Microsoft, LinkedIn To Retrain Unemployed Workers for In-Demand Jobs (bloomberg.com) 53
Microsoft and its LinkedIn unit will provide free job training to help unemployed workers prepare for in-demand jobs as the global pandemic pushes U.S. joblessness to levels as bad as those during the Great Depression. From a report: The program uses LinkedIn data to find the jobs that employers most want to fill, and offers free access to content that helps workers develop the required skills. The company will also cut the cost of its certification exams and offer free job-seeking tools. Microsoft aims to provide additional skills to 25 million people globally by the end of the year through the program for such jobs as software developer, customer-service specialist and graphic designer. Microsoft said its calculations show global unemployment may reach a quarter of a billion people this year. The U.S. unemployment rate was 13.3% in May, the highest level since 1940, as the coronavirus shut down stores, restaurants and bars, with higher rates of joblessness among Black and Latino workers. While parts of the economy are starting to reopen in the U.S., companies are also shutting down, filing for bankruptcy or announcing permanent job cuts to adjust to a long-term slowdown.
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UBI (Score:5, Interesting)
Automate everything. Tax companies. Pay UBI. Purchase shares. Problem solved.
If everything is automated... (Score:1)
...there is no need for UBI. Everything is made by robots...automatically.
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How are you supposed to acquire those things, and how will factories know where to allocate resources? Everyone can't have a house on the top of the highest mountain, money is needed to determine who gets what. Even in a commie utopia, you have to decide who gets what and which resource is "better" than another from an individual's own perspective. For example, to certain people a house on top of a hill may be undesirable compared to a house on the beach -- without money how does that trade of resources hap
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Automate everything
You write this as if it is easy to do, we are just choosing not to.
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Yes thank you for understanding that I meant "Automate everything" super literally as in switch over to AI-based CEOs/Skynet immediately all or nothing, overnight, tomorrow. No in-betweens, exceptions, or transition periods. And of course I meant an extreme tax rate of 100% so that there's no re-investment? Thanks for assuming that one too. LOL.
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Automate everything but one thing, human interactions with other humans. So in all human interactions, businesses should be forced to employ humans to interact with those other humans, staff members to interact with customers, by law, that should be made a legal requirement. No human should ever be forced to interact with a robot an AI avatar, by law a customer should be able to choose to interact with a human being at no additional cost. In the same light human beings should look down upon companies who do
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Automate everything.
We did that. Now we keep thinking of more work to do, because we all want to be richer. 99% of old farm jobs are automated, and the vast majority of jobs we have today didn't exist 300 years ago.
Plenty of people with those skills already (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Plenty of people with those skills already (Score:5, Informative)
Developers!! Developers!! Developers!! Developers!!
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You, too, can be the next Bill Gates!
Just without the money.
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Software developers, customer-service specialists, and graphic designers have all lost jobs during this recession. There's already plenty of people with those skills. Microsoft certainly isn't starving for that kind of talent. This is a long-term, strategic attack against it's own workforce. It wants to increase the supply of these workers and decrease the demand for higher wages.
Isn't that nevertheless a good move, though? I mean, if a company invests in secondary or college education then it also has the same effect of increasing the supply of workers, but we unambiguously think that a universally educated country is great.
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Software developers, customer-service specialists, and graphic designers have all lost jobs during this recession. There's already plenty of people with those skills. Microsoft certainly isn't starving for that kind of talent. This is a long-term, strategic attack against it's own workforce. It wants to increase the supply of these workers and decrease the demand for higher wages.
Isn't that nevertheless a good move, though? I mean, if a company invests in secondary or college education then it also has the same effect of increasing the supply of workers, but we unambiguously think that a universally educated country is great.
No, actually. When you depress salaries, the intelligent and hard working people move to greener pastures, and the bulk of that pool becomes grunt workers. Imagine UI framework deisgners trying to code everything. This is where software will be in a couple decades. Only the FOSS people with a political/religious desire to code for free will be doing any serious programming. And some of their stuff will be GPL3 instead of BSD or apache.
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Pretty much what I was gonna say. This is a definitive move made by a company intelligent enough in its management to know that a small investment in education now will pay off big time when the market is flooded with people that have the skills they need most. It's rare to see a company of that size be that intelligent in its planning. It's almost admirable if not for the overall effect it will have on the individuals that worked their way up and will be shown the door when the new wave crashes into the
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It's almost admirable if not for the overall effect it will have on the individuals that worked their way up and will be shown the door when the new wave crashes into the job market.
Note that they aren't investing in MBA bootcamps even though they hire plenty of those. . .
There are certain salaries they don't want to depress.
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Management and near management don't want to depress their own salaries? Sounds about right.
Re:Plenty of people with those skills already (Score:5, Insightful)
Close, but not quite. There is a larger scheme that ALL of the major tech companies are into right now.
Each tech company for years now have been pushing away from standardized languages like C/C++ into their own in-house tools to help prevent the easy transition away from their tooling and into competitor's tooling. This means more 3rd party eco-system vendor lock-in for their own stuff, without helping others.
Microsoft? C# and everything .Net
Apple? Swift
Facebook? Hack
Google? Go
Despite Visual Studio and VSCode supporting an assload of languages, watch Microsoft only provide free learning materials for just C# with a very narrow focus on tools that transition upwards to Azure exclusively.
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This is almost exactly what actually happened, except it was China unleashing it on the rest of the world whilst closing regional borders inside China!
Their expatriates bought up PPE in many countries in January and February, and flights continued to come out of Wuhan for months after they locked it down internally.
not the pandemic (Score:4, Funny)
you mean as government forced tens of millions into poverty as an overreaction when the truth is most of those jobs could have been done in a safe way. Mom and pop shops were destroyed while the big corps were allowed to continue to operate.
An essential business is one that provides income for families. We need to clip government and big corps wings so this evil farce never happens again.
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Not like this was the first time this happened. The S&L Crisis destroyed lots of small banks and pretty much ended locally funded loans. Now all big loans are sourced from national institutions. I am sure there are other examples in the last 40 years too
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Cutting off the arms of your pet groomer does not clip the wings of your bird.
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pet groomers can wear masks the same as hair dressers. And around me shops that sold plants were destroyed, as if someone couldn't take curbside delivery of a fucking plant.
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...while at the same time you could buy plants and other tidbits at those stores that had to stay open because they sold "essential" stuff like food, meaning that small, specialized stores were crushed while large corporate wholesale stores were allowed to continue operating.
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you mean as government forced tens of millions into poverty as an overreaction when the truth is most of those jobs could have been done in a safe way. Mom and pop shops were destroyed while the big corps were allowed to continue to operate.
An essential business is one that provides income for families. We need to clip government and big corps wings so this evil farce never happens again.
If "We" had the power to do that, "We" would have done it. Long ago.
All the wealth and power in the world doesn't mean shit if you aren't In Control.
False (Score:5, Informative)
No, the unemployment rate was not that number. At a minimum, the rate was three points higher, most likely more. When BLS released the May number, they knew they had a data error [politicususa.com] where people were misclassified. Instead of correcting that error as well as going back the two previous months where the same error occurred, they gave out fake information but added a teensy tiny footnote about the known issue.
And the unemployment number doesn't take into consideration those who aren't eligible for unemployment such as contractors, self-employed and many wait staff.
So no, 13.3% is not the unemployment rate. The rate is much higher. We just like to fool ourselves into thinking this is the number.
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They just want prettier results. Where are the exact results?
Humans are not fungible (Score:2)
For fuck's sake, get this through your skulls finally, dammit. Programming isn't business administration, it doesn't work to stuff the bullshit into the people's heads and have them regurgitate it to produce programmers. They have to understand it. And you can lead a donkey to the well but you can't make him drink, having people rote learn code isn't going to cut it, dammit.
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No, a 90th percentile programmer has nothing in common with a 90th percentile business administration person.
Where you do have overlap is around the 60th percentile. There is a lot of opportunity at this end.
My office manager could simplify her work dramatically and move up to a more valuable role if she just took some initiative to learn about the difference between management of data and presentation of data... but I have tried enough times and failed to explain. She spends a good 40 hours a year updati
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In other words we could cut management in half by teaching them a thing or two about programming and get rid of those that can't grasp even that while those that do get productive enough to replace them.
Lead time. (Score:5, Insightful)
I lived through it in the mid to late 90s. There were so many technologies (and Buzz Words) coming out, we did not know what would stick. I learned IBM's Taligent. It was supposed to be HUGE! I mastered it. And nothing. FIZZZLE!
Java came out and some of us were skeptical and well....I missed out.
Microsoft released .NET and many of us thought that MS was on its last legs. Well, let me tell you that a diet of crow and humble pie grows on you.
And we have ALL seen all these new platforms that gain a following and then fizzle out - unless this is your first two years in this crazy fucking industry. Then I would suggest, get the fuck out while you are young.
And it sucks because of legacies. We all saw the story how states unemployment systems were in dire need of COBOL programmers. Even when I was in school, it was considered a dying language and career suicide to get a job doing that.
I guess what annoys me the are the fads and trends in this industry. And if you are on the wrong trend, your skills are not transferable and you career is over.
Try as a C# developer or move to Java (or vice versa) and see what you hear.
I am sorry. But you do not have the skills that we need.
And so begins the demise of higher ed.... (Score:2)
Many of the IT companies today, including MS, don't need workers with a 4 year degree. What they need are people with a basic coding competence. Some of the better "coding bootcamps" can produce good entry level developers after a few months of intensive instruction. Once you have that you can groom them into the specific ways of your company.
Frankly, the idea of running up debt of 100K or 200K to land an entry level 60K job is absurd. If you want to be a Doctor, a Lawyer, a Structural Engineer then fine go
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"A university education is supposed to be about being a well-rounded person" - Yes, and in the days when Universities monopolized knowledge that might well have been true. These days you can acquire all the knowledge you desire without ever having to set foot in a classroom. I'm not discounting the benefits of the social interactions and networking that college affords but from a pure knowledge standpoint there are other ways to bridge the gap.
"Now it's become somehow mandatory for the lowest rung, despite
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Since when? It is a side-benefit, but the purpose of higher education has always been building advanced, specialized knowledge in order to produce skilled professionals and more knowledge. At least until probably about the 60's or 70's when the purpose became not being sent to Vietnam. That's where the "well-rounded person" and "everyone should go to college" ideas came from.
The inevitable result of which has been the decl
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Only part of the answer. (Score:1)
Diploma Mill (Score:2)
It seems Microsoft wants to resurrect the Diploma Mill method of employment. Employers have moved away from demanding certifications: That resulted in a lot of people who could regurgitate rules but not collect, filter, apply and synthesize (combine) their way to an answer.
Employers are back to their old stand-by of 'need the job to get a job'. It avoids the time and cost of training, re-training failures, HR-savy con-artists and enables employers to demand an employee more experienced than their curre
"...jobs such as..." (Score:1)
Or more accurately "Go reboot the cash register, then go tell that "Karen" you're the manager then take this sign out by the road and flip it around for 3 hours. Hey, didn't you used to work for Microsoft?"
No H1B visas this year. Coincidence? (Score:2)
If that's what it takes for big tech companies to invest in and hire American workers, that's okay by me.