Tag Archives: jobs

Who Interviewed These Folks?

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I have to ask because:

Roman Devengenzo was consulting for a robotics company in Silicon Valley last fall when he asked a newly minted mechanical engineer to design a small aluminum part that could be fabricated on a lathe—a skill normally mastered in the first or second year of college.
“How do I do that?” asked the young man.
So Devengenzo, an engineer who has built technology for NASA and Google, and who charges consulting clients a minimum of $300 an hour, spent the next three hours teaching Lathework 101[.]

How was this newly minted mechanical engineer even hired when he didn’t know the basics of mechanical engineering (how was he able to graduate with a degree when he didn’t know such a basic thing, but that’s for a separate article.) Why wasn’t he given a quick test of the basics? Newly hired secretaries administrative assistants get tested on basics like typing and telephone etiquette and etc. Why wouldn’t any new hire be tested on the basics of the job for which he’s being hired?

Employers are spending more time and resources searching for candidates and often lowering expectations when they hire. Then they are spending millions to fix new employees’ lack of basic skills.

It isn’t just mechanical engineering, either, it’s

  • structural engineers unable to answer questions about the use of trusses in the construction of bridges and roadways
  • nursing students struggling to pass a certification exam
  • new call center workers have problems with soft skills
  • Zoo seasonal workers not looking to be productive; if someone isn’t managing every second and keeping them busy, their inclination is not to self identify what they can do—it’s to do nothing

The list goes on. And on. And on….

In the alternative, instead of taking whatever noob wanders in from the sidewalk, or dropping too many dimes on ad hoc spot training, where are the employers’ more formal, organized remedial training programs? What are these employers doing to work with the schools to help them better train their students/recover more quickly from the effects of the Wuhan Virus Situation and the associated remote learning, which aside from failing generally, didn’t get the newly minted mechanical engineer the hands-on design training he should have had?

A Start

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But it’s a move that could—and should—be made irrelevant by a larger move.

Senators Marco Rubio (R, FL) and Kevin Cramer (R, ND) have reintroduced their Protect Equality and Civics Education (PEACE) Act, which is intended to eliminate the ability of the Department of Education to commit tax dollars to any plan or program to push Critical Race Theory into our schools.

That’s fine as far as it goes, but there’s a larger solution that more broadly addresses this mess.

The US Department of Education needs to be eliminated altogether—not merely defunded, but erased from the Federal government. This is a Cabinet entity that our nation did without just fine for nearly 200 years. It was created out of whole cloth just 43 years ago in 1979, and over the last several years, all it’s done has been to interfere with our children’s education by moving teaching away from serious subjects and into inherently racist and sexist ideological indoctrination. Additionally, DoEd has become a facility that seeks to deny due process to students accused of sexual misbehaviors. DoEd’s usefulness has disappeared.

Moreover, DoEd’s FY2024 budget request of $90 billion is money much better allocated to other purposes: items like plussing up our defense establishment with equipment, logistics, and combat training, as well as our defensive and offensive cyberwar capabilities; strengthening our government and private cyber security capabilities outside of our defense establishment; strengthening our energy and water distribution networks; supporting relocation of our economic supply chain sources and intermediate stops away from enemy nations. The personnel of the department should be transferred completely out of Federal government employ into the private sector, where their existing experience will easily facilitate their finding gainful employment.

American Worker Shortage

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The Wall Street Journal‘s editors have taken note of our nation’s workforce problem and its relation to our immigration problem.

The birth rate has been sliding for years, and it’s about to translate into a shrinking labor force. By 2040, according to a study out this week, America could have more than six million fewer working-age people than in 2022. The only way to counter the domestic trend is by attracting workers from abroad.

One thing that would help with this worker shortage would be to raise the Social Security full retirement age to 70, or even 75. When Social Security was first developed at a national level, some 85 years ago, full retirement was 65, the worker:retiree ratio was 7:1, and life expectancy in retirement was on the order of 7 years. Today, the worker:retiree ratio is less that 3:1 and falling, and life expectancy in retirement is on the order of 15-20 years. Raising the retirement age would increase the number of workers in the labor force.

That by itself, though, would be only a Band-Aid fix outside the strong benefit it would provide to Social Security survival.

What’s far more broadly needed is to build the “big, beautiful wall” all along our southern border, pierced every mile with a border crossing station through which legitimate immigrants and guest workers could enter (and the latter leave), with that combined with a vastly streamlined legal immigration system that removed visa quotas, sped up vetting of immigrant wannabes, and applied requirements that the immigrant wannabes have economic value to add to our nation.

Even that, though, would be insufficient as a stand-alone fix. Our tax regime and our welfare program badly want reform. With lower tax rates on individuals and businesses, there’s more incentive to work and to hire. That incentive can be further expanded by eliminating the areas of overlap among our welfare programs (which will include eliminating some programs and combining parts of others into single programs) and adding work requirements to remaining programs.

When Did History Begin?

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According to members of the Progressive-Democratic Party, it began in 2022. Take, for instance, the Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman from Pennsylvania, Chrissy Houlahan.

As inflation cools, it’s important to think about how far we’ve come since the crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

How far we’ve come:

At this time last year, due to the efforts of the Biden administration and congressional Democrats as we emerged from the pandemic, we were seeing strong economic growth, historically low unemployment, and large wage increases, particularly for low and middle-income workers.

What we were seeing at this time last year was the beginning of an Obama-esque slow recovery from the booming economy that already was expanding rapidly as we came out of the Wuhan Virus situation in the summer and fall of 2020 in that history that exists before this time last year.

What we are seeing since this time last year is the recovery to that latter half of 2020’s historic unemployment—for women, blacks, and Hispanics, especially—due to the recovery of jobs lost during the Wuhan Virus situation, and very few new jobs created.

What we are seeing since this time last year has been declining real wages in the face of Party-driven inflation as those wage increases—which Houlahan knows are only nominal, but chooses to elide—paled in the face of inflation. Only in the last month did nominal wage increases exceed inflation, and that’s far too soon to know whether this one time is the start of a trend or merely a one-off.

What we are seeing over the last two years is a widening of the wage gap between whites and minorities as that slow recovery and Party’s racist and sexist identity politics limit who gets back into those recovered jobs. That wage gap had narrowed significantly over the four years through 2020, as folks on the lower rungs—especially minorities and single mothers—actually got jobs (that historically low unemployment rate extant in 2020 and before) and had income. And their wages rose—nominally and in real terms—faster than did the wages of the middle and upper classes.

However, Americans were still experiencing high prices.

Yes, we are. And we will relative to our incomes for some years. Inflation may finally be coming back down—it’s still higher, though, than it was at the end of the prior administration, over two years ago—but as Houlahan admitted, inflation is a rate of price increase, it is not the prices themselves. The prices Party’s inflation drove up will not come back down.

One factor that contributes to those high prices in addition to overall inflation is the cost of energy. That has become even more expensive with Party’s open war on fossil fuel-based energy, and its effort to eliminate that industry altogether. They don’t care that energy is at the heart of the cost of production (and so at the heart of the cost of us ordinary Americans‘ purchases, especially for those of us on the lower economic rungs, below Houlahan’s middle class).

It’s certainly true that supply chain disruptions have contributed, also, to higher prices. However, the prior administration, and American businesses on their own, had already been working to revamp our supply chains to re-anchor them in more stable, more favorable locations. The disruptions of the barbarian’s invasion of Ukraine also have contributed. But that invasion was encouraged to start by the Progressive-Democrat-run Biden administration’s open timidity in the face of terrorists in western Asia and in the face of the barbarian chieftain in the Kremlin.

New Democrat, same as the old Democrat.

CIOs, Affirmative Action, and Diversity

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Company CIOs, Chief Information Officer inhabitants of the C-Suites, claim to be worried about the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling banning colleges’ and universities’ use of race as an admission criterion on their own access to a suitably “diversity”-laden work force.

By removing race from college admission considerations, the pool of tech talent entering the workforce may not only be less diverse, it could also be smaller if underrepresented minorities don’t see the field as a welcoming or viable option, those executives say.

No, rather than looking to plus up their virtue credentials, these executives should be more worried about (prospective) employees’ ability to do the job than about whether their departments have the “correct” balance of skin colors and sexes.

There is this from Juniper Networks‘ CIO:

“I worry about, in universities, if we’re not making it a more hospitable environment, that we make it harder than it is,” said Sharon Mandell…. That means companies and IT leaders need to work to convince diverse workers that technology is “a compelling place, and a welcome place for them.”

That hints at a good start (but only hints); however, by beginning at the college/university level, it renders itself too late to be an effective start. Of course, I’m also, probably naively, assuming a benign definition of “hospitable.”

Hence my question: if these CIOs and their companies are serious, and not just virtue-signaling, what are they doing to improve K-12 education and the resulting better preparation for all students? If all students get an equal opportunity at a quality education, the resulting population of job applicants—whatever the job—will pretty much automatically have a requisite diversity, artificial as that criterion is.

Unless, of course, these CIOs (they wouldn’t be alone in this regard) actually think some groups of humans are intrinsically inferior in ability to other groups of humans and so those lesser groups need special handling and protection.