If you're like 31 plus & remember a pre 2017 left a pre Bernie left or even a pre Occupy left its really hard to communicate consistently to many people the message of "we already tried being like that"
— daniel (@escargotpro_) April 22, 2023
What if you remember a pre-Clinton left? Heh. (And I mean Bill here, not Hillary.)
However, there are plenty of places where you are socialized into a profession through menial labor. Consider the legal profession. The work that young lawyers do is junk labor. It is dreadfully boring and doesnโt require a law degree. Moreover, a lot of it is automate-able in ways that would reduce the need for young lawyers. But what does it do to the legal field to not have that training? What do new training pipelines look like? We may be fine with deskilling junior lawyers now, but how do we generate future legal professionals who do the work that machines canโt do?
The same is true in my field. Used to, people would come up through help desk and then become a junior sysadmin or similar before moving on to more challenging jobs. Through that, they got very good at troubleshooting, understanding how systems work and even more importantly, how they fail. But through the advent of “money-saving” high-volume, low-skill call centers that people rotate through in months, automation, offshoring, and deliberate obfuscation, nearly no one matriculates through those lower tiers — learning as they go — any longer.
Thus, it’s been quite a few years since I’ve encountered anyone at all even 1/10 as good at troubleshooting as I am. There’s a whole two generations of tech people who can’t troubleshoot a goddamn thing. They just do not have the experience nor the skills even if they are “senior.” I’ve encountered so-called senior people with four-year degrees in my field who can barely open the command line and can’t even do anything once they are there.
I have no degree in my field and I invariably end up doing 99.9% of their troubleshooting for them.
In many ways, though, it’s not their fault — they’ve been deskilled and don’t even know what they’ve missed or that there is any behind-the-scenes system to understand.
Europe: โUSA u should really care about the environment moreโ
USA: โokโ
Europe: โwait not that much stopโ https://t.co/2bjlN8i0SJ pic.twitter.com/EPjT4njV9b
— Kane ่ฌๅฑๅ ฏ (@kane) April 21, 2023
That shit has been hilarious to witness. The EU so-called intelligentsia are all up in arms because we actually did something useful and constructive (or at least are starting to), rather than their poseur bullshit as they shut down nuke plants and burn more coal.