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by joe_mamba 38 days ago
>The opposite, expecting everyone in the country to aspire to white-collar professions, is to me much more clearly an elitist (or at least irrational) position to have.

This, when you have everyone go to college and then they'll be shocked to be unemployed or work for peanuts since there's an oversupply of college grads and not much demand.

Here in Austria people working in construction cam earn way better than SW engineers because the former have an oversupply and the latter a shortage.

If you need a mobile app or a Java app, the're dime a dozen developers but if you need a plumber, lock smith, facade, roof specialist, well good luck.

The days when a college degree were an instant ticket to a well paid job for life are over.
1 comments
JKCalhoun 38 days ago
It's not even an issue of job scarcity.

I have worked enough blue-collar jobs to know that there exist people for whom technical work is a non-starter. Not that they are somehow dim and incapable of learning engineering, but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them.

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joe_mamba 38 days ago
>It's not even an issue of job scarcity.

Still it's supply and demand issue. The west has had 20-30 years of grooming the youth that going to college is the right path to middle class lifestyle and blue collar jobs are for losers who are too stupid to study. You can't be shocked when the supply demand reverses. South Park even had an episode mocking this, with plumbers being the new tech bros, and tech bros being unemployed.

> but "work" that is not done through labor, that does not show in a tangible way a day's effort… is anathema to them

Same applies within white collar jobs too. Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible, instead of pushing JSONs to the cloud, even if that's not more complicated than the other.

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JKCalhoun 38 days ago
"Some engineers want to work in hardware, firmware, mechanical jobs, because the output is tangible…"

Ha ha, the giddy feeling a software engineer feels when they write a few lines of assembly on a Motorola 68HC11 and get an LED to turn on…

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