No Looking Ahead

[Editorial]

There is a shortage of trade people, by that I mean carpenters, electricians, plumbers, welders, and people who do things in their hands. Have you ever tried to hire an electrician lately?

The government is building more submarines, more aircraft, more ammunition, they are giving incentives to bring back semiconductor manufacturing here. New Lithium mines are being started for better or worst. Industry is hiring! It is a workers market.

I was waiting for my take out order from a local seafood restaurant and I overheard a table of college age people talking. They must have been college seniors and they were talking about job prospects. A couple of the kids were talking about getting jobs where they can work from home. Getting a job where you can work from home seems to be the current prize on the merry-go-round.

Call me old fashion but I think for college students they are dumb. The new “golden job” are computer programming jobs and yes there is a great demand for them, but as we just saw with layoffs in silicon valley they are big bucks job but they are also volatile. With all the IT layoffs from Meta, Apple, Twitter there will be an awful lots of laid-off IT people out there getting a job will be very competitive.

I was a desk jockey for 35 years working in manufacturing, I was, a technician, an engineer, and then department supervisor. We built stuff! And if we want to excel as a national we have to bring back manufacturing jobs here. No work at home jobs, these are get your hands dirty type jobs, all most all of it should handled by automation.

There will be many jobs to keep the machines running, people have to maintain the robots, and design them. Many of the jobs will not be IT jobs but the type of jobs where you have to get your hands dirty and not work from home.

In the future the jobs will be in either the trades or in manufacturing, work at home will be a dying fad and only for a slim portion of the job market. Read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano that he wrote in 1952 and automation, he nailed it! Wikipedia writes,

Player Piano is the first novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., published in 1952. The novel depicts a dystopia of automation partly inspired by the author's time working at General Electric, describing the negative impact technology can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers.

We need to plan for the long term not just for "Today" 

[/Editorial]