Monday, August 23, 2010

Welding and Engines

I can't really say that I am steering my kids toward college.  Truth is, unless you are heading into a college education to get an engineering or hard science degree, I really can't see any use in the exercise.

Most college degrees lead to a job pushing paper.  There is nothing being made, you just become one of the parasitic middle managers or drones that are documented so well in the comic strip "Dilbert".  For my time, and for the world that I grew up in, being a salaryman was a good thing.  I think that if you tried to do this in the future, you will be dying on the vine slowly.

The middle managers and the petty bureaucrats are the "add-extras" of our society.  Layers of do-nothing that allow the upper managers their personal fiefdoms.  The functions that these odd critters provide are ancillary at best, counterproductive at worst.  

We are entering a stripped down world.  As the greater depression continues (no, there wasn't a recovery, it can't be a double-dip when we haven't crawled out of the first dip yet) the businesses will cut the excess.  I think that we haven't seen unemployment until the excess is squeezed out of the workforce and the government payroll.

So, back to the kids.  I am counseling them to study hard, and get into some type of trade training.  The oldest want to be a cook, I can live with that.  The youngest hasn't really thought about anything but having fun and playing football.  I don't want to interfere with that just yet.

But the days of MBA and the overfocused crap of American corporate life is going to be screeching to a halt soon.   One thing that I will be telling them over and over again is that they will have to be able to make something or provide a service.  Being a cog in a big corporations machine is a good way to die slowly.

4 comments:

Mayberry said...

I wholeheartedly agree. We could do away with 2 or 3 "upper crust" positions where I work, and the only difference would be that we could actually get some work done. And when the day comes where there's 10 paper pushers standing in line for a craft type job, with one skilled tradesman, all the degrees in the world won't trump that tradesman's skill. Rebuilding this country will take hammers and saws, welders and engines... MBAs need not apply.

Survival Chick said...

If I could do it all over again I would have gone straight to a tech school, maybe even the military. Even though I love what I do, it would be great to have an actual skill that doesn't involve pushing paper..

Nocomachinist said...

Herbert should be "Herberto"... just saying.

russell1200 said...

Since the 1970s your blue collar trade jobs have been absolutely killed. Middle skill white collar positions (sales for instance) are starting to lag as well. Medical is likely a bubble. You cannot sustain 80% of your GDP going into medical care.

Probably the group doing the best at the moment (regardless of what they majored in - I know one who was a Geography Major) are the data manipulators/number crunchers.