worker-guy rant

He's right. Not everybody can play the college-essay game, and we don't need millions of artists and sociologists and film-makers surviving as Uber drivers and baristas.

"America is lending money it doesn't have to kids who can’t pay it back to train them for jobs that no longer exist. That’s nuts."

We do need more electronics and manufacturing techs, more good HVAC and auto mechanics, more good IT support people, more good PCB layout people.

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Have you noticed that many excellent PCB layout people are dyslexic? They are great with geometry but bad with words. This shows up as bad text placement and spelling (PARTS NOT USE) and inattention to reference designators. That's one reason that women are usually better at PCB layout. Boys are about 3x more likely to be dyslexic than girls, and things like PCB layout may selectively attract dyslexics.

It's Tucker Carlson again.

It's certainly nuts, but loads of people are making money out of training people for jobs that they won't be particularly good at.

Money talks remarkably loudly in the US, and the people who are making money out of selling dubious training have a lot more political clout than anybody else.

But Tucker Carlson isn't the guy who will get them for you. Nor is Mike Rowe. He's clearly talking to the wrong people and not getting anywhere, It's clearly a social problem. Going to university and getting a degree is irrationally attractive. When I did it the drop out rate was about 30%, which makes it a risky investment for the average student. Vocational training in something you like doing is frequently a wiser choice, but it isn't touted as a glamorous route to a great career.

And even if you can can cope with academically demanding subjects you still have to chose the right one. I persisted with Chemistry until I'd got a Ph.D, in the subject before I slid off into electronics. Winfield Hill get better advice and and switched from a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics to a Masters in Electronics.

No. Most of them seem to handle the printed word just fine. The was one truly excellent engineer at Cambridge Instruments who was dyslexic. We would have been happy to tidy up what he wrote, but he couldn't see how what we did changed what he wrote - their, there and they're all sound exactly the same, and that was all that he could register.

Being dyslexic isn't necessarily being bad with words - his case it was just being bad with phoneme to grapheme transcription.

That's not dyslexia. It's not paying attention to detail.

John Larkin has the idea that dyslexia is a single problem. It's a problem in a single area - going to and from written words to sounded out words - but that's a complicated task task involving a number of different skills.

Lumping all dyslexics in a single bin is an exercise in sloppy thinking., and John Larkin does much more of that than he should.

Incidentally a number of those "real jobs" like e.g. auto mechanic are very physically taxing (in a bad way); doing labor-intensive jobs for long periods of time in a country with as inconsistent and expensive a health care system as the US is a risky proposition.

A relative of mine is facing multiple orthopedic surgeries well before age 60 due to being employed in the vehicle maintenance field, fortunately he works for a major logistics company that's more understanding/generous than some.

Not everyone in the maintenance field is so fortunate; the vocational rehab centers are full of trade guys in their 60s, 50s, even 40s, who have aged or injured out of their chosen trade and their employer just kicked 'em to the curb.

Auto maintenance shops in particular are a race to the bottom on throughput, always more cars per hour, must go faster, auto mechanic is a high-turnover industry in general.

Even just some college education is often enough to to teach kids to be skeptical of marketing, which is what Mike Rowe is in the business of.

“If you want to make America great again, you’ve got to make work cool again,”

Anything but pay more money. Sort of like how the US Navy set up recruitment centers outside theaters where the film "Top Gun" was showing in the 80s - you know the most likely result is you're going to be swabbing the deck, when anyone is telling you to think of how "cool" you'll feel as a job perk, in lieu of taking about cash or actual perks.

I kept a few tape-and-mylar examples to show to the kids. I don't miss that at all.

I still sometimes draw schematics on D-size paper and give them to my layout guy to enter. I enjoy drawing; I have a big wooden drafting table with a giant window with a view.

I doubt that AI can do decent PCB layouts. Autorouters are still pretty bad and auto-place really sucks.

Flux now claims AI capability. Flux.ai. It will be interesting to see if they survive.

There was a guy, used to post here, teaches industrial automation, a

2-year program, at Sierra College. We visited one of his classes. It was awesome. He said that 100% of his grads get job offers, running factories and such. One his grads, a girl, runs the gigantic Budweiser brewery near Sacramento.

One reason to go to college is to learn to drink beer. But that's not worth graduating $200K in debt.

Before the states raised the beer drinking from 18 to 21 we learned beer drinking in high school. Usually starting in the 11 grade. Many started around 17 years old even though it was illeagle.

Due to that around here a man will work for the big car dealers long enough to get good at repairing the cars. If he is very good ,he opens up his own shop. The car dealers would be better off paying the better ones a higher wage.

The better ones open up their own shop around here.

Auto mechanics spend a lot of time programming engine control computers. That's a speciality that doesn't need a lot of brawn.

We have power tools and lifts now too.

I did visit the controls class at Sierra College. They were doing really cool stuff. The class project was to build a control system with motors and sensors and stuff. They machined the mechanical parts, did their own PCB design and layout and assembly, wrote the code.

I bet the average MIT EE grad doesn't know how to drill a hole or solder.

Early in th PC era, one expert said "you will never get a businessman to type."

I still breadboard to test parts or simple circuits. Many parts aren't specified or modeled enough to trust simulation.

Nest week I need to blow up a bunch of solid-state relays. SSRs never have SOAR graphs. With a bit of luck and some tricks, *almost* blowing them up might do.

PCB layout is rarely driven by simple rules, especially for fast or high-power-density products. I don't know how I could communicate all the requirements to AI, even if decent AI existed. I can't even communicate all the issues to my PC layout guy. I do the critical bits myself.

That's easier.

Vanity mainly, but some of them pay for college that way, some may even make it a career. Also it teaches cooperation.

Which is to say John Larkin gets less from data sheets and models than the average engineer.

Pretty much everybody else who buys them doesn't need to go to that much trouble.

Some of it is.

Minimising cross-talk isn't all that easy. You do have to know which traces carry fast-changing voltages and currents.

I didn't have much trouble with that. The final layout did take a couple of cycles of inspection and correction, but good layout people got enough of the message that you rarely neede more than two go-arounds.

Once printed circuit layout programs got tolerably user friendly, I did do critical layouts myself, but that was at a point in my career when I was less busy and we didn't have all that many layout people.

It's usually pretty obvious.

AI isn't likely to have access to enough boards to develop any kind of "style".

AI isn't likely to be able to understand the past interactions, so it won't know enough about what it was "watching". That's how senior executives break things - they think they know what they are seeing, and will impose the solution that makes sense to them.

Accountants famously don't know enough about what they are doing. It was always difficult to get them to pay the broad-line distributors on time, so that when we needed a particular part urgently we could get it fast. Get it wrong and you can have an almost working million dollar machine siting in final test, waiting for a ten cent part that you have to fit before you can ship it.

Mainly because there's no quality control. It took ages before Tucker Carlson got fired.

Fox News had to agree to pay US$787 million in damages to Dominion for the lies that Tucker Carlson - amongst others - broadcast.

My experience is mostly with UC Berkeley and Stanford EE grads, but the results are similar. Most of them don't understand electicity and many are afraid of it. Few can coherently explain their senior project. That's a good test, after the 9K:1K voltage divider challenge: tell me about your senior project.

I did a tour of the Cornell EE department and counted screens. I saw

22 computer monitors and one oscilloscope. Laptops paid for by students are cheaper than labs with benches and equipment.

But the fact is that most people going to 4 year colleges aren't going

200k into debt getting English degrees, anthropology degrees, or degrees in underwater basket weaving.

You can see what they're doing and the liberal arts ranks pretty far down the list:

The lure of being "white collar" is strong and despite rising interest rates and a few well-publicized layoffs the white collar world economy is still roaring, there has rarely been a better time to be in finance, biomed, business, marketing, accounting, engineering, etc.

It shows in that the housing market in the Boston area is still plenty hot with people making 700k cash offers on 2 bedroom gutjobs with no garage 30 miles outside the city. The white collar world has wealth to burn, it's not very many baristas with English degrees making those offers, or very many auto mechanics, either.

The statistics show that most kids going to college aren't going to get "useless degrees", conservatives are living in the past (if it was ever true.)

4 year college enrollment is down something like 20% over the past decade with community college enrollment down 40%.

Most of the kids that haven't bailed on college already are shooting to become managers, not baristas with English Lit degrees. That's an understandable decision, being a manager has rarely paid better or required less work.

Yeah, like dieting. Better to just stay fat.

The media tends to pick the biggest idiots they can find to run a story on to represent whatever generation they're trying to slur, Gen Z I guess in the case of recent grads. "I spent 500k on my two anthropology degrees and have four kids by four baby daddies, how will I ever get out of debt?! Help me Biden!" will serve to get clicks but isn't the reality of most college grads, as you can see from the stats.

Something like 50% of college debt is held by PhD grads, it's hard to get too riled up over the fate of their debt repayment they chose that life, and almost nobody I know of who didn't have parents with a good chunk of scratch, and/or a spare family home to fall back on, backing up their decision, went into academia.

And the only means you have of assessing it is to look at the earnings of past graduates.

I did a degree in chemistry as my parents had done before me. They'd both graduated at the end of the 1930's and had both got jobs.

By the time I'd got my Ph.D, in chemistry in 1970, chemistry was a rather different profession, and I'd learned quite a bit of electronics in the course of getting my degree, and it wasn't the kind of electronics I would have been taught if I set out to get a degree in electronics in 1960.

The answer changes from year to year and from course to course.

No chance.

Knowledge keeps on advancing. Permanence is a very dubious virtue in advanced education.

They have gotten more expensive

Anybody who hasn't spent time being a manager. Being on the next step up the pyramid always looks good - you do get better pay - until you have to do it.

Really? The image at of people at work concentrating 100% from nine to five is unrealistic. I tended to work late because I got regularly distracted during regular hours. The social interactions are important - that's when you find out what is really going on, as opposed to what your managers tell you is going on, and when you sort out the problems that your managers are glossing over, but it is distracting.

But the liberal arts is where we get the literati; all the worthwhile writing in the world (pre-ChatGPT) was honed by the liberal arts coursework, perhaps in the sidelines of folk doing other degrees. Authors and editors, and video producers and musicians... our world would be poorer without those skills that can be implanted in young adults during an academic year, or written into comprehensible books... to educate generations yet unborn.

Steinmetz, Terman, Shockley, Grove, Horowitz and Hill... they're on my bookshelves.