Is there a danger of having no more tool makers though? We still make things in this country afterall, and even if we wind up with a shortage, that is very different from losing the skills, because those who know how to do the work can always teach others.
I do wonder how much of our problem of 60 year old workers is based on union "last in, first out" rules though. . .
In some industries or specialties, yes. There are things that literally two or three guys do anywhere. These guys are in their 60's or older, and if they die without passing on their knowledge nobody anywhere knows how to setup / calibrate / fix issues / etc.
Quite a few industries use equipment that hasn't been produced for literally half a century...it was overbuilt (both in durability and quantity) in the 40's, 50's, and 60's that it's just what you use. If you need one, you find one that's being resold. In some cases the control systems have been upgraded, but a lot of times the machine operator is doing the exact same job their grandfather did. Presses, tooling / machining , winding , racks / handling equipment, etc.
This equipment is ubiquitous, but even now when one line goes down it can take weeks or months (and big $$$) to get one of the few people who know what they are doing out to fix it. Nobody is building replacement equipment, because...why? Little market, and everyone wants the standard.
Most of the problems with lack of workers aren't so much 'last in - first out' rules as the big manufacturing companies stopped taking on new apprentices ~late 1970's and never started the programs back up. It was part union breaking, and part changing business needs. It wasn't a big deal in the 80's and even the 90's because there was a glut of trained boomers from the old manufacturers that had gone out of business, downsized, or offshored jobs. Wages were depressed, no training was really available, and labor was readily available. Why spend money training new people?
Now, anyone who was apprenticing in the 70's is approaching 60, and we're still struggling to get a halfway decent technical education setup in this country.
I think you would have trouble filling apprenticeships even if they were available. I've talked to two plant managers that have trouble retaining young factory line workers because as tinwhiskers said, it's boring as shit. The kids they get simply don't want a career out of it, assuming the job is even around in 20 years.
Plus apprenticeships don't fix the core problem. It's a failure of management that tribal knowledge is still so prevalent in many factories. More than ever, documentation needs to be stressed even though people hate doing it.
Ok, first and foremost 'factory line' and 'apprenticeships' are not the same thing. Not even close. You are conflating two different issues here.
People don't want to do boring ass jobs for crap wages. You start people at $19 / hour + benefits and you're going to have people lined up around the block. I don't care HOW boring the job is. For $11 / hour? Shit - people are going to deliver pizzas or work retail instead of slaving away on a plant floor somewhere. I know I did. Give them decent pay and a retirement plan? Completely different story.
Now skilled trades? If someone has a trade and experience, they aren't going to work for a crap wage either. The time and experience it takes to be a certified journeyman in most trades is comparable to a college degree. People aren't going to earn that journeyman card and they give their labor away for peanuts.
It's no different than the reported 'IT worker shortages' we always hear about, where some employer posts a ridiculously specific job opening and offers 25% less than market rates...then says they can't find qualified American workers so they need H1B visas.
People will do any work as long as they think they are getting paid fairly for it. People will roll around in shit all day and not think twice about it. But very few of them will do it for next to nothing. The ones that will are the ones that are unreliable, with personal / substance issues, and generally otherwise unemployable.
Line work and skilled tradesmen work are entirely different. At best one can serve as a sort of audition for the other but that isn't a high percentage path. Not very many employers are willing to put the time and money into people that would require.
I do think the very idea of skilled trades isn't very well publicized. They've been traditionally very solid middle class jobs, albeit with a longer work week than is typical.
But if you wrote things down, how would you justify high wages?
Everything is written down. All of the standards work has to conform to, engineering tables, techniques, etc are documented. It's not particularly useful though without the practical understanding of how to apply that knowledge.
That's the whole point of it being skilled trades. The skill is in applying the knowledge.
Look, everything a computer programmer, a nurse, or an engineer knows is documented somewhere too. But if every Oracle DBA died tomorrow, you can't tell me that someone would be able to just pick up that documentation and do their job.
The attitude that all skilled trades are is 'tribal knowledge' is fucking retarded and only illustrates how little someone knows about that tradesmen actually do. There is a real education along with on the job training, and a journeyman's card is equivalent to at least an associate's degree w/ two years of on-the job experience.
Yea, if I want a hole in something there are like a dozen different ways I could do it and which way I use depends on a whole bunch of factors. Deciding which of that dozen ways best balances time used against required quality is a matter of skill.
Is there a danger of having no more tool makers though? We still make things in this country afterall, and even if we wind up with a shortage, that is very different from losing the skills, because those who know how to do the work can always teach others.
I do wonder how much of our problem of 60 year old workers is based on union "last in, first out" rules though. . .
In some industries or specialties, yes. There are things that literally two or three guys do anywhere. These guys are in their 60's or older, and if they die without passing on their knowledge nobody anywhere knows how to setup / calibrate / fix issues / etc.
Quite a few industries use equipment that hasn't been produced for literally half a century...it was overbuilt (both in durability and quantity) in the 40's, 50's, and 60's that it's just what you use. If you need one, you find one that's being resold. In some cases the control systems have been upgraded, but a lot of times the machine operator is doing the exact same job their grandfather did. Presses, tooling / machining , winding , racks / handling equipment, etc.
This equipment is ubiquitous, but even now when one line goes down it can take weeks or months (and big $$$) to get one of the few people who know what they are doing out to fix it. Nobody is building replacement equipment, because...why? Little market, and everyone wants the standard.
Most of the problems with lack of workers aren't so much 'last in - first out' rules as the big manufacturing companies stopped taking on new apprentices ~late 1970's and never started the programs back up. It was part union breaking, and part changing business needs. It wasn't a big deal in the 80's and even the 90's because there was a glut of trained boomers from the old manufacturers that had gone out of business, downsized, or offshored jobs. Wages were depressed, no training was really available, and labor was readily available. Why spend money training new people?
Now, anyone who was apprenticing in the 70's is approaching 60, and we're still struggling to get a halfway decent technical education setup in this country.
I think you would have trouble filling apprenticeships even if they were available. I've talked to two plant managers that have trouble retaining young factory line workers because as tinwhiskers said, it's boring as shit. The kids they get simply don't want a career out of it, assuming the job is even around in 20 years.
Plus apprenticeships don't fix the core problem. It's a failure of management that tribal knowledge is still so prevalent in many factories. More than ever, documentation needs to be stressed even though people hate doing it.
Ok, first and foremost 'factory line' and 'apprenticeships' are not the same thing. Not even close. You are conflating two different issues here.
People don't want to do boring ass jobs for crap wages. You start people at $19 / hour + benefits and you're going to have people lined up around the block. I don't care HOW boring the job is. For $11 / hour? Shit - people are going to deliver pizzas or work retail instead of slaving away on a plant floor somewhere. I know I did. Give them decent pay and a retirement plan? Completely different story.
And who do you think you are going to sell your product to, since your labor costs are now 73% higher than your American/European competitors, and 1200% higher than the Indian/Chinese?
Especially because in the world of automated machining, your machining rates are something that are mostly dictated by the machines. Having the best CNC machinist in the world won't make an ounce of difference the 95% of the day where the machine is just sitting there doing it's thing.
Are there times you need someone who is very skilled, yes of course. But it makes much more sense to have 2-3 machinists(in the traditional skilled sense), maybe working in a management/supervisory role, and several dozen "CNC Operators", who are basically there to set up new parts, and hit the stop button if something starts going wrong. And that level of skill can be reached with a couple weeks of OTJ training, not years.
But if every Oracle DBA died tomorrow, you can't tell me that someone would be able to just pick up that documentation and do their job
Why not? That's probably how the Oracle DBAs got started anyway. Most tech stuff is picked up by reading the documentation, with maybe a little supplemental verbal training for the difficult points. Of course, they'd take a little while to get up to speed.
But if every Oracle DBA died tomorrow, you can't tell me that someone would be able to just pick up that documentation and do their job
Why not? That's probably how the Oracle DBAs got started anyway. Most tech stuff is picked up by reading the documentation, with maybe a little supplemental verbal training for the difficult points. Of course, they'd take a little while to get up to speed.
I can't speak to manufacturing, but when it comes to software a huge portion of your practical knowledge is not about how to write software, or administrate a DB but rather how to write software in X company style according to X company process (naming conventions, spacing conventions, version control, custom project management software, possibly custom bug-tracker with specific protocols for submitting bugs, time documentation, etc.), or administrate their specific oracle setup without impacting anyone's work. It's relatively easy to find someone and teach them to write software in some form, but depending on the company you work for (it gets worse as the company gets bigger) they will have all of their own custom components they use to run and administer everyone's work and that makes mountains of difference as to how you do absolutely everything.
While it's arguable you could replace the loss of the Oracle DBAs, you could not so easily replace the loss of company-specific "tribal" knowledge about how to manage things within their own specific ecosystems. This is why COBOL programmers still exist! ;p Big companies love to write their own "custom" software to conform to their process and often spend huge investments on what turn out to be terrible hardware/software that still becomes mission critical and must be maintained for years to come.
Also, Oracle is a terrible example to use here because Oracle is meant to be enterprise software that is literally TAILORED to a business' needs and Oracle will even help the company find/train a competent DBA just for their specific needs. If Oracle DBAs died out it would not be as simple as sicking a basement-nerd on the documentation and telling them to try their best. Oracle DBs are some of the most traffic-heavy DBs on earth and they run critical infrastructure which can cost (if it breaks) potentially billions to a company. It would COMPLETELY CRIPPLE parts of the world if you had that kind of an event where suddenly we lost a huge amount of Oracle DBAs like that.
It's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of: (in some places) "We are required by law (or our insurance company) to only allow someone Oracle certified to run this equipment due to legal liability. We have to shut down until we can get another."
If the best you can come up with against someone who's patently ignorant is to yell back at him, "Yeah? Well there's BOOKS, and they say you're WRONG!"
Then honestly you're not coming out of this looking great either.
Posts
Ok, first and foremost 'factory line' and 'apprenticeships' are not the same thing. Not even close. You are conflating two different issues here.
People don't want to do boring ass jobs for crap wages. You start people at $19 / hour + benefits and you're going to have people lined up around the block. I don't care HOW boring the job is. For $11 / hour? Shit - people are going to deliver pizzas or work retail instead of slaving away on a plant floor somewhere. I know I did. Give them decent pay and a retirement plan? Completely different story.
Now skilled trades? If someone has a trade and experience, they aren't going to work for a crap wage either. The time and experience it takes to be a certified journeyman in most trades is comparable to a college degree. People aren't going to earn that journeyman card and they give their labor away for peanuts.
It's no different than the reported 'IT worker shortages' we always hear about, where some employer posts a ridiculously specific job opening and offers 25% less than market rates...then says they can't find qualified American workers so they need H1B visas.
People will do any work as long as they think they are getting paid fairly for it. People will roll around in shit all day and not think twice about it. But very few of them will do it for next to nothing. The ones that will are the ones that are unreliable, with personal / substance issues, and generally otherwise unemployable.
I do think the very idea of skilled trades isn't very well publicized. They've been traditionally very solid middle class jobs, albeit with a longer work week than is typical.
Everything is written down. All of the standards work has to conform to, engineering tables, techniques, etc are documented. It's not particularly useful though without the practical understanding of how to apply that knowledge.
That's the whole point of it being skilled trades. The skill is in applying the knowledge.
Look, everything a computer programmer, a nurse, or an engineer knows is documented somewhere too. But if every Oracle DBA died tomorrow, you can't tell me that someone would be able to just pick up that documentation and do their job.
The attitude that all skilled trades are is 'tribal knowledge' is fucking retarded and only illustrates how little someone knows about that tradesmen actually do. There is a real education along with on the job training, and a journeyman's card is equivalent to at least an associate's degree w/ two years of on-the job experience.
This is super simplified obviously.
And who do you think you are going to sell your product to, since your labor costs are now 73% higher than your American/European competitors, and 1200% higher than the Indian/Chinese?
Especially because in the world of automated machining, your machining rates are something that are mostly dictated by the machines. Having the best CNC machinist in the world won't make an ounce of difference the 95% of the day where the machine is just sitting there doing it's thing.
Are there times you need someone who is very skilled, yes of course. But it makes much more sense to have 2-3 machinists(in the traditional skilled sense), maybe working in a management/supervisory role, and several dozen "CNC Operators", who are basically there to set up new parts, and hit the stop button if something starts going wrong. And that level of skill can be reached with a couple weeks of OTJ training, not years.
Why not? That's probably how the Oracle DBAs got started anyway. Most tech stuff is picked up by reading the documentation, with maybe a little supplemental verbal training for the difficult points. Of course, they'd take a little while to get up to speed.
I can't speak to manufacturing, but when it comes to software a huge portion of your practical knowledge is not about how to write software, or administrate a DB but rather how to write software in X company style according to X company process (naming conventions, spacing conventions, version control, custom project management software, possibly custom bug-tracker with specific protocols for submitting bugs, time documentation, etc.), or administrate their specific oracle setup without impacting anyone's work. It's relatively easy to find someone and teach them to write software in some form, but depending on the company you work for (it gets worse as the company gets bigger) they will have all of their own custom components they use to run and administer everyone's work and that makes mountains of difference as to how you do absolutely everything.
While it's arguable you could replace the loss of the Oracle DBAs, you could not so easily replace the loss of company-specific "tribal" knowledge about how to manage things within their own specific ecosystems. This is why COBOL programmers still exist! ;p Big companies love to write their own "custom" software to conform to their process and often spend huge investments on what turn out to be terrible hardware/software that still becomes mission critical and must be maintained for years to come.
Also, Oracle is a terrible example to use here because Oracle is meant to be enterprise software that is literally TAILORED to a business' needs and Oracle will even help the company find/train a competent DBA just for their specific needs. If Oracle DBAs died out it would not be as simple as sicking a basement-nerd on the documentation and telling them to try their best. Oracle DBs are some of the most traffic-heavy DBs on earth and they run critical infrastructure which can cost (if it breaks) potentially billions to a company. It would COMPLETELY CRIPPLE parts of the world if you had that kind of an event where suddenly we lost a huge amount of Oracle DBAs like that.
It's not a matter of skill, it's a matter of: (in some places) "We are required by law (or our insurance company) to only allow someone Oracle certified to run this equipment due to legal liability. We have to shut down until we can get another."