
Those jobs are gone forever - quincyla
https://medium.freecodecamp.com/we-cant-bring-back-the-old-manufacturing-jobs-12214a0ab057#.pkkmosdp2
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DelaneyM
Manufacturing -> programming (particularly superficial web programming as
taught at a bootcamp) seems like an awfully impractical leap for those people
currently affected by this labour transition.

Manufacturing -> augmented materials handling, robot/machine maintenance,
manufacturing configuration & system setup, fulfillment & distribution, etc.
all make great use of existing skillsets & environmental familiarity in new
and growing areas.

If freecodecamp/general assembly/app academy/flatiron school/... were serious
about serving the market of aging factory jobs, they'd diversify their
training options into those areas (a category overweight in opportunistic
"private education" which _sorely_ needs disruption.) There's even a massive
amount of government grants available to fund this training (
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_Adjustment_Assistance)
) and unions are eager to include it of companies as a requirement for major
RIFFs (which lets companies write it off for departing workers).

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ConfuciusSay02
Total strawman argument. Nobody is suggesting bringing back turn-of-the-
century industries. When people talk of keeping jobs, they are talking about
high tech manufacturing jobs.

When a company is deciding where to build it's next manufacturing factory,
something many companies are doing, why not have policies in place that incent
the company to build it domestically? This type of policy is prevalent in
virtually every country across the globe (especially in China).

The argument that "some jobs are being automated, therefore we should make no
effort to keep the jobs that are not being automated" is a ridiculous and
nonsensical argument.

Furthermore, every manufacturing job (whether high tech or low skilled) adds
all kinds of downstream benefits to the economy that add up to much more than
just one job.

And finally, the author demonstrates a complete ignorance of the criticisms of
the H1B program and cherry picks the highest salaried H1B workers in order to
hold them up as some kind of example as to why there should be no reform, I
guess?

Sure, we should be better training people to match the realities of the modern
labor market, but that's the only point that makes sense - and it's an obvious
one.

Oh, and by the way, those Apple profits? None of them actually go back to the
U.S., they sit in foreign, tax exempt, bank accounts.

~~~
kenning
> Nobody is suggesting bringing back turn-of-the-century industries.

Am I misinformed or was this the major talking point for Trump in several
states?

~~~
ryanx435
its a mix of both, although he has never said "turn-of-the-century industries"
and that looks to be a bit of bias on OP's part.

here is his speech specifically about jobs from his campaign [1]. long story
short, he wants to focus on reducing taxes, reducing regulations, energy
reform, and renegotiating trade deals. So its a bit more nuanced than what you
probably think his positions are.

[1] [https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/trump-
delivers-s...](https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/trump-delivers-
speech-on-jobs-at-new-york-economic-club)

~~~
tasty_freeze
> We’re going to put our great miners and steel workers back to work.

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devwastaken
Articles like these really ignore the true problem with jobs and technical
fields. Most individuals who have to have factory worker jobs are not the same
individuals who can spend years learning a highly technical and competative
proffession. Programming is not something you just 'go to school' for, and
even if it was, college is very difficult by itself for many, especially if
you have kids. The mindset you have to have to partake in something like
engineering, in any form, is years upon years of effort. For younger
individuals, this can still be possible, but our education system is far too
broken for that to work out for the individuals it should.

I don't think "everybody should program" is a realistic goal. Companies are
not willing to invest in individuals to 'learn', because they don't have to.
There's so many already that they can pick and choose individuals who already
know how to solve the problem they have, even if sometimes that person lies
and then somehow turns out a decent output. The time when places like Google
or Microsoft hire people to 'figure out' how to do something is when they
require extremely advanced skills, skills that by their nature maybe only a
few hundred, or dozen, in the world have.

~~~
segmondy
Oh stop it, we love to think of ourselves as special. Programming is simple,
so simple factory workers can do it. With the right training, it's not
complicated, I'm talking about the type of programming that happens in most
places too, it's nothing more but digital factories, CRUD, gluing together
framework, libraries, the DB, a queue, email, config files, very few original
code. Very few people implement amazing novel algorithms & data structures in
new projects.

~~~
paulddraper
While I think we're very far from "special", we _are_ special in that we're
good at programming.

Being (humbly speaking of course) very good at math, and a math tutor and TA,
it took a while before I realized that lots of people just don't "get it".
With effort and time they can manage, but math will just never be comfortable
or intuitive for them.

Some people get music and rhythm and melody. I just don't. I can tell you a
lot about music theory, but I can't string notes in a good sounding way to
save my life.

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erikpukinskis
They will come back in the long tail of manufacturing.

You'll buy a standard Toyota made by robots in Nevada for $8,000. But if you
want to spend $50,000 you can get a custom car, with lots of parts
manufactured in house.

There will be single humans who build a car from scratch using a couple of
robot "helping hands". There will be a car company that uses _no_ robotic
tools, using only carefully designed winches, with a car designed specifically
for ease of human construction. There will be a competition to build a
complete car from scratch as fast as possible.

There will be cars that are unique to Paris, cars that are unique to Arkansas,
and cars that are unique Long Beach.

Teenagers will make cars as a science fair project.

There are all kinds of interesting opportunities for things to flip flop.
Robots take away easy work, but they make many more kinds of new work easy. I
know it is easy to think "what's happening now will be the trend forever!" and
robot manufacturing is in fact a major trend, but history is complicated and
after robiticization the next phase will look very different again.

~~~
pg314
It seems dubious that those custom cars will ever amount to more than a very
small niche market.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Each individual design will be a niche, but all of them together will be
somewhere in the low double digit percentage market share.

Look at food: the majority is mass produced: McDonald's, frozen pizzas, etc.
But there is a big long tail of one off experiences: home cooked meals, local
restaurants, etc.

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erikpukinskis
Here's what the chart would look like if the data analyst wasn't trying so
hard to push their political agenda:

[https://i.imgur.com/nlALPzj.gif](https://i.imgur.com/nlALPzj.gif)

~~~
eridius
Why not go even further and make the right axis go up to 100,000? Then you
wouldn't really even be able to see any decline at all!

</sarcasm>

But seriously, no, the chart doesn't have to go down to $0 in order to be
useful. All you're doing is compressing the data. The original chart makes it
very obvious that the manufacturing employment has gone significantly lower
than it was back in 1947. Your new chart obscures that, makes it so if I just
glance at it, I might come away with the impression that it's close to where
it was in 1947, when in fact it's something like 20% lower.

That said, I wouldn't complain if you simply wanted to extend the chart a
little downwards, maybe down to $8k or $9k, rather than dropping it to $0.

~~~
untangle
I don't see how Erik's chart obscures anything. Quite the contrary. And zero-
based charts make percentage changes more obvious, not less.

~~~
eridius
I'm saying it obscures the change between the 1947 and the 2012 values. Zero-
based charts make the percentage change between the lowest and highest points
more obvious, but that's not really the interesting feature of this chart. The
interesting feature is the change from 1947 to 2012, and the zero-based chart
makes that harder to see at a glance.

~~~
esrauch
The original chart makes it look like manifucturing jobs doubled from 1950 to
1980 and then fell by 90%.

Your complaint is that the zero'd axis makes it look like 1950 and 2010 aren't
actually that much different seems weird to me, because the actual data seems
to be that they _aren 't_ that different, and showing that is correct (rather
than incorrectly hugely magnifying the differences)

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k__
What about the "old" jobs that aren't going anywhere soon?

There are a bunch of such in health care that are always drastically
understaffed...

