[ikarous]

Plenty of others have predicted the rise of unemployment in proportion to increased automation, and they've been wrong before. Maybe this time they'll be right. I don't know; I'm not economist nor do I possess a crystal ball.

What I do know is that this whole situation is terribly discouraging for young people fresh out of school. My partner, for instance, recently graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a very challenging private school. He's been unable to find work as a starting engineer after a six month search, and I'm frankly out of ideas on how to keep him optimistic. Add to all this that his dad, a senior electrical engineer, just got laid off, and any encouraging words I say start to sound very hollow indeed.

I fear that this high unemployment rate, temporary or not, is going to create a generation of career setbacks and failures to launch. A lot of people out there have it much worse, I know, but I still don't know what to say when this hard working young man can't even get responses back for internships and unpaid work.

[civilian]

That sucks. I graduated in 2009 with a degree in Biochemistry, I fought for 7 months to get a job-- and when I did, I was laid off pretty quickly.

I wish that I had watched this when I first started job hunting: http://tedxcmu.com/videos/charlie-hoehn

I think his plan is good. The job hunt is dumb, demoralizing, and at the end of the day you aren't really making anything. Your partner should learn something! (Maybe learn programming? There's lots of jobs in that-- that's what I switched to.) At the very least he should continue doing civil engineering projects on his own. Boost his portfolio.

(oh, also, my dad is an economist and he has a crystal ball. Best gag gift for an economist!)

[chubs]

I just watched that video. It's brilliant! I'm going to force my sister to watch it now :) Thanks so much for sharing the link

[wallflower]

> My partner, for instance, recently graduated with a degree in civil engineering from a very challenging private school.

The challenge of civil engineering is that you need to be professionally licensed. As you know, a new graduate has only taken the EIT (Engineer in Training) exam. You need four or five years professional experience before you can sit for the PE exam. In fact, in at least one state (Massachusetts?), you need to submit at least four inches thick of completed engineering calculations to prove your experience. The PE exam is very difficult, especially for structural engineering. I have friends who failed twice (the passing curve is statistically determined after all tests are scored, in some regions).

That being said, I have a Civil Engineering degree, and I never was paid to do any engineering calculations.

What most people who do not go through an ABET-accredited engineering 4-yr program do not know -is that an engineering degree is a superb background for building problem solving skills. The entire curriculum is based on problem solving and later, problem definition.

I believe that if your partner so chooses, he could develop fluency in the programming language of his choice. The most important thing though is that either he wants to do software development or already had programming skills.

You cannot motivate someone by burning them, the fire must be lit inside them, by them.

Consider checking out this: http://www.kolbe.com/

$$ skills survey much better than MBTI

[ikarous]

Thanks for the advice. You are absolutely right that motivation has to come from within. A fair amount of research shows that the happiest and most productive people are intrinsically motivated. My partner's true passion is transportation engineering and, more specifically, sustainable mass transportation -- but, as you note, it's a difficult field to break into.

A poster upthread linked a video about getting work. The speaker advocates doing free or nearly free work in whatever interests you most, the theory being that these activities will eventually pay off. I think it's a fabulous if rather unorthodox idea. Since we're financially stable with my income, I've told him to give it a shot.

[petercooper]

Plenty of others have predicted the rise of unemployment in proportion to increased automation, and they've been wrong before.

Have they? In the long term, definitely, but in the short term, a sharp increase in automation is sure to have an effect on the amount of human labor required. Isn't a normal cycle that technology begins to replace workers but then those workers retrain and then get new types of jobs and recover their employability? It seems we're currently doing a poor job training existing workers and future workers, if anything.

[ikarous]

I was referring to the long term, but you make a good point. Asimov posited that increased automation would temporarily increase unemployment but that the net benefit would always be positive. He thought that automation would allow human beings to focus on more interesting and rewarding jobs.

The unspoken assumption is that these more interesting jobs are plentiful enough to support the displaced workers assuming that they're willing to train and transition into a new kind of job. Is this the case today? Are the "higher" jobs plentiful enough? The question is not rhetorical; I'm asking because I can't say. I work in software development and my perspective is limited.

[petercooper]

Ok, cool, seems like we're thinking along similar lines :-) The problem I see, however, is perhaps different to the one you pose. As distasteful as this sounds, I suggest that perhaps the "average" person is ill equipped to deal with those more interesting and rewarding jobs, given that they're likely to require significant technical or creative skills.

Can we bring "the masses", as it were, up to the levels of talent and expertise we'll require in the future, or is there a limit to how good our education and training can be? Will we reach a point where a small number of people are, effectively, supporting the majority? A mini version of this seems to be happening in some Western countries with people who've lived their entire lives on welfare. Perhaps the future is just one where more of us end up on welfare and the government keeps us going on the spoils of the extremely smart and/or powerful.

[orangecat]

Perhaps the future is just one where more of us end up on welfare and the government keeps us going on the spoils of the extremely smart and/or powerful.

I think that's essentially correct. The non-singularity non-fiscal-collapse endgame is that everything we need and almost everything we want can be produced by a small fraction of the population, and most people don't have sufficient skills and knowledge to be economically productive. When you're trying to cure cancer or build self-driving cars, 10 brilliant PhDs beat 1000 average high school graduates.

Prediction: the idea of a universal guaranteed income (e.g. Milton Friedman's negative income tax) will steadily become more popular.

[rpwilcox]

Agreed - the idea of retraining "wrench turning" jobs to be computer programmers is, in my mind, optimistic. Because every startup wants at least a BS in some tech related field (so a 4 year barrier to entry)... in addition to the fact that it takes a lot more than 4 years of school to train someone to be a computer programmer (I think)

[VladRussian]

>He thought that automation would allow human beings to focus on more interesting and rewarding jobs.

i think he is right. There is a bunch of problems in theoretical physics that somebody need to attend to asap and specifically there are some in gravitational waves theory that i'd like to get into as soon as somebody automate the enterprise software development. In the meantime we can't find people to fill open positions (30%) in our department.

[waterside81]

From your other responses, it looks like you're American? If you're willing to move up to communist Canada (I kid, I kid), we're starving for engineers. Alberta needs civil engineers for their oil industry, and Ontario & the City of Toronto are hiring too.

[Nicknameless]

Slightly further afield, communist Australia has major skills shortages. I doubt engineers would have serious visa problems.

[ikarous]

I checked with my partner, and he's under the impression that getting a visa would require at least five years of experience, but he's going to double check. Is this not the case?

[rdouble]

There are civil engineering jobs in places you probably don't want to go, like western North Dakota.

[protomyth]

how wide a search area is the job search? is relocation an option?

[ikarous]

Thanks for asking. He's been searching in the Bay Area and in the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex primarily. Relocation is certainly an option; in fact, we would both love to live in the Bay Area, and it's a good chance that I could find rewarding work there. We're willing to spend time living apart if that's what it takes, but obviously that's not our first choice.

[ericd]

A lot of companies in the Bay Area can't find enough good programmers, even while offering very high salaries. If he has some downtime between his job hunt, it'd probably be very good for his eventual prospects if he spent some time learning to program and practiced, practiced, practiced.

I imagine it has a good number of uses in Civil Engineering as well (modeling? automating repetitive tasks?).

[protomyth]

In an economy like this, you might be in for a rough ride only having two preferred places that are already popular for job seekers. I do wish you and yours luck.

[ikarous]

Yeah. It would have been easier if we had both graduated at the same time. Now, we have less maneuverability. Thanks for the wishes.