An Age of Dying Expertise

Recently, a friend described an incredibly expensive series of visits to his Volvo dealership in which he had to explain the problem (surging at low speeds), leave his vehicle at the dealership for a day or two, pay around $1,000 per visit, take the car home and discover the same problem still existed. And he had to do this a half-dozen times before he finally “resolved” the problem by disabling the car’s oxygen sensors. He’d had several such problems with his two early 2000’s Volvos and at least one of those malfunctions was solved by a Boomer parts manager who had been a mechanic before being promoted to management who knew something about the history of Volvo’s many fuel system problems. Without that insight, his car might be in a salvage yard today.

I’ve had a couple similar experiences. In 2011, on a motorcycle trip with my grandson through the Rockies, my Suzuki blew a fork seal about 50 miles north of Laramie, WY. First, I assumed that there wouldn’t be a Suzuki dealer in that backwater and I was wrong. Frontier Cycles not only serviced and sold Suzuki bikes, but I lucked into a 60-something parts guy who knew that Suzuki only use 3 sizes of seals, regardless of their hundreds of part numbers for fork seals. Thanks to his long-term knowledge of Suzuki motorcycles, I was back on the road a day later. Left up to the young mechanic who did the work in a perfectly competent manner, I’d have been stuck in a motel for a week waiting for a part from Denver. I’ve documented my Volkswagen experience here long and loud, but along with discovering that two Albuquerque VW dealers and one VW specialty independent service station were totally incapable of doing anything their highly flawed computer analysis equipment didn’t describe for them, I lucked into one very clever and curious 50-60-something technician at German Motorwerke who discovered the Eurovan’s Transmission Control Unit (TCU) couldn’t make up its mind as to the source of the problem. Where the VW dealer “mechanics” read “replace the transmission,” Motorwerke’s tech tracked the faults though the analysis down to the point that every time he ran the analysis, the computer pointed to a different component of the transmission. That convinced him that the TCU was the problem, not the transmission that obviously managed to get the camper from eastern New Mexico to Albuquerque without frying itself, although a good bit of that trip was done in “limp home mode.” Later, I found another mechanic, Victor Cano-Linson at Big Victor’s Automotive in Elephant Butte, NM who patiently hacked his way through the mostly-erroneous mess of “service information” VW supplies for $400/month to independent shops and got us back on the road. Victor has a couple of grown kids, regardless of the fact that he looks about 30 max, so he’s going to be heading into retirement soon, too.

Currently, significantly more than 50% of America’s skilled-trade workers are retiring in the next 10 years, almost a third in the next five. That skilled labor shortage includes automotive and heavy equipment mechanics, plumbers, electricians, electronic technicians  construction workers, water system treatment technicians, building maintenance technicians, HVAC technicians, welders, masons, and heavy equipment operators. The same is true for high-skill, jobs like electrical and electronic engineers, mechanical engineers, doctors, and other hyper-skilled, education dependent jobs. There was a brief window when the important details of many of those skills would have been passed on, but that opportunity was missed during the multiple recessions, down-sizing, huge and incompetent conglomerate monopolies sucking up businesses and trashing them, and the massive transfer of wealth from the 99% to the 1% the country suffered between 1970 and 2020. While the owners of those skills are leaving the workforce, their replacements are having to fend for themselves in an unstable labor market with a shaky national  economic future. We often hear the shrill cry of “why don’t people want to work anymore,” but those asking don’t want to hear the complicated answer.

In a country that has fallen hook-line-and-sinker for the repeatedly-failed economic fallacy that dribble-down will save the economy and culture if we just cut taxes on the rich, working hard to earn a middle class living has lost its appeal. White people especially have been convinced if they just bow and scrape low enough they will be rewarded with the luxurious life they are entitled to be living. Mostly that proves that you can fool enough of the people all of the time.

From my own experience, a big reason the traditional generational skill-transfer didn’t and isn’t happening is that since the 70’s few of us had even considered staying with an employer long enough to be part of that. Most of us didn’t have the opportunity due to downsizing layoffs, recessionary layoffs, and local economic factors that put many of us in the technical migrant category. During the 70s through most of my career, the average engineer stayed at one company for an average of 3 years. Supposedly, that is up to 5.1 years today, but only one or two people (or at least a dozen) I know who are working in engineering would reflect that stat. Still, after 5.1 years an engineer has barely mastered the basics of a typical job in manufacturing, design, or customer support. Through most of the past 40 years, companies have devalued technical experience by laying off higher paid, experienced employees first often followed by employing those ex-employees at a much higher rate as contractors. There is literally no reason why a contractor would make the slightest effort to pass on valuable information to a company employee.

My last medical devices employer only hired degreed (mostly MS and PhD) engineers from well-regarded schools like MIT and CalTech. They were usually wonderful manipulators of computer-assisted software (CAD/CAM) and could wring solutions from auto-routing PCB layout software that totally baffled me. Their understanding of semiconductor electronics and reliability engineering was embarrassing at best and too often tragic for the end users. And every year there were fewer experienced engineers at that company to act as guardrails against the kind of mistakes young engineers make without knowing any history of the product, customers, or applications. Many of those experienced engineers were paid early-out bonuses to leave, because the company mismanagement had no idea how complicated the products had become.

Years ago, a young man who was trying to get started in the field I had introduced him to through the school where I worked and he had attended complained that “It’s not what you know but who you know in this business.” He was mostly complaining about the fact that service information on the products he most often was asked to repair was only available from other technicians. The companies who made the equipment were mostly dead-and-gone, but their equipment lived on and stayed in demand for at least another decade. The “who” he was complaining about were experienced technicians who had collected service manuals, schematics, and troubleshooting techniques over the previous 20-30 years. I offered to level the playing field for him by ignoring his calls when he needed help and he declined; understanding that it might take a while to become well-regarded enough to collect more useful resources.

Company and industry history are poorly-regarded today. “Experienced workers” are considered to be expensive workers and the first to go when mismanagement wants to give itself a giant pay increase or a huge golden parachute. Because they have no financial motivation to do anything to improve the life of the companies they mismanage, they see no downside in killing off company history resources. Like their heroes—Jack Welch, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and the rest of that ilk—they imagine that their media-manipulations are the important stuff in a company’s activities and the wreckage they leave behind will be for future generations to clean up . . . or not.

Book Review: Bullshit Jobs in A Bullshit World

I recently suffered my way through a terrible book, recommended by a retired professor friend who (apparently) hustles any book written by a fellow anthropologist: Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, by David Graeber. Graeber setup a definition of “bullshit job” that excluded his own job, "anthropologist and anarchist activist" and any other job where the occupant does not think what he/she is doing is pointless. So, being clueless and selfish at pretty much any occupation makes that job some variant of worthwhile, according to Graeber. 

I will have to disagree. 
 
One of the things I experienced working in a for-profit college for 13 years was the bullshit academia attitude of “What can I do to keep myself busy and employed without a moment of thought as to whether my class provides any value to students?” Liberal arts academics are desperate to sell their bullshit services because outside of those ivy-covered walls those “services” are pretty much worthless. With a PhD in anthropology/literature/history/music/philosophy/etc. and an ability to pour coffee into a cup and carry a plate you can probably get a wait-staff job, if you aren’t too lazy. Otherwise, what you know and can teach does not have a market value outside of the education system. If you can incorporate those fields of study into a writing career or take your “broad-based education” and turn it into a profitable hobby or convince someone that your liberal arts background makes you a viable candidate for a marketing, sales, or management job, power to you. Seriously. It happens although I don’t know why. . 

In the meantime, I’ve thought a lot about bullshit jobs and, more importantly, important and critical jobs and how our fucked up incentive programs (taxes, education system incompetence and obstacles, paychecks, and general encouragement/discouragement) are as far as getting the right people into the right jobs and getting the rest of the braindead bulk of humanity out of the way. A typical western STEM education, for example, is loaded with bullshit classes taught by bullshit experts; from "anthropologist and anarchist activists" to anthropology/literature/history/music/philosophy/etc. PhDs. There are areas of those fields that are of use to every serious adult, philosophy’s Logic and Critical Thinking, Advanced English Grammar (in the US, at least), and . . . that’s about it based on my own experience. At one time a “liberal education” required several hours of college-level math including calculus, similar hours of real science including calculus, and cross-disciplinary courses in STEM subjects. Today, a liberal arts program is designed for the lowest common denominator with inflated grades for mere participation. With that in mind, forcing a serious student to waste time with these fluff courses is practically theft. 

For a really long time, I’ve believed that management jobs, from corporate to the President of the United States and all important jobs in-between should be drafted positions. Anyone who wants that kind of job is exactly the kind of person who should never be allowed anywhere near it. On the compensation scale, the jobs a society needs the most should pay the most: scientists are probably most mission-critical in today’s world, followed by physicians of all specialties, engineers, computer programmers (especially cybercrime experts) and technicians followed pretty closely by farmers (actual farmers, not corporate farm managers) and a variety of critical jobs from water purification technician to garbage man. The easy, unimportant stuff like middle management, banking executives and hedge fund traders should be taxed into near negative incomes until no one wants to do that job ever again. Most of the rest of the jobs in our culture are likely bullshit jobs. 

A realistic definition of a bullshit job is any job that, if every practitioner of that occupation vanished tonight, would either not be missed by society as a whole or could easily be replaced in a day or two with equally unskilled labor. Doctors, nurses, scientists, engineers, mechanics, plumbers, electricians, skilled construction technicians, food farmers (not corn or soybean corporate welfare queens on tractors), and the like are real jobs. Bankers, hedge fund “managers,” a huge variety of “higher education” academics and administration doofuses, salespeople, burger flippers, wait-staff, telephone sterilizers and the like are bullshit job practitioners. And it doesn’t matter if they know it or not. 

Postscript: In these corona-virus pandemic days, it has become a lot easier to determine which jobs are really bullshit jobs. If you are sitting home now, unemployed and clearly "unnecessary," your job was bullshit. If you are fumbling around at one of the stock exchanges, gambling and guessing a whatever direction the President's latest gibberish is going to take the market, you could not be less critical to any aspect of the economy or national security. Obviously the author of this books self-exemption from the world of bullshit jobs has been proven wrong. Every anthropology prof on the planet is sitting at home hoping for extended paid leave because not a one of them is critical for any aspect of life. 

Who Are the Job Creators?

Wingnuts want us to think the idle rich, corporate executives, military-industrial companies and the rest of the elite corporate welfare crowd are the "job creators." I don't think so. I came up with a game to test who is really economically important in the country and world. It's called "Who Can We Live Without."

First, let's play this game with the right wing crowd. If some blessed biological catastrophe were to happen to the caviar-eating crowd, everyone Romney and Bush have ever known for instance, what effect would that have on the nation's economy? All of the little rich kids who life on Daddy, Granpa, and Great-Great-Great-Granpa's money come down with a case of the mother-of-all diarrhea. The clowns to inhabit the top floors of the nation's corporate headquarters spend their last hours in the executive bathroom, emptying their money makers. The entire investment banking circus vanishes in a bubble of oily excrement. Most of the entertainment industry does what Hollywood usually does, makes shit, but this time no careers rebound from the disaster and we're left with independent artists for out diversions. Everyone who has eaten caviar (or some other rich asshole staple) in the last month is gone in a few weeks. How does that effect the nation's gross national product?

It's not like it's hard to find another CEO, so the loss of the executive class would result in a momentary burst of business productivity, until the usual assholes filtered to the top of the corporate toilet bowl and everything businesslike returned to "normal." Nobody but the people who serve the idle rich would know the rich douchebags were missing and those servants would probably find something useful to do fairly soon. The South's slaves ended up on the Detroit production lines after a few years of assimilation. George and Ann's butlers, maids, and gardeners can probably find productive work in time. Bankers just beg cheap (free today) money from the public and sell it back to us with interest. We can live without them. The difference between major stars and everyone else who plays an instrument, pretends to be someone else, or chases a ball in clown costumes is . . . not much. They will be replaced faster than we can forget their last performance.

If the right wing elite isn't mission critical to the country, who is?

How about scientists and mathematicians? If exposure to calculus and statistics caused aneurysms, how would that effect the economy? First, all of the rich people in the previous paragraph would be broke overnight if someone didn't manage their money, do their taxes, create tricky investment portfolios to maximize profits and minimize effort, and invent the products  and services that keep the 1% in control of 95% of the country's income. Without scientists and mathematicians, the idle rich would starve and have to find work asking if we "want fries with that?" The rest of us would be in trouble, too; especially if the US was the only country to have lost its scientists and mathematicians. We would go from being a shriveling first world economy to a third world disaster zone in a few months. Most of our productive industries would have seen their last new product and many wouldn't be able to continue producing their current products. The only competent federal government agency, the General Accounting Office, would become as stupid as the military and the military would be in capable of targeting anyone but Canada and Mexico and we'd have to drive the bombs to those places. Anyone but a wingnut can see scientists and mathematicians are job creators.

If we drop down the social ladder to the fastest vanishing career in the United States, farming, how does that play out if farmers and their support industries get Mad Cow and Corn disease and spend their last hours clawing at their skulls? The US food reserves are already lower than they have been for decades and fuel costs are likely to drive them lower. Doing stupid things like converting farm land to energy production (ethanol) will push this safety margin even closer to disaster. Even without killing off farmers and the ag industry, we might see the effect of these producers going away in the near future. Disregarding reality, if the food producers of the country vanished, so would most of us. With food reserves in the near-non-existent territory, most Americans would starve in a week. Grocery stores would empty on the first day and we'd eat our way through our personal reserves in a few days, those of us who have any. The streets would be on fire and the rioting would make the Civil War look like a block party. Obviously, farmers are job creators and life sustainers.

You can, hopefully, think of a few other occupations that are actually important to the country; medical providers, fire departments (especially forestry fire fighters), teachers, and the list of underpaid, overworked, unappreciated economy-critical jobs goes on. The ruling elite are not among that group. We can get along without them under any conditions.