Programming is one of those things some people just don't have the knack for, and no matter how long they stay with it and how hard they try they'll never be more than barely productive. The industry is already full of those kinds of people shuffling from one three month contracting gig to another.
We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of hours).
If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.
The other element missing from the post you responded to is that self-learning is very effing hard. I would say that fewer than 1/50 people can teach themselves anything of value to the job market.
I also have to point out that, as an ex-blue-collar worker myself, that blue-collar workers in generally really don't care about education or any intellectual pursuits. Sorry, but the glove of doing programming doesn't fit everyone, and it shouldn't fit everyone. The world is interesting because we all have our unique abilities.
I work for a fairly large 20,000+ mostly non IT consulting firm that has a solid reputation for getting things done. Most programmers make on the lower end of ~60-110k and code quality tends to sit just above terrible. However, what works for us is simply focusing on solving problems not meeting specks which is the antithesis of the factory model.
Granted, if they knew who to higher and what problems they needed to solve they would get by at 1/3 of our what we charge. But, most people and organisations are unbelievably incompetent.
PS: As to immigration a lot of the work done by immigrants would simply disappear without immigrant labor because it's just not worth minimum wage and or could just as easily be done outside the country. However, when it comes to the upper ends of the work force we are far better off with them than without. Don't forget Sergey Brin was born in Russia and I don't think we would be better off without Google.
>As to immigration a lot of the work done by immigrants would simply disappear without immigrant labor because it's just not worth minimum wage and or could just as easily be done outside the country.
But a lot more of it would still need to be done, and people would get paid enough that going off public assistance made sense.
Also, don't conflate illegal immigrants with legal immigrants. Sergey Brin didn't slip over the border with a sixth grade education and no ability to speak English. What we lack is jobs for people on the left half of the bell curve. There's plenty of room on the right half.
We're not going to retrain blue collar workers to do IT as it's done now, and the factory model doesn't work - consulting companies have been trying to do this for decades with no success (well, aside from billing a whole lot of hours).
If we want to deal with high unemployment on the lower rungs of the job ladder we need to stop the flood of illegal immigrants. Any small gains we try to make by bringing people up the ladder will be washed away in short order.