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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   4064 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 19, 2023

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On bad service, I did read some discussion that this is downstream of the tight labor market. Service jobs are struggling to hire good people because good people would rather get other jobs if they could. So they have to hire crappy people or nobody at all. I'm also seeing anecdotally that teenagers are delaying drivers licenses and jobs, so I think the talent pool is smaller on that side.

There was some talk about service being the best during recessions when all your laid off engineers/etc got jobs at Dairy Queen and crushed it.

In addition to teenagers delaying driver's licenses and jobs, those that do try both are trading their time against extracurricular that can be marked on a FAFSA or CommonApp, and it's extremely unlikely any entry-level job will be as remunerative in the long run, especially with how scholarship-focused a lot of programs have gotten.

I think there's also been improved outreach from blue collar work to skilled- or smart-but-not-college-bound students, which on the upside means that they're getting pulled into more serious careers instead of spending a few years at McDonalds before seeing something more serious, but it does mean you're not seeing the sort of person you'd trust to reassemble a car engine doing customer service.

But more morbidly, the educational system has also just very strongly moved away from practical skills. I see it more clearly in STEM outreach, where it's now typical to see students who've never handled a wrench (and sometimes not even a screwdriver!) nor had a serious long-term project to manage, but almost all of the nearby schools have completely closed down their shop classes, and classical reading-writing-math has moved away from larger-scale or longer-term projects without immediate oversight.

I think there's also been improved outreach from blue collar work to skilled- or smart-but-not-college-bound students, which on the upside means that they're getting pulled into more serious careers instead of spending a few years at McDonalds before seeing something more serious, but it does mean you're not seeing the sort of person you'd trust to reassemble a car engine doing customer service.

This has not been my lived experience in highly skilled blue collar work- functionally all the decline in smart non-college types’ availability is from increased pot use. Young people entering the trades mostly went to college, discovered that they still didn’t like school, and then left to go to trade school because it will at least be over quickly(or had a relative in the trade in question).

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