[FRIAM] What is Stopping Poor People From Moving? - The Atlantic
Steven A Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Fri Oct 13 19:23:04 EDT 2017
Gil-
My sympathies are with you. Your father and I (and many others here)
were lucky enough to "come of age" when computing was (relatively) new
and the opportunities were exploding. Many of us had limited computer
science (or even programming) education/training. We likely had some
education in Science or Engineering and a willingness to learn new
things, and Viola! We had a whole career handed to us. Then we
encouraged our kids to "go into computers" because there was STILL a
wealth of opportunity and a dearth of practitioners. Even the
home-computer and commercial internet revolutions didn't produce enough
practitioners, or at least not as fast as it created a demand for
them. But that era has passed.
My own generation hit a lull in the Aerospace industry (80's) which was
what many of US were sold on as "the next big thing!". I was born in the
year Sputnik went up and was a mere lad of 12 for the moon-landing...
and raised on old-school space-opera style Science Fiction. So *of
course* I wanted to be a Space Jockey... if not an astronaut, then at
least someone who did orbital calculations in their head (or on a
computer!) and rode the "last frontier" with style. I might well have
NOT spent my life as a computer technologist, had Aerospace options not
been so unavailable during my early career (two of my job offers leaving
college *were* in aerospace, but 5 years later I couldn't get a callback
on my resume/applications).
I *think*, in all fields specialization (and ultra-specialization) is a
natural evolution (more than a march of entropy but in many ways
similar?)... so the detailed specs you see in jobs ARE realistic, as
frustrating as that might be. There really ARE people who happen to
have exactly that mix of skills! Also plenty who are willing/able to
"fake it 'til they make it" which only aggravates the problem IMO. My
own daughter (a few years older than you) is a mid-career Molecular
Biologist, which to ME means a huge range of possibilities, but it turns
out that she moved from Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) for her PhD to
CytoMegalaVirus for her first PostDoc but got diverted to West
Nile/Dingue and now 10 years later feels ONLY qualified to work on
FlaviViruses and microRNA... which I *think* is like 1% of the field
of Molecular Biology. According to her (who really needs a venue
change mid-career), there are probably only a handful of labs in the
world where she could do the work she feels fully qualified for. I
think that is narrowed to like 2 when you restrict it to her
geopolitical preferences, and she is convinced both of THOSE
institutions have no openings, at least not until someone dies or the
entire Executive branch of the US Government gets turned over (3-8
years?) and NIH/Science funding returns.
In CS, widespread adoption of OO programming didn't happen until I'd
already invested a lot of time in developing workarounds in *procedural*
programming (Fortran, then Pascal, then C) to achieve the results that
good ObJC/C++ offered. Similar for functional (though functional
programming languages were more widespread at that time). But by the
90's *I* was not marketable as a *programmer*. I could address a LOT
of problems that "mere" programmers were not as equipped for but in fact
could barely hold my own as a programmer when using the familiar toolbox
(I STILL often prefer the old school Unix development environment
Vi/cc/ln/etc over modern IDEs, no matter how much leverage they offer
me, there are just *too many to choose from* as the WedTech list
demonstrates with "flavor of the month" tools/kits/frameworks. I was an
early adopter/practitioner of network computing (ala Sun's "network IS
the computer" and NeXT's "Network Extensible Window System", all of
which is finally blossoming 30 years later with HTML/HTTP/JS standards
normalizing if not actually maturing. So I'm very familiar with the
paradigms of "modern" systems, but almost entirely lame with writing a
single line of code in support of them in their current incarnations!
I don't know your precise skill set or level of skill with various
tools, but I am guessing that despite being a generation behind me, you
are suffering from this "embarassment of riches"... there are just TOO
MANY different tools/environments to easily master (m)any and it is hard
to find the focus to pick the few you could master. My experience with
the Computing Technology world is that it is often the *application
domain* that helps define what one might do. Outside of programming and
computer tools, if you have a specific *passion*, perhaps that would
help you channel your limited time? I know that computer games are one
of your passions, but that is *also* an overpopulated domain.
BTW, these are "first world problems" compared to (poor) folks in the
wake of the recent hurricanes, or a friend of mine from MX who has
managed to renew a seasonal green card as a laborer for 20 years until
his last visit to MX this summer. He's now unable to return (legally)
for an unknown period and while he has plenty to *do* down there, his
(extended) family had become dependent on his high ($15/hr) rate of pay
he could command here for his (very) skilled labor.
Carry On (and good luck!),
- Steve
On 10/13/17 4:09 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:
> Many here are thinking this. I shall say it. Jerks. Plane and simple
> their are many jerks in the business world. Also things are pretty out
> of kilter. I don't make it a secret that I am challenged when it
> comes to those litttle slips of paper. I don't know how many job
> postings I've seen that'll litterally say 'must know view.just vers
> 0.4 PHP v 5.6 python 3, Java VM, JavaDM, MongoDB, and have head for
> drawing and sketching, be energetic and have a zest for life.'
> (In my head ....) I 've been turned down many times simply because I
> am not physically located in the city the place is. Even though it's
> webyweb work much of wich can be done by TeleComute.
> Perhaps others have a different view ^_^
>
> On Fri, Oct 13, 2017 at 3:58 PM, Steven A Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com
> <mailto:sasmyth at swcp.com>> wrote:
>
> While the world has seen many mass migrations forced by economics
> (and climate), I doubt it has ever been a "pretty picture" either
> for those forced to migrate or those forced to receive them.
> Certainly the indigenous people of North (and to a lesser extent
> South) America got quite the shock as Europe flooded the "New
> World" with it's disaffected as well as it's fortune-seekers.
>
> In the intra-continental migrations during/after the industrial
> revolution (as subsistence farmers became coal miners, and then
> their children moved to the rust belt, etc.) people often arrived
> "too many, too late". I suspect the dustbowl/depression had a
> lot of that. People chasing rainbows across the country only to
> discover that "the good jobs" were gone by the time they got
> there. I see that in my children's generation in their
> educational/vocational choices... getting a big fat education to
> meet the opportunities/needs WE saw for them in the 90's only to
> find that they demands shifted out from under them.
>
> I've been seeing the very whimsical advertisements on Hulu for
> Monster.com where a giant purple-cookie-monster-like-being punches
> out the windows of a shoddy office building to grab a "sweet young
> office worker" and transport her (king-kong-like) to a crisp/clean
> hirise office build where he leaves her at her new desk with her
> new office mates only mildly surprised. I wonder if this isn't
> too close to the reality of our current job market, even for
> entry-level professionals... feeling that helpless and capricious
> about job prospects.
>
> With our efforts at SFx to support "the Gig Economy", I got a good
> taste of how complicated supporting creatives in Santa Fe really
> is. Now, the same with trying to help create and hold high tech
> work in the area. Housing is a significant but not singular
> component. Many of us where here (and some probably profited)
> during the housing boom of the 90s when developers/builders
> managed to change the anti-development climate of the county in
> such a way as to open up rampant (over?)building. For the most
> part, I don't think it helped the lower end of the economic
> spectrum of the county/city.
>
> - Steve
>> Pertinent to this morning's discussion.
>>
>> The Barriers Stopping Poor People From Moving to Better Jobs
>> https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/geographic-mobility-and-housing/542439/
>> <https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/10/geographic-mobility-and-housing/542439/>
>>
>>
>> TJ
>>
>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=icon>
>> Virus-free. www.avast.com
>> <https://www.avast.com/sig-email?utm_medium=email&utm_source=link&utm_campaign=sig-email&utm_content=webmail&utm_term=link>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ============================================================
>> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
>> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
>> to unsubscribehttp://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
>> <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
>> FRIAM-COMIChttp://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe
> http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> <http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com>
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> <http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/> by Dr. Strangelove
>
>
>
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20171013/8e869e04/attachment.html>
More information about the Friam
mailing list