HVAC techs make more than either(and that's assuming minimum payscales and no overtime), but it's nowhere near as lionized as the girlboss middle manager in an HR department at a startup that bills itself as Uber for cat psychics. I wonder if that's upstream of many of the motte's obsessions- let's take the fertility rate here. Having kids will not fuck up your career as a k-12 teacher, or accountant, or RN, or for the vanishingly few female long-haul truckers. 'Explain this gap in your resume' being met with 'I was a SAHM when my kids were in diapers' will not stop normal average jobs from hiring you. It's only awesome girlboss career track progression that will be derailed that way. Now, ideally, 'housewife' is a role that society lionizes the same way it does professor of queer fartsniffing or founding HR manager at uber for cat psychics. But it goes beyond just that- the motte fixates on admittance to very selective colleges. But society has far more unmet demand for electrical linemen than it does for another hotshot lawyer or Mackinsey consultant(I don't actually know what the latter does, except that it is pointless, well paid occupation for Ivy league grads). Now sure, whatever it is Mackinsey consultants actually do, it's probably more comfortable and easier than electrical linemen. But at a certain point, shouldn't we as a society go 'it takes all sorts to make the world go round, why don't we make the top of every field prestigious, give everyone someone to aspire to. In the words of country music, every sort of person should have something to be proud of(https://youtube.com/watch?v=PXg8E0kzF1c)'.
I remember when movies had a trope- I'm not defined by my work, I do x from 9-5, but all day long I'm a dad- one who happens to do x to pay the bills. The idea of an identity to be proud of, genuine pride in our differences and diversity, was singing its swan song. It's now dead. How many of the world's problems are actually downstream of that? I'm reminded of the several AAQC's about why South Koreans aren't having kids(my answer is pretty simple- it's not fun. Rednecks have kids because they look forwards to going to t-ball games. South Koreans don't because they don't look forwards to twelve hour study sessions).
Darnit, I wish I'd written this before trying to revive the user viewpoint focus series(@netstack how's yours coming?).
I'm curious which jobs you're thinking of, and why the value add is unclear? Although it's also worth making the distinction between the difficulty measuring an individuals level of value add (very hard depending on the job) and the value add from the job position(s) overall, which I actually think is always incredibly clear, and the person saying "this doesn't add value" just doesn't like the job for ideological or other belief reasons.
I've worked 4 white collar jobs now. 2 of which I absolutely did not generate enough economic benefit to offset my salary. Although both of those I was an intern/fresh grad, so I was hired less to do work and more in the hope I stuck around until I was more experienced, and did work later.
The first was in an operational risk function at a bank. This specific department seemed to largely exist due to government compliance reasons, as we didn't do very much. But governments and societies have a preference for better regulated banks, so that's a value-add. In a 0 regulation environment, I think they'd get trimmed, but I also think it's rational for banks to have some level of internal risk monitoring regardless. The principal-agent problem combined with massive sums of money means that humans with power will do incredibly dumb shit which can put the bank as a whole at risk (see: bearings bank). And this bank in question had some pretty good fuck ups that resulted in government consequences in recent history, their prior lack of risk management wasn't a working business strategy.
The second was in the tax function of a large corporation. We were overstaffed half the year, but this was on purpose. Clearly whoever was in charge prefered is to be overstaffed during the year, so we'd be correctly staffed during the crunch of tax season. I always wondered why we didnt just have a skeleton crew for day to day tax stuff, and then have consultants come in for the tax filings. I assume it was probably cheaper to pay a few extra medium-tier accountant salaries than to pay for a massive tax engagement every year.
At both jobs, we can quibble about the cost/benefit of the scope/size of the department, but the value add was clear imo, I just articulated it. it doesn't strike me that either department was incredibly sub-optimal (I'd assume they'd get cut if so). You can hand-wave this away I guess as "these are zombie companies limping along due to a decade of free money" but both are massive successful corporations/household names in North America that anyone here would recognize.
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The respective wages indicate that the market disagrees with you, there. As markets are how Western societies assigns scarce goods (such as labor), and generally are thought to do a non-terrible job of it, this requires further explanation.
I mean, there were certainly lucrative occupations in the past which did not correspond to fulfilling a need for society. An uncontroversial example might be a bank robber. Even the craziest economist will not look at the average income of bank robbers and conclude that given their effective hourly rate, there is a great demand for bank robbers in society.
People with different politics will widely disagree on which professions are in the same parasitic class as the bank robber. An argument could be made for meth cooks, developers of free-to-play Skinner box mobile games, people who make advertisements for tobacco products, ransomware gangs.
Another model would liken your ivy league lawyers and McKinsey consultants to the feather train of a peacock: a weird attractor state where the underlying forces (of evolution or the market) end up spending a lot of surplus resources just for signaling that they had surplus resources to spend. More uncontroversially, this is true for luxury brands like Porsche or Rolex: nobody buys a Rolex because they want to know what time it is.
A related concept is what Yudkowsky calls Inadequate Equilibria. Games (in the game theory sense) can be set up so that the stable outcome will be far away from the Pareto frontier, so that if participants could only coordinate better, everyone could get higher utility. As an example, consider the security dilemma: The states of the world spend trillions on their military-industrial complexes to prevent being invaded and better invade others, but as that is a zero-sum game, they will on average not get anything for that. In theory, the members of the United Nations might coordinate to forgo developing and building new weapon systems and spend the resources on endeavors which are not zero sum, like education (to the degree that it enables people to do more things instead of just competing for finite jobs), human necessities, entertainment, research or the like.
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Michael Church's 3-ladder system of US social class offers a much better model of prestige. In broad strokes, there are three ladders of social status:
You have described aspirations for Gentry, decrying the lack of the aspirations for Labor, and completely disregarding the existence of Elites.
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The thing is, a lot of ‘traditional’ jobs are bullshit now.
Farmers: half the EU’s budget is agricultural subsidies (edit: 37% in 2017, down from 70% in 1980). The other main source of income for them is when the village council declares their land constructible, another form of subsidy. The production of food is just some hypothetical scenario (they get paid to leave the land uncultivated) these real estate guys known as farmers dangle to soak up more subsidies.
Japan completely protects their rice farmers from competition (with subsidies on top), so to keep their WTO commitments, they are forced to buy rice on the international market, which they let rot until they can feed it to animals. The asian rice penury from 2008 was solved when Japan got permission from american farmers to sell their useless rice back to the international market(wiki, asianometry video). The latest round of farmer absurdity was EU farmers forcing a tariff on ukrainian exports: the country the EU is currently shoveling money to, whose economy they’re trying to keep running. Robbing peter to pay paul so that piotr and pierre can steal it back from paul to pretend their job has any economic value.
Teachers: we are massively over-educated, and they make it worse. Doubly useless, they encourage others to be non-productive. A university professor who rants alone in a room would only be half as damaging. To be fair the early teachers do provide daycare for the normal kids and prison guard duties for those who can't read.
Doctors: Attending to hypochondriacs and prolonging old people’s suffering.
A farmer once told me "farmers run land management companies with a farming problem"
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What. For example, what do you think paediatricians do?
Same thing. They soothe parents who panic and hold the hand of leucemics.
It’s the hansonian argument about doctors being more about showing people care than producing a substantial increase in qaly. And the background modern increase in qaly caused by clean water, vaccines, antibiotics, which you don’t need all those doctors for.
Jesus Christ. It's one thing to observe that a lot of QALY and DALY improvements come from "clean water, vaccines and antibiotics" and then entirely another to imply that additional interventions are zero or negative expected value.
Do you think that our (now quite successful) treatments of childhood leukemia are as ineffectual as extending the unhealthy lifespans of the very elderly?
That's not the work of most doctors. Even the specialists administering the treatments are essentially just following protocols that were invented and tested by a very small number of people.
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Huh, okay, looks like childhood leukemia really took a beating these last decades. Yay science.
Still, most docs spend their time talking to old people and recommending negative EV surgeries.
I may have been a tad harsh. Unlike farmers, who went from useful to parasitic, doctors improved over time. They used to kill people, drink their blood and feed on their suffering, now some of them occasionally manage to help humans.
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I would view subsidized farmers like an army: in good times, a waste of money, but in bad times, essential to the sovereignty of the nation. (Of course, both the farmers and the army require petrochemicals to have any effect, but unlike food and trained fighters, you can stockpile petrochemicals just fine, and nations generally do.) Obviously, this does not mean that a breakdown of international trade would not be bad: most high-tech products have globe-spanning supply chains. But there is a difference between "your population no longer has access to their fancy Starbucks coffee, or new iPads or the chips which your car industry would require to continue building cars" and "your population is starving".
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I disagree with you about the value of education. I will grant that at least half of education is pure credentialism. Go to university, pay your dues, get a paper you require to get a good job, learn whatever you require to do the job from the internet.
I have an advanced degree in STEM. A lot of the stuff which makes me a non-zero value employee I picked up on the side, sure. And sure, everything I learned I could have learned from books (for free from libgen) or educational videos. But I can also tell you that I would not have done so. Without the structure and the tests of traditional educational institutions, it is very doubtful that 22-year old me would have woken up at 9:00 one Thursday and started watching a video on the Gram–Schmidt process at 10:00.
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Despite being someone who tends to avoid interacting with the medical system where possible (a hyperchondriac, if you will), I vehemently disagree. Most physicians do not actually like to pander to hypochondriacs. I am very pro-MAID, but I do not think that most of what doctors do can be fairly described as "prolonging old people’s suffering". Most people do not seek euthanasia at age 50. I generally support trusting people to determine if their life is worth living for themselves.
I think every jobs includes some bullshit components, and physicians are certainly not exempt. Often, doctor's offices are run as a business (and a weirdly over-regulated business at that), and you will see them peddling additional preventive healthcare to patients which is not covered by insurance. Or they will have to spend a lot of their time dealing with health insurance companies. Obviously, most dentistry should be a skilled trade, there is no need to require a lengthy university education to handle a drill. I think that The Elephant in the Brain is making a good case that a lot of the the costs of the medical system are actually due to signaling. But at the end of the day, there is a pretty substantial non-bullshit core.
That’s what they want you to think. This lobby group is so powerful because it has arguments tailored for all kinds of people. To greens they say they preserve the ecology, the meadows and all the little birdies. To conservatives, the character of the land, the connection to ancestors, they eat that shit up. To social democrats they emphasize the need to safeguard their jobs from the destructive forces of the market. And to greys, they play the strategic food reserve card.
Why can't you store food? Let’s do some back of the envelope math: CAP budget is 55B/year, with germany shouldering 25%, that’s 13B, that’s €0.45 per german per day in subsidies.
That’s imo a large underestimate of alll the subsidies they get. Most peasants I know build a house on their land, which they can then sell for a large profit, because normal people do not get to build a house on cheap agri land without tons of red tape. When a piece of my grandparents’ land was declared constructible, it was like winning the lottery to them. Plus the tariffs and all the protections they get and all the problems those protections cause. Like the japanese customer who pays to subsidy the rice, then pays a higher price for it, then pays again to buy some other rice that gets destroyed to compensate WTO partners. A significant share of EU-US trade disputes, like every trade dispute, are caused by farmer lobby duels.
So let’s double the estimate to 90 cents/day/person. I think you can feed a man for about 9 cents/day on non-perishable (conserves and such) goods. Because you can feed a man for one day for 5 cents in vegetable oil, and that’s retail. So if we cut the subsidies and went with my strategic pemmican plan, after about 10 years we’d have 100 years of food for everyone. Talk about food security. And then we’d enjoy our extra euro per day. And that’s assuming we all forget how to farm once the subsidies subside and we are henceforth incapable of producing a single beet.
Because it goes bad?
Tin canned, freeze dried, etc.
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Unions exist solely for extracting rent in the form of above market wages from through the use of various coercive techniques. That's literally their entire point. Similarly, guilds and trades apprenticeships restrict supply to drive up wages through regulatory capture.
I always say it and I'll say it again. Trades are easy. It doesn't take years to learn to wire up a house or install some plumbing. A novice with zero experience and a copy of the code could do it all perfectly, though he'd be a bit slow. But make it so only another plumbing master can grant access to the masters club, and tons of bs hurdles and hazing will suddenly be in the way.
So don't be surprized when people outside the club, which just exists to rob customers, don't hold the club in high regard.
He would be even faster without the code. Of course, nobody likes water damage from failed plumbing or wrongly installed wiring to burn their house down. Getting rid of the corpses of DIY-electricians is also a hassle.
There is a reason why we generally do not hand out driving licences after a student has passed the written test. A lot of knowledge is tacit, stuff which you do not learn from books.
That being said, I agree that a lot of the license regulations are protectionism hiding behind a veneer of safety concerns. For example, learning how to safely deploy standard household electricity (i.e. 230V, 16A) should not be more effort than learning how to drive a car.
If it's not in the code it won't be done. No inspector would check it, and no mechanism for different electricians to agree it should be done.
All I am hearing is "just read the traffic code and you'll be fine, man. No policeman is ever going to ticket you for something which is not in the traffic code."
Sure, the policeman will find a section in the traffic code to ticket you, and that will not be difficult because some of the sections are very broad. For example, "reckless endangerment" could cover anything from your pet jumping out of your convertible mid-drive to you getting stuck on the highway with an empty tank. Likely, the traffic code will not explain how your car needs fuel and how to check the fuel gauge. Knowing that you are forbidden from recklessly endangering others does not mean that you know how to do that.
If someone wants to learn C++, about the worst advice in the world would be to tell them "just read through ISO/IEC 14882:2024, everything you need to know about C++ is in there". Sure, it would be technically correct that if they stick to the standard, use a standard-compliant compiler correctly (a subject very much not covered by the standard) then their program will have a well-defined runtime behavior, but even if that person is a genius able to wade through ENBF syntax rising to their chin and coming out with a solid understanding of how actual code would look like on the other side, they would spend most of their remaining lifespan independently re-discovering the principles of good software engineering.
For electrical installations of low-voltage systems, the relevant local standard likely refers to IEC_60364. Your would-be electrician will likely want the sections (1), (4), (5) and (6), each of which costs about 280 swiss franks in the IEC web store. Part 1, Fundamental principles, assessment of general characteristics, definitions is all of 49 pages, so I would not expect full electrical engineering 101 course full of comic strips to teach how to apply wire ferrules or use luster terminals or warn you that single strand wires will eventually break if bent in opposite directions repeatedly (or whatever, I am very obviously not an electrical engineer). Likely, the standard will start by saying that electrical installations should only be performed by licensed professionals (which is part protectionism and part that you can not reasonably trust a layman to understand the standard from reading it), and your self-taught handyman will be breaking at least that part of the standard.
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Do you feel this way about historical unions that were fighting for weekends, 8 hour work days, and basic safety precautions? Or just the modern ones that do seem to have devolved into straight rent seeking (police and teachers most obviously, with a honorable mention to east coast dockworkers).
The elevator repair mechanic guild in Ontario is one of the most egregious rent seeking institutions of our time and I wish we could burn them down. Unfortunately they're very tied into the suburban-developer-complex who in turn have very deep pockets and ties to the Italian mob.
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I don't generally disagree. Some unsorted thoughts:
That's not how prestige works.
American folk culture told a lot of romantic stories about cowboys, lumberjacks, trappers, all sorts of things. The guy who owns the roofing company probably has a wife and kids, and the people in his church respect him. Is that not good enough for him? Some things are harder to romanticize than others, but people have been making beautiful stories about the British navy for hundreds of years, I'm sure it's possible to draw attention to the honor of HVAC technicians. Winter on the Railroad , Landsailor, Logging Song
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This isn't necessarily directed at you in particular, but it seems like a good excuse to talk about it:
I often see sweeping generalizations about "prestige" on TheMotte that betray a very particular kind of coastal, Blue Tribe, upper-middle-to-lower-upper class perspective on what counts as prestigious and why. But not everyone in "society" shares that perspective. Ask yourself, the types of guys who are actually working these trade jobs, do they know about your concept of prestige? Do they know what you consider prestigious or not? And if they do know, do they care what you consider prestigious or not? It's not a rhetorical question, I'm legitimately asking. I don't exactly have a foot in that world either.
Think about a black teenager growing up in the projects in inner city Chicago. He's a part of "modernity" too. What does he consider prestigious? He may be aware to a more or less vague degree that people think that being the President is prestigious, or that being Elon Musk is prestigious. But what he considers most viscerally prestigious, his "revealed preference" for prestige if you will, is being the local drug dealer, or the most feared local warlord. That's what actually matters in his world. Or maybe he could aspire to be a major rapper or athlete; those are things that "society at large" finds prestigious as well. Those positions are certainly compensated well enough. But even then, they're the sort of thing that the more well-to-do Blue Tribe perspective might look down upon as "tacky". Note that a couple comments here have already given their personal shortlist of what they consider prestigious, and "being Jay Z" and "being Tom Brady" haven't made any of the lists so far.
I once read a comment here that said "being a doctor is one of the most prestigious things you can be". And I just thought... really? Really? I mean it's an important job, don't get me wrong. Thank you for your services. I'm happy for them that they're making a lot of money. But at the end of the day it's, from my perspective, still just another job. Doctors are, modulo individual technical skill, fungible, and fungibility is antithetical to prestige as far as I'm concerned.
Now, if I were in the same room as say, I dunno, David Chalmers or Slavoj Zizek, I might find myself stumbling over my words in a vain attempt to make a good impression, because those people have achieved social positions that I do consider to be highly prestigious. But this is hardly a universal opinion! Many educated and well off people of good repute have never heard those names; and if I were to explain to these same educated and well off people that they were philosophy professors, a common response (particularly from those of a more conservative bent) would be "well they're just parasites who are stealing our tax dollars and filling young peoples' heads with nonsense, so why the hell would I think they're prestigious?" (In fact your reference to the "philosophy of fartsniffing" indicates that this would likely be your response!)
The TL;DR is that there are almost as many conceptions of prestige as there are people, so before we say that the prestige of such and such a thing is motivating people to do XYZ, we should establish what model of prestige the individuals in question are actually operating on.
There's a game I like to play whenever I go to a new country or region, and that game is 'what job does this culture value most?', as measured by 'what careers do parents, but especially mothers, try to push their children towards?' Or, more flippantly, 'where do the best and brightest get pushed towards?'
There are absolutely countries where being a doctor is uber-prestigious. Korean mothers had (still have, presumably) a reputation for pushing their children hard in that direction. By contrast, an adult who, say, stayed in the professional military beyond the conscription requirement had the stigma of 'maybe they couldn't cut it.' If they were better, they'd get a better job.
But as you note, that sort of prestige isn't a given. Doctoring doesn't get any easier, but there are places in the west where they aren't as respected / striven towards as, say, lawyers. Or financial services. And let's not get into truly different cultures. There are cultures where a military service is considered prestigious (often when access to the military is selective/limited, as opposed to 'scraping the bottom of the barrel). In parts of the middle east, a religious education / islamic religious certification is something broader families take great pride in. Etc. etc. etc.
The game I referenced before comes from how inevitably, any sort of socio-cultural 'list your top X most prestigious jobs you'd be proud of your kids having' tends to leave more than a few highly relevant jobs off for those who are not as good or gifted. It can be fun to (gently! in good faith!) tease out those gaps in social values versus social impact. Surprisingly, not as many people as you might think put 'going into politics' as 'prestigious' for their best and brightest kids... and so who can be surprised when politicians are viewed as midwits? Or 'just' government service? And so on?
If you ever need a cross-culture icebreaker conversation on a low-key social drinking, that's a good one. It's a good way to get your counterpart to open up about their background, why they are in the job they are in, and even what they feel about it- all of which are good for your personal/professional relationship. It's also an opportunity for some comradery, since no matter where they are in their own country's relative preference stack, there's usually another culture where their job would be in as high or even higher esteem (and thus you can signal recognition/respect that their culture may not ascribe to them). Alternatively, if they are highly placed and they know it, you can get them out of their normal headspace by inviting them to wonder what other jobs they might have had in a different context- something which gets them outside of their familiar context of knowing all the things they need to know.
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Does anyone actually look up to middle managers in HR departments, girlboss or otherwise? How is that prestigious? Lots of people look down on HR as useless do-nothing wreckers, yourself included. HR are villains in popular culture: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADWb4gM7cDM
Or McKinsey? Consultants are also reviled and blamed for so many problems. Quite right too IMO.
Academia is prestigious (letters before and after your name!), being a lawyer is prestigious, working in finance, working in some human-rights NGO is prestigious/virtuous, being a doctor is prestigious. All of these have some tangible pull factor, ranging from power, wealth, high academic requirements or virtue. There might be hostility but they're not despised like HR is.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=-l0HFgfDWec&t=13
HR only has a lack of negatives (you don't have to deal with the general public grubbily asking for fries, you work sitting down all day).
I think the issue is that there's a default track in that you're supposed to go to university (you are smart aren't you?) and then people feel like they need to use their uni degree, so they go into HR or some similar low-value public service job. It's a smooth progression.
Nobody ever dreamed of working at McKinsey, they just end up there after going to uni and studying 'business'.
How would you feel if your daughter turned up on your doorstep on the arm of a McKinsey consultant or a white-shoe lawyer (who we affect to similarly desipse)? If most people's answer is positive, it's prestigious and the haters are just jealous.
I would say that the lawyer is prestigious but the consultant is not, as mentioned above. Nobody is making songs about how they want to fuck a McKinsey consultant (not in that sense, anyway)!
Plus there are gradations. There's a certain type of 'dodgy real-estate developer phenotype' lawyer that would raise alarm bells.
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I’m going to ignore most of your comment, which I agree with and have nothing to add to, and focus on the part that deserves elaboration.
I’m a white collar worker, and a member of a specific skilled trade - namely, a programmer. And it is a craft, or trade, for what it’s worth. There’s a huge amount of trouble in learning to program the right way, where “right” goes from the seemingly-trivial “works without bugs” and “runs pretty quickly and cheaply” out to the trickier “can be easily maintained and extended” and “can be deployed without taking out double digit percentages of the world’s Windows servers.” That’s what I do, and what I aim to be good at. If I do my job right, nobody notices a thing, and their systems run as smoothly as sci-fi.
The reason I bring this up is to add some context on white-collar work and why what you say is so.
The biggest costs to cutting yourself out of white collar work are:
Going through these in turn.
White-collar work - the real stuff, not lesser clerical roles, usually called email jobs - is knowledge work. And that means your job involves a hell of a lot of learning and recitation. Obviously a skilled craftsman also needs to know his stuff, but the amount of specialist, company-specific, novel, or downright esoteric knowledge you are expected to have in a white-collar role is massive.
This is the table of contents for the Arch Linux wiki. Scroll up and down - pretty long list. Now note a little number in parentheses by most of those - this is the number of subpages aggregated under one of those keywords. And while Arch’s wiki is known to be pretty exceptional, it is not exhaustive of Linux knowledge, and Linux knowledge is not exhaustive of computer science or IT skills.
So dropping out of that world for a time means you will concretely be missing skills when you come back. The longer you’re gone, the worse it will be. In the best case you’re simply going to be making the same money as before you left. Worst-case, you’ll be making less. Some of this, in software, is honestly just dumb churn. I’ll admit to that. But it’s the
Moving on. Analyzing a white-collar worker on the merits, especially in a large (bureaucratic) organization, is challenging. It usually doesn’t have obvious and measurable parameters, and if it does, those are guaranteed to be gamed and inefficient elements will rise to the top. So your ability will be in no small part judged by superiors with good reputations. Is this potentially cliquey? Can it keep good workers who are bad at networking down? Hell yes. But it’s roughly the best of a bad set of options. So if you drop out, you have to spend X amount of time proving yourself when you get back and giving some concrete evidence that your superiors can use to support you when you’ve won their trust.
Lastly, and this is probably the most important. Learning to be really good at a trade takes a lot of time and focus. You need talent, and then you need to put effort into it daily. This is doubly true for anything with poor feedback cycles, and the feedback cycles in white-collar work are typically slow and lossy. There’s a long, long way from the choices I make to my company’s revenue, and so telling the difference from a good solution and a bad will take some abstract reasoning and really good evidence. This usually boils down to time in the industry deeply engaged. And if you want to rise above a certain position, this effort and growth is required. On top of that, the vaunted “soft skills” are indeed quite important, since your average white-collar worker is navigating a human-dense and political environment. Dealing with them effectively is just another part of the job, and you only get better at it with time.
I’m aware none of this really undermines your central point. In fact, in a sense I’m supporting it. None of these points are actually fun things about white-collar work, at least the high-skill variants. And the low-skill variants aren’t much different, they just tune down all the knowledge about real things in favor of trends and politics. But the problem of returning to work isn’t just getting past the HR screen, and I wanted to convey a little about my own vocation.
So, in your view, is the current advice about "if you don't want to be laid off in the next round of IT job cuts, make sure you're promoted into a management role" since that seems to indicate "just programming on its own, no matter how good you are, is not job security"?
I do take your point about specific knowledge, but the problem there too is that if you know all about how to keep the janky, tricky systems of Company X running, little of that transfers over to Company Y which has a totally different tricky, janky system.
Lowest level managers are prime candidates for downsizing.
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If you want my opinion, keeping your IT job is mostly about working for the right company (responsible, hasn’t overhired, good market prospects) in a critical and productive, usually backend, capacity - not on puff projects funded by zero interest debt. Easier said than done, I know, but the team I’m currently on has survived multiple rounds of layoffs at my company completely untouched. In software, boring is extremely good. Management is not immune to cuts, on the other hand.
You’re right that domain knowledge transfer is a serious problem in tech. The one thing I’d say is: the best people tend to be good by virtue of their ability to learn fast and learn as a function of general principles over rigid specifics. I personally haven’t had much trouble moving into new jobs or domains. Then again, I wasn’t even a programmer initially - I learned on the job. So maybe I’m not the best example, since my case is already weird.
Overall, I empathize with pretty much any cynical take on big industry and tech in particular. Industry leaders have not shown great judgment over the past couple decades. That said, the best advice is always some combination of work on your skills and build good relationships, and be prepared to pivot if it comes to it. The one good thing about the modern industry is that your individual labor does have value and you can take the value of your labor where you want - it’s fundamentally inalienable. Keeping that idea close to heart helps you stay sane.
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Sure, but computer programmers are what, 80% male? That's my guess without submitting to artificial mental retardation, whether through a search engine or not. Last I checked, a (slim)majority of (employed)women were employed as k-12 teachers or registered nurses.
I'm entirely prepared to believe the statement 'men and butch lesbians shouldn't take time off work to have a kid'- that's their wife's job. The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
Yes, but it was another one of the complaints that was question-begged into existence. Woman at every peg of the promotional ladder already worked less than men. If you take 3 years off, even if you come back at 100%, you will have men 3 years younger than you next to you that are working harder than you were 3 years ago, and now you are 3 years older and even less likely to put in 60 hours while only obligated to do 40.
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I haven’t heard that- what I have heard was that such jobs wouldn’t hire women with children/married women, full stop.
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I hadn't heard that, but unless the baby is born in late spring or summer, a woman in America is expected to return to work within three months of giving birth. If she breaks her contract by resigning mid year, that isn't great for her record, though teaching tends towards chronic shortage, so she's likely to find another job sometime anyway.
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lmao, just apply to your local (3 hours away) IBEW program that accepts 5 people once a year heavily based on diversity quotas and/or legacy connections.
People on the internet are always saying 'dude just learn a trade bro' as if it's some kind of guaranteed career path for anyone willing to work hard. If these industries want young people to choose trades as a career, they're certainly doing a terrible job of communicating that. I went to a trades job fair recently, it was about 200 guys exactly like me packed into a room with about 6 company booths, none of which were actually hiring. It seems about as likely as scoring on tinder.
You can get an entry level HVAC job in June by having a clean driving record, piss test(and that is what your coworkers will call it) and willingness to work. Previous experience doing grunt work will make your application through the union as an apprentice go through much much better.
No, seriously, the trades are jobs and having previous experience, even if it isn't a one to one, and grit to get after it, will take you pretty far in getting started. Maybe you're a wordcel and not good with tools or something(I attempt to offer no judgement, maybe I don't succeed but recognize the effort please) and the trades aren't for you. Maybe you just lack the specific knowledge that functionally all trades bosses are computer illiterate and you need to call(or visit in person if you are unemployed) the company and ask to speak to the hiring manager to check up on the status of your application. This latter is what I tell to the at risk youths I mentor.
I won't sugarcoat the trades. There's a few long days, you'll have some years starting out where you live in your mom's basement, compensation is unlikely to reach fintech levels, etc. But, uh, if you don't like school you can support yourself and your family by doing them. You just gotta have that go getter choler and a willingness to work.
You can get a job being someone's bitch in June. That's what being an apprentice is.
They're shitty jobs that nobody would take without the promise of a master card at the end. Nobody will do a phd either without the promise of the degree at the end.
Tradesmen are mostly honest about their jobs not being fun, but do them for the pay premium, not the promise of a license for rent seeking(which is what a master card is).
Show me where apprentice jobs actually pay more than comparably difficult jobs on the open market
Apprentice jobs pay a meaningless amount more than other construction jobs(which is what they are). Journeymen make much more than other construction workers, and this is true even when the journey license is not strictly enforced. There are lots of plumbers in a truck on their own with an apprentice license and they get paid like journeymen.
Tradesmen earn a premium mostly because they are more highly skilled. Labour in the USA is just really expensive, and reliable labor with any skill at all particularly so. Unionized tradesmen earn an additional premium because of the union but even non-union tradesmen are generally making a good living.
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I really don't believe this. One of my coworkers finished a private electrical trade school, went into debt, and he still can't find an apprenticeship. I doubt HVAC is much different, especially in my area of the country where nobody even has air conditioning. Maybe in a big metro area or something. But I work at a lumber yard in a rural area and everyone wants to do either trades or become a firefighter (for some reason). And the firefighter guys seem to have a much higher success rate. I've applied to at least 100 jobs and gotten 2 interviews, both of which ghosted me after. And yes I'm an autist but I can hide it pretty well for short periods of time. The most recent one was for a "laborer" position at a company that does kitchen remodels, so it was actually one level below an apprenticeship, but there was a possibility to maybe become an apprentice someday. The interview went pretty well in my opinion, but he said they had hundreds of other applicants. At this point I'm more interested in joining the navy, since at least it's guaranteed employment and bennies once I'm in, rather than sinking hundreds of hours into job searching and hoping some boomer will answer the phone.
Yes, joining the military is a great way to start a career. Pick something with ‘technician’ or whatever in the title as an MOS so there’ll be a job waiting for you once you leave.
It kinda sounds like you’re in an economically depressed area.
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I have a friend who's an apprentice electrician, but he already has a bachelors from a good college and is happy to be taking trigonometry again, so it's more of a "same academic skills, better personal fit" when compared with white collar positions.
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I think the trope exists because most fantasy is based on D&D over anything to do with medieval times. It gets particularly irritating when the characters in the story act like modern people with modern concerns and attitudes rather than anything that someone living in the actual Middle Ages would have believed.
Some things I think were beneficial and should be brought back. Communitarianism, connection to friends and neighbors, belief in God. In a lot of ways I think that lifestyle is much more appealing as it gave everyone a place and a purpose with mutual support and respect.
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I'd say this is clearly Max Weber's "Protestant work ethic," and it's triumph is, to a great extent, thanks to Blue Tribe cultural dominance (and, in turn, the Puritan and Quaker roots of the Blue Tribe).
Plenty of people misunderstand what Weber meant (probably because they haven't read him), but, IIRC, he never actually argued that Protestantism caused the "work ethic," merely that they were correlated (and, indeed, looking at history, the causation was more the other way around, with the parts of Early Modern Europe that developed the work ethic being much more likely to go Protestant in the Reformation). Further, it's not just about hard work; Weber made an explicit comparison to monasticism.
To understand the work ethic, look at the etymologies and historical usage of the words "profession" and "vocation." The former especially was originally religious in context. The idea is that, in the pre-work ethic Medieval view, secular work is the curse of Adam — you do it because "he who does not work shall not eat." In contrast, there is the religious calling ("vocation"), whereby one is called by God to make a "profession" of faith in the form of holy vows, becoming a priest, a monk, a nun, etc.
Weber argued that the "work ethic" emerged when Europeans began removing that idea of a "calling" from the monastic context, and bringing it into the secular world; whereby, one could be "called" to serve God by being a farmer, a craftsman, or whatever. Bringing the same sense of mission, and thus identity, to whatever career you have.
And this is deeply embedded in American culture. Practically the first question someone asks upon being introduced to someone else is "what do you do?" — meaning, of course, "what is your job?"
(As a NEET, I'm particularly sensitive to this one. Further, neither of my parents are big on the Protestant work ethic. My Dad never had "a career," only jobs; and my mom (a very lapsed German Catholic) had no problem marrying out of high school and becoming a homemaker, only going to work after my youngest brother graduated high school. I was raised with the understanding that "work" is just whatever horrible, shitty drudgery you do to put a roof over your head and food on the table, and should absolutely not be expected to provide any kind of "meaning" or "purpose" — or even enjoyment. "Work to live, not live to work," and such. And yes, I agree we could do with far less of the work ethic.)
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