Re:Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Ris...
by antisthenes on Friday May 19, 2017 @12:54PM
(#14377432)
Like most people pushing the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" mantra, you're vastly underestimating the cost of education, particularly of adult re-education.
Yes, the answer is, it takes at minimum several years for a person working in the food industry to be anywhere reasonably close to being called competent in software engineering, because it requires you to change your entire way of thinking about problems.
In many cases it's flat out impossible, given that those people work full time. If your work is not in the same field, performing the mental shift to learning something in-depth in an unrelated field is extremely cognitively costly.
Another thing to keep in mind, many people working low wage jobs have families to take care of, which means even less time devoted to learning. In those cases, yes, it could probably take a decade for them to learn.
And considering how fast-paced tech is, it's likely their knowledge will be outdated by the time they would actually finish the self-learning process.
> Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.
You're right, it's a good start. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue of how costly the education process is on behalf of the learner. These companies "disrupt" by reducing transaction costs, but the cost of the good itself remains prohibitively high.
Yes, the answer is, it takes at minimum several years for a person working in the food industry to be anywhere reasonably close to being called competent in software engineering, because it requires you to change your entire way of thinking about problems.
In many cases it's flat out impossible, given that those people work full time. If your work is not in the same field, performing the mental shift to learning something in-depth in an unrelated field is extremely cognitively costly.
Another thing to keep in mind, many people working low wage jobs have families to take care of, which means even less time devoted to learning. In those cases, yes, it could probably take a decade for them to learn.
And considering how fast-paced tech is, it's likely their knowledge will be outdated by the time they would actually finish the self-learning process.
> Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.
You're right, it's a good start. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue of how costly the education process is on behalf of the learner. These companies "disrupt" by reducing transaction costs, but the cost of the good itself remains prohibitively high.