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Michael Bloomberg: You Can't Teach a Coal Miner To Code
theodp (442580) writes "Gigaom reports that while speaking at the Bloomberg Energy Summit on Wednesday, former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg said he gives 'a lot of money to the Sierra Club' to help close dirty coal plants, but added that as a society we have to 'have some compassion to do it gently.' Subsidies to help displaced workers are one option, said Bloomberg, while retraining is another option. But, in a slight to the tech industry's sometimes out-of-touch nature with workers outside of Silicon Valley, he said retraining needs to be realistic, 'You're not going to teach a coal miner to code,' argued Bloomberg. 'Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great. I don't know how to break it to you... but no.'"
Coding is not for everyone, and simply putting everyone into tech-training is not the answer (it will just create another problem).
...requires foundations laid down in the 5th and 6th grade of school, mostly math, but also the interest and desire to learn. Some people get it, some don't get it. So it's more accurate to say that some coal miners may be able to learn to code: Watch out for those blanket generalizations, they bite back.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
The point I take from it is it's silly to think that all you do to fix the skills/jobs gap it so send people to school. Some people will have the ability to make huge transitions in careers, but most will be looking for equivalent work. It's how sociology works. You have to look at demographics and odds, not best wishes and theories.
That being said, I hope this is a lesson to communities, cities, and states that throw all their economic eggs into one industrial basket. No matter how good the gettin' is, you're screwed if that industry takes a big hit.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
How is this shocking? People have different temperaments, skills and interests.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
if you are transitioning from one skill/job to, say, software, you'll probably be over 30, and maybe over 40.
just tell me this: who would hire an aging programmer, just starting out, when you can more easily abuse immigrants and h1b's who are young and will work overtime for free and deny the value of a personal life?
we have a major problem with companies not being socially responsible. they don't care that an aging population is being wholesale REJECTED by corporate america and worse than that, local US born and raised citizens are second class, now; with imported labor or outsourced labor being first class.
an idea: give tax incentives or other incentives for companies that go out of their way to hire locals/americans and even bigger bonuses to companies that go out of their way to hire older (over 35, cough) people. not saying you punish those companies who don't; but you give them extra benefits so as to motivate them.
companies only look out for their bottom line. they would sell their mother into slavery for a higher share price. the only way to keep a balance of social responsibility and prosperity is to give incentives, to guide better behavior.
(I'm over 50, have been looking for work for a while now, and I'm getting nothing; no interviews and certainly no offers. I have a lot of experience and a good work ethic, but it does no one any good if the companies routinely dismiss anyone with more than 2 pages of resume experience, since they are seen as 'too expensive' to hire).
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The headline misquotes Bloomberg. He didn't say you *can't* teach a coal miner to code, he said you won't. And he's right. While it's certainly *possible* for some older adults to radically change their career paths into tech jobs, the majority of us lack the motivation and mental flexibility, and society doesn't want to spend the money to help us make the switch. It's just not going to happen. Bloomberg's overall point is dead on: we need to come up with ways to allow people to gently move into new careers that make the most of their talents, rather than just firing them, throwing a Javascript for Dummies book at them, and expecting them to become the next Zuckerberg.
That said, Bloomberg's got a pretty 19th century view of what coal mining is. Since it's all done with heavy machinery and robots these days, it's a pretty technically demanding job.
Possible . With a lot of effort a team of bright minds could teach hulk hogan to do some java . But then , who's gonna fight the undertaker??
There's no reason to train every worker to "code", we don't suffer from a lack of coders, we suffer from a lack of "developers", and no 6 week software bootcamp is going to turn someone with no programming experience into a developer. Besides, the average coal miner is probably not going to want to sit in front of a computer all day (many in my family work in the heavy construction industry, and I am 100% certain that although you could probably teach my brother to code, you're not going to be able to teach him to sit behind a desk all day).
But there are plenty of other jobs that you *could* teach a former coal miner to do -- not everyone in the economy needs to be a coder any more than everyone needs to be an auto mechanic just because we all (well, mostly) drive cars.
Bloomberg has a valid point. It's also the reason most people can't be fashion models ("he's so hot right now").. There is also something to be said for nerdly predispositions and interests, which goes a long way in determining whether someone can become a successful coder.
On a more general note, Bloomberg has struggled far more to "earn" his billions and has seen far more of the world than Zuckerberg, who in turn strikes me as an incredibly naiive, deer-in-the-headlights, I-don't-know-what-I'm-doing-here, I-just-won-the-nerd-lottery sort of person: his proclamations simply don't carry that much weight.
I'd rather write
Host files at midnight
Than pass my days
Hacking at lignite
BURMA SHAVE
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Let's try to evaluate this in a non-partisan grown up way. By coding, Bloomberg is referring to America's move to eliminate all blue collar work by sending it abroad to China and Brazil, and to create great opportunities for academic pursuits, financial services and intellectual property. If there was a strong manufacturing sector, miners could be retrained to work in factories, with all the health benefits over mining, but those jobs got exported to make the multi-national companies richer and more powerful. Since large companies now own the American political process, all political efforts are concentrated on making the rich more rich at the expense of the working people.This doesn't end well.
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We could use more PMs, but we have another problem: most PMs are terrible; and, although you can apply PM effectively to anything, you are a hell of a lot more effective if you have foundational knowledge of the project's domain.
Miyomoto Musashi said that a foreman must know all aspects of a carpenter: once the carpenter has lain floors, and built furniture, and carved designs and cut wedges and doors and columns, he can be a foreman. A good foreman can move from carpentry to a steel factory; but he will need to rely on experienced steel mill workers to explain a lot of things to him, and to help him work with the inexperienced and get them on track. A foreman who has been a steel worker will understand most of the base, will get new information from the experienced steel workers who know new processes and tools, and will be able to effectively direct the inexperienced to experienced steel workers and direct the experienced steel workers to get him trained in specific skills he is lacking in and "anything else you think he needs".
We can turn a coal worker into an ITPM. We will do much better turning IT people into ITPM.
Eventually, we get the same problem that we have with programmers: we have too fucking many STEM people, and the labor flood is creating high unemployment and low salaries. I'm trying to get in on these $160k PM salaries, but I expect them to drop to reasonable $90k salaries eventually. As well, I expect the job to turn into less of being the first guy awake, last guy to sleep, always there on weekends kind of thing and more of a reasonable position.
In short: project managers are like lubrication. Your engine needs it. The wrong lube will work better than no lube, but won't work well. The right lube works great, but you need enough of it. If you have too much of it, your engine dies.
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Bloomberg didn't say that you can't teach any coal worker to code, just that you can't teach every coal worker to code, refuting Zuckerberg's Marie-Antoinette-style "let them write code" statement.
Only the Zuck sounds like an out-of-touch elitist in this case; Bloomberg is making a legitimate point that the retraining process is more complicated than that because it has to be tailored to the skills and interests of each person. The article summary is misleading, and the headline is outright wrong.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
They are all great skills to know, but there's only so much mastery a person can obtain.
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills. They are also mostly untrainable, or they wouldn't have ended up skillless in the first place. In the past, our economy had a place for these people. The future is likely to be different.
He was the head of Data Systems Development at Solomon Brothers. When that company got bought out, he started a company selling Bloomberg Terminals, which were extremely innovative. He parlayed that into the Bloomberg News service. He grew up middle class with no family connections or a leg up, and now has $33B. That doesn't happen to dumb people.
This is the IT trap.
IT people always look down on all the other morons and retards staffed in the building. They're stupid enough to look up to us, after all. Dumb bitches in HR, accounting, finance, lawyers who don't know a fucking thing about anything except legal bullshittery, CEOs and executives who can't find their ass with both hands.
Yeah uh, I've run an income statement. Would you like to try? When you finish crying, you can come suck my dick.
We need executives. My company doesn't have all the ones it needs, and they don't realize it, and we have risk problems. Severe risk problems from not having a CISO. Wasteful spending and excess work and ineffective output from not having a PMO with a Manager of Projects. Because of our market, basic business decisions--not just internal IT ones--would benefit from a CTO to help the CISO figure out how the fuck to handle market risks that will impact us severely. These people create top-down business strategy and establish what management gets hired to run what branches of operations.
HR goes through shit that would break my brain. Once. Then I'd absorb the process and handle it with great skill. Neuroplasticity is fucking awesome, after all. But seriously, god damn, have you ever tried that PHR test?
Miners have to decide if they want to go with stuff like water elevator or sub-level cave or whatever, which at a glance can appear roughly equivalent in terms of ore extraction, cost, and safety. Then you run a bunch of simulations and analysis and you find that doing a simple sub-level cave mine to pull ore pillars from a mined-out mine costs more, returns less, nets you half as much profit, and puts your people at a 30% higher risk of fatal death than doing a water elevator WITH sub-level cave. Then the damn miners have to figure out how to excavate a sub-level cave without collapsing it on themselves, and they have to pipe water into it without it getting soggy somewhere and collapsing on them.
Coal miners are going to translate either to construction or some branch of engineering. And I will be fucking glad when they're building bridges, because these are people who look at shit and go, "Oh hell no, you see this shit? No see, there's stress channels here, and this all comes to a focal point here, and like... wind and seismic activity from people walking over it or cars driving will create a pressure build-up that will lead to buckling and catastrophic failure. We can't use this design, people will die!" Because they've been there, they've held a hammer and looked at a rock in a wall, and they've looked up and gone, "... uh, wait, this shit will collapse on my head and kill me if we do this."
You learn to take pride in quality work when shit work is 99% likely to crush you to death.
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It seems like some of the less deep thinkers these days get confused by our societal value of equality.
When the founding fathers said said "all men are created equal", they meant that the government should treat everybody the same out of general fairness.
They didn't mean that Dr J and Albert Einstein have the same attributes.
Anyhow, you most likely won't be successful retraining most coal miners to write code.
But it's not much of a stretch for most coders, particularly brogrammers like Marky Z, to learn to shovel shit.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I don't know about the rest of STEM but unemployment for programmers is really low.
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I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.
the problem with Zuck's thinking is that the logic goes like this:
1) say "omg coal miners could learn to code!"
2) expect coal miners to learn to code
3) blame coal miners when they are out of work but did not become coders
4) people on the government dole are lazy and shiftless! handouts! obama! socialism!
It's a very convenient slippery slope for those looking for a way to back into #4.
During the so called New Economy bubble I worked at an ISP and development shop. We tried to get more developers, but this was harder than expected. While the average CS student was more or less able to code, retrained ex-lorry drivers and bricklayers sent to us by the employment center where all unable to conceptualize problems maybe they would have been able to type in things we specified, but creative thinking was not their string side. Like, not everyone can run like Usian Bolt. Therefore, we need jobs for everyone suitable for their abilities.
It's the TOTAL number of high-paying jobs that's important, and people tend to gravitate to what they like.
You seem to overlook the fact that if there are high paying jobs there must, by definition, be low paying jobs as well. Not everyone can have high paying jobs simultaneously anymore than everyone can have an above average IQ. In the long run economic growth can benefit everyone, rich and poor alike. In the short run however it is something close to a zero sum game. If you make one person wealthier you are making another poorer at least temporarily. If you have a larger pool of high paying jobs, in the short run you necessary are making the pot of money available to lower wages workers smaller.
You might be able to implement policies that benefit most/all people in the long run but there will be some short term pain in the process.
I could never imagine working nine to five on an auto assembly line, but that's what people did 50 years ago at GM, for $20 an hour before the cheap labor conservatives came along and crapped in the punch bowl.
People get paid that much TODAY to work on some lines at GM. $20/hour is roughly $40K/year. Not exactly a huge salary in the US these days. There are plenty of assembly workers that get paid well in excess of $20/hour.
Furthermore it isn't "cheap labor conservatives" that limit pay at the automakers. You could have had to most generous liberal management you could envision in charge of GM and Chrysler and they still would have gone bankrupt. What primarily limits direct labor pay is competition. Labor is a huge percentage of the cost of building vehicles. That means that production will gravitate towards locations with cheaper labor costs. Ford, GM and Chrysler in years past agreed to labor contracts that were simply not economically sustainable in the long run. When new competitors with lower labor costs entered the market, the Big Three were unable to adjust their cost structure to match. (Note, this isn't an anti-labor screed. Management shoulders a huge portion of the blame here) Labor costs had to come down and that ultimately meant some combination of lost jobs and lower pay rates. It was simply economic "physics" at work - a reversion to the mean.
Hate to break it to you - most politicians are *very* smart. Arguably as much so if not more than most techies.
The difference is in how they apply their intelligence. Politicians specialize in motivating people to follow a course of action of the politician's choosing. That is no mean feat and requires a great deal of intelligence and insight. It is a different discipline than say writing code, but it does require a high degree of intelligence to figure out how to manipulate other people.
By way of contrast, most techies, while very good at figuring out technical problems, are often woefully inadequate when it comes to people/social issues. This is kind of the point of this article - that this naive belief on the part of techies that people can just arbitrarily change jobs, be "retrained" to do anything else - is completely unrealistic and doesn't actually work in reality. Techies often try to view the world in their terms and fail to understand that "their terms" are often a poor way of understanding the rest of the world. They then thumb their chests about how "stupid" everyone else is, how if only everyone could be "as smart" as they are everything would be so much better. What they fail to understand is that the world is as it is for very good reasons - that the world has been that way for millennia and will continue to be the same way - all for the very same, good reasons that shaped things that way to begin with.
I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence. Politicians tend to be very wise when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and how to get people to like them enough to vote for them.
Then they get on Senate committees and blabber on about topics they have absolutely no business talking about because they are ignorant on the subject.
The intelligent person knows when it's raining. The wise person knows to get in out of the rain.
I'm pretty sure that you can't teach politicians to code either, they just don't have the intellectual capability to handle such a task.
;)
The bigger problem I see with teaching politicians to code comes from their comprehension of boolean logic. In computer science, we constantly evaluate the truth of various simple expressions. In politics, their entire career depends on their ability to obfuscate the truth of insanely complex issues in such a way as to make them look true (or false) based on the interest of their highest bidder.
More seriously, though, I have to agree with Bloomberg. Not everyone can code, and of those who have the raw capacity to learn it, many of them would hate actually doing it. Coding requires going into an almost trancelike state for hours at a time, sitting motionless while visualizing the flow of data through complex control structures and eventually interacting with some form of I/O. You try to stick a traditional manual laborer (I mean that in the good way - The kind of guy who enjoys nothing more than an honest day's hard work) into that seat for ten hours, and watch him slowly go crazy.
You kinda tanked your credibility by starting a sentence that way....
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is that we have many millions of people with NO useful skills
I think it's a little more accurate to say that we have millions of people with skills that were marketable when they started working but over their career lifetime those skills no longer became useful. I really do feel bad for these people because they didn't do anything "wrong" - the economy shifted under their feet and the profession that they expected to spend their lives in just happened to disappear. Imagine if tomorrow programming or IT became obsoleted - would you really want to start over from scratch in some other industry that you don't understand (or even like), especially if you're an old fogey like me? That's the harsh reality of what people have to do, but it doesn't make it any less painful.
It's also not quite fair to say they are "mostly untrainable" but there is definitely a limited subset of things that you can be retrained for with a high school education and a professional lifetime spent in blue collar jobs. The US economy - like that of most advanced industrial nations - has shifted over the last several decades to outsourcing blue collar jobs and increasingly retaining onshore only "knowledge worker" and white collar roles. And many of these people are not educationally (or potentially mentally) suited to the jobs that are still here, which puts a premium on figuring out "what are the still extant jobs that they can be retrained for?" To Bloomberg's point, that is a hard question and the technology industry is not a panacea.
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I think you're assuming that there is only one type of intelligence. some people may have problem-solving skills but no emotional intelligence for how to work with and lead groups. If you have just one type of intelligence you shoudl consider yorself lucky for that and not make fun of those who are also intelligent but different.
I think you are confusing wisdom for intelligence. Politicians tend to be very wise when it comes to understanding what makes people tick and how to get people to like them enough to vote for them.
Then they get on Senate committees and blabber on about topics they have absolutely no business talking about because they are ignorant on the subject.
The intelligent person knows when it's raining. The wise person knows to get in out of the rain.
He's not confusing them. He's saying there are different types of intelligence. He's also agreeing with the post he replied to, basically saying that retraining politicians to code wouldn't work, but not because they're dumb. Rather because that's not how their brains are wired.
If goal X can be achieved by action Y, the ability to recognize this and succesfully carry out action Y would be considered a form of intelligence.
If goal X is get funding for something, and action Y is blather on about crap they know nothing about.... then blathering is a smart move. The morality of such an action is certainly debatable, but that's indepedent of intelligence.
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While its socially correct and karma-boosting to take potshots at how dumb politicans are, my experience with politically successful people is that they tend to be pretty sharp in what youd call "managerial" skills: figuring out the tl;dr of a subject, figuring out who to pull in, figuring out how to pull together a unified response. That is, they tend to be organizaltionally skilled.
IT / Comp sci people (especially slashdotters) seem to love touting how brilliant they are, but my experience is that they tend to have glaring weaknesses with:
* Idealizing situations and ignoring practical / human problems
* Interacting with other people
* Missing the forest for the trees
* Admitting when they might not have the answer / the best answer / the necessary skills
Allow me to substitute some words. Having technical skills doesn't necessarily mean that someone is smart, especially when it comes naturally to them. Someone without natural technical skills and are able to apply their intellect to gain them are very intelligent, however. But a lot of technicians out there don't have to think about it much. - And yes, it's nice. In both venues.
You kinda tanked your credibility by not being able to read a complete sentence.
Then there's those of us who can code in an almost-trancelike state, but rarely get the opportunity because companies these days have all embraced the "open plan work environment" that the ADHD Under-30 crowd loves so much, and which makes it completely impossible to get into a proper mental state to do any serious coding because every time some person walks by our desk or has a loud conversation directly behind us we lose our concentration.
The really sad part is all the economists and politicians who can't seem to understand that a 50 year old coal miner probably can't afford to be out of work AND paying for school for 4 years and probably doesn't have enough working years left to pay off a student loan. They act as if re-training means swallowing a free magic pill and POOF!
I moved to a 3rd world country a year ago to look for ways to motivate people to learn to code. I thought it would be easier in a place where the benefits and needs are the greatest. It is much harder than I thought... I used to think the people just needed the funds to go to school, a patient personal tutor and/or extremely simple lessons (think computer game).
One person (~12 years old, on school vacation) simply would not learn code. I mean, the person would not consider it for any reason. I noticed that the person can play flappy bird with a high score of 71. I justed wanted to see if a very well done game environment might motivate them. Out of curious, I asked the person to play the Ouya game, Clark, that involves solving puzzles. The person gave up after hitting a puzzle in which you have to position two blocks to prevent the robot from being killed by 2 lasers.
In another case, I was able to convince the person (~27 year-old, college graduate) to take the javascript class at code academy but it didn't sink in. This person works at a restaurant where they make $10/day working 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. I've explained to them that as software developer they can make in a year roughly what they would currently make in 30 years. I agreed to pay them to take a leave from work to learn javascript. After getting about a third of the way through the course, they still made mistakes that they should have learned in the first 5 lessons. (They couldn't remember where to put {}, (), commas, semicolons, function arguments, variable names, etc.) After 3 weeks, I decide to try a different approach. I showed them simple functions like max(number1,number2) or indexOf(array, value), etc. They could look at the solution as long as they liked. I explained it to them. The functions were only a few lines long. Then I hid the function and asked them to write it from scratch using a syntax aware IDE. If they got stuck they could look at the answer and I would explain where they were going wrong. It still took several attempts for them to write the function even when shown the answer. After that first day of the new approach, I thought I found a way get them to remember the syntax but the next day the person quit and returned to work at the restaurant.
I worked with several other people and the results are consistent. Coding is a kind of puzzle solving problem that people dislike intensely.
Out the 10 or so people, I tried to help only one has gotten very far. She is 51 year-old mother of 3, and I was surprised by that. I was actually trying to convince her kids (27, 18 and 14) to learn.
It is an interesting problem. I think there is a path to get people over their resistance but it is not obvious to me so far.
If 'custodial engineers' were to drop everything and become programmers, who'd do the dirty work that they do?
Nobody is talking about re-training people that are usefully employed. They are talking about re-training people whose jobs are disappearing. Robotics is advancing very rapidly. Jobs for unskilled people have been disappearing for decades, but the past is nothing compared to the avalanche of disappearing jobs that may soon be coming. History shows that, in the long term, economies adjust and everyone benefits from productivity improvements. But the short term transition can be brutal.
...
It is essential that we keep the timelines straight on how jobs are lost, and then eventually regained in a true Industrial Revolution. We are currently in what should be called the Cybernetic Revolution, the only true successor to the original IR in terms of its effects on employment.
In the original IR there were rapid losses of employment (starting in textiles) as factories went up starting around 1780. Optimists, who prate about how 'the IR really wasn't so bad' argue that by 1840 the average wage had risen to finally exceed pre-levels. As with today, talking about average wages hides the extent of poverty with a society, but more importantly it ignores the fact that the gap between 1780 and 1840 is sixty years, and other more systematic analyses pretty much keep this same gap for the employment picture turn-around, though shifting the dates of both start and end forward slightly. This means the typical worker rendered a pauper in mid-life by the start of the IR never benefited, their children never benefited, their grand-children rarely benefited, it was only their great-grand-children that found ready work at good wages!
The promise that eventually the economy will adapt and replace the lost jobs is one that won't be seen for a few generations. We need to have policies in place now, as the jobs vanish, to keep the workers and their families from ending up in poverty, and these policies will need to be maintained and updated for several decades to come.
It is notable that a quick perusal of conservative policy sites (National Review, etc.) for suggestions on how to deal with this problem of inevitable long-term unemployment find by far the most common is to suggest that job salaries be subsidized by the government to create employment. The really aren't any other alternatives that might conceivably work - only government spending to stimulate the economy can step in. (But how taxes should be raised to finance this is never discussed.).
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