[danielharan]

I actually used to work in one. A couple years after I left, the center relocated to another province. It was a shit job.

As a society we're not doing a great job of helping workers move on. In any case, it really shouldn't be up to startups to protect jobs, any more than car companies had to compensate carriage manufacturers or nail factories helped blacksmiths.

[wisty]

As a society, we do a terrible job at helping workers move on.

You go to school for 12 years, then possibly uni for 3-7, then are unlikely to receive more than a couple of months of formal training throughout the rest of your life, even if you change careers.

Virtually nobody does a university course after graduating. I don't think that's because university is useless (though there is room for improvement), or that skills are easy to obtain elsewhere, but a society that tries to load a lifetime of study onto people who don't even know what they are going to be when they grow up.

[cabalamat]

I agree. I'd make more sense for many career paths if people did maybe 1 year university, then work for maybe 5 years, then 6 months uni, work for 5 years, etc.

Why do all undergraduate courses last the same length of time? Not because the amount of time it takes to master every subject is the same, but because of administrative convenience.

[maigret]

Also because it has just been so. In the old times, you used to do the same thing as your parents, and capabilities didn't usually go obsolete during the course of one's work life, even less if that was at a college level.

[tgvcfgtbvcfgh]

It all balances out. The industrial revolution removed the need for lots of manual laborers and replaced unskilled jobs with machines.

But then TV came along and created even more jobs for the unskilled than the patent crop rotator over destroyed.