Skilled labor = real human deserving of a fair wage.
Unskilled labor = meat machine that we need to pay by law, but we gladly wouldn’t pay them a dime if we could get away with it because they aren’t real people.
I’m a software engineer. There’s people on my team that went to Yale for computer science. There’s also people on my team that took a six month coding boot camp. They’re both great at their jobs.
For me it’s not really an us/them opposition, my disgust is with how unskilled laborers are viewed/treated because of our lack of education. That somehow makes us subhuman and undeserving of a living wage. That we should be thankful for a minimum wage.
I have no issue with skilled laborers, I have an issue with owners/CEO/etc… us laborers of all skills are in the same boat. Best friend works for Intel, Intel makes tons of money, friend gets pay cut and added responsibility. ¿Que?
The problem lies in the fact that we need to categorise these subjects to write more effective policy. And it doesn’t matter what words you use, they always get these connotations as familiarity grows.
Education requires no skill, you just kiss professor’s ass and do as you’re told, your reward is a diploma. Here, is that reductionist enough for you?
By the way, cashier job can’t be learned within days, you need to be literate and know at least basic math and average kid goes to school for at least 8 years so fuck you. I can’t even think of a job that requires no education.
Is it made less difficult to achieve a living wage for everyone by affirming, or by challenging, the practice of characterizing some labor as “unskilled”?
Close, but that’s not a job. It’s no coincidence that the destructive practice of using your wealth to suck wealth out of society without adding anything beneficial is called Rent-seeking
You’re comparing the bottom person at a restaurant with a mid level engineer. You should be comparing an engineering intern with a dishwasher or something. Both are somewhat replaceable (but try running anything without them).
Compare an actual engineer with a restaurant manager or head chef. Both of those require experience and education.
An entry level engineer is going to have 2 years of additional math, or coding, or whatever after highschool. I was cooking burgers and running a register at 14. It’s easy to learn. Most people can cook a burger as a part of their existence, no training but the specific way they want. Far far more easy to replace and train.
I think all jobs at least have the potential to be skilled labor. The issue is with many of these types of jobs the work isn’t paid well enough for someone to stick around and really develop the skills.
Obviously there are many exceptions as there are a lot of really skilled workers working jobs that still pay well below what they should but hopefully, with more awareness and union membership uptick, this is improving.
I guess one thing I learned reading this thread, there are very few unskilled jobs nowadays.
Maybe old time admin assistants just collating papers, making copies, etc but even then those are really just unskilled tasks moreso than an unskilled job. They also had appointments to set up, calendars and rolodexes to manage, organization, etc.
I think any unskilled job can be made skilled labour if you’re thoughtful about how you do it, and do it well.
You’re gonna tell me catching a stray cat, butchering it correctly and making mincemeat that tastes no different from cow to average customer doesn’t require copous amountso of knowledge?
Don’t get me started on making a dead rat look like a KFC chicken nugget.
Skilled labor meaning it took more than a twenty minute introduction for the job. If the guy flipping burgers can cook multiple burgers at multiple Temps, than that would classify as skilled labor. They guy that drops the fries in the fryer and just has to wait for the ding, not skilled labor. Another example, a welder who knows how the mixture of gas affects the welds, skilled labor. It’s knowledge of why and how to get to the end result rather than following basic instructions just because that’s what you were told.
Every single action can be mastered to perfection, then relearned from the basics. There’s endless depth to everything
Fruit picking can be grabbing, twisting/pulling, then putting a thing into a basket. You can do it faster and more precisely to use less energy, you can stack fruits so more fit without bruising, you can change how you walk and hold the basket to strain yourself less. You could relearn it so you toss it all in a basket still on your back, perfectly so they don’t bruise or bounce out of place. You could learn to identify how long until a fruit ripens and chart an optimal path day by day, or even learn to smell them out.
An “unskilled job” is a job where you can get someone up to basic competence quickly. It’s an effort to use people like a fungible unit of man-hours, and to make up the difference by essentially being strategically wasteful.
A better fruit picker will have more and better fruit in less time, a better fast food cook will make a better burger. By standardizing it, you can reduce the floor - you can throw out bruised, under ripe, or overripe fruits. Maybe you can even process the rejects make juice or fruit snacks from them… You can use machines to minimize the cost and chemicals to cover for inferior ingredients
But you also cap the ceiling. An amateur fruit picker or chef can make better food than McDonald’s or Dole, because capitalism doesn’t care about “better”, it incentivizes everything to be “good enough” and punishes quality control beyond that… It’s far more profitable to put more effort into marketing an inferior product than to produce something of higher quality.
And that’s why everything sucks - because it’s more profitable to lower standards than to produce better goods.
We worry about AI alignment with little reason, but we’re blind to the fact corporations are not aligned with human values
So to you what is the difference between a job that requires years of experience to become fully capable vs a job you can pick up and learn within a couple of minutes/hours/days?
You gonna pay your plumber the same as a fry cook?
A nuclear safety engineer as much as a cashier?
Cardiac Surgery M.D. the same as a box packer at an amazon distribution center?
Teacher the same as a universal basic income recipient?
Your fry order being wrong means nothing, the business owner pays for it to be replaced.
The cashier may scan an item twice or miss scanning an item but the nuclear safety engineer stopped that worker who was careless from dying due to radiation exposure.
The cardiac surgery M.D. gave your mom a new heart letting her live another 25 years but with a simple mistake instead she dies on the operating table and the insurance they pay for covers the inevitable malpractice lawsuit. The amazon box packer packs the wrong item so the recipient at worst asks for a replacement, and the business owner replaces the item if it’s a private seller or provides a refund - or amazon ships a brand new one at their expense.
The teacher helped you understand basic concepts of mathematics, geometry, physics, biological processes… the UBI recipient rents their flat in Strasbourg at no cost.
When your definition of skilled labor is basic cognition ability then apparently no labor requires advanced knowledge of concepts that are difficult to understand and the risk undertaken has no tangible value. It’s fine if the cardiac surgeon shows up drunk or high because the fry cook could without anyone losing their life, right? After all, their labor isn’t valuable- anybody can do it because it’s just skilled labor on par with packing boxes.
People are paid based on outcomes of their role and the amount of competition there is in that labor segment. Nurses right now, especially the ones that deal with the real messy cases are an excellent example of great pay and benefits due to a shortage of workers in markets where there is demand (e.g. population centers where nurses are needed.)
Software developers can make 250k++ - why isn’t everyone just doing that? it’s nearly free to learn (need internet and a basic computer) and building a portfolio just requires learning a skill and practicing it. You don’t even need to leave the house. Packing boxes is way harder on your body. Cooking fries or dealing with customers is way messier and no one wants to really do those gigs… so why not just dev? isn’t it an easy “skilled labor”?
That last paragraph is miles away from the truth. Developers are not coders and you need a lot of fundamental knowledge in things like math, logic, design, etc., a degree, very strong grasp of a lot of technical skills, and plenty of practical experience to be worth six figures, much less 250k. Well paid coders are quickly being replaced by either AI, offshore resources, or a combination of both and at the best of times they made half of what you suggested.
If you were able to grind your way into 250k with only a GED and skills you taught yourself off the Internet, consider yourself a unicorn and also an artifact of the past that is basically impossible to replicate now.
This is more of QA / testing than programming. What title did he start with, how many job changes and what is the current title?
I know TONS of people who went to school for CS but couldn’t cut it because they didn’t sit down and continue learning and building a portfolio to really be the shining star to land the job they wanted. If you count them the average cs major probably gets paid like 40k or some shit. It’s easy to not make it over the bar because you have ADHD, can’t keep enough things in your head, don’t have the work ethic etc.
Also i’m talking US salaries, not other nations. Not working for non profits, schools, startups etc that are low wages.
It’s a title solely meant to pay less for software engineers, and usually dedicated towards IT folk working with vended products.
I know this because I got a 30k bump when my org remapped people’s titles based on their work, and they really didn’t want to keep losing software engineers.
He’s been a developer since starting his career. He has no intention of moving to QA.
He’s spent a lot of time between colleges and universities and holds several diplomas for programming, and even spent time teaching during his degree. He has deep knowledge of programming fundamentals, logic, even dabbled in AI and compiler design, making his own compiler at one point as a project for school.
He’s spent the better part of a decade acquiring the knowledge he has. He’s been a senior developer at several companies, and when he broke six figures, it wasn’t a raise he asked for, nor one he had to change jobs to get. He’s also not the type of person who changes jobs for a raise. He’s had four different employers over the past 5-10 years…
He’s a very smart person and very logical. I feel very privileged to be his friend since highschool.
That’s what I said, it’s possible. It’s not everyone. It’s not show up first day after your coding bootcamp with 0 self study and 0 effort outside of an education program. It’s a few years of learning bleeding edge skills.
There have been machine learning roles paying over 150k for someone with 2 years of experience programming and “an interest in machine learning” all this year because of the AI craze. 150k is way beyond low income by all measures and is very realistic for the typical dev after 2-3 roles and fiveish years of experience. every year that goes by someone with practical experience designing and implementing ML projects in business is going to be worth their weight in gold, so long as businesses are willing to pay.
You don’t need a degree for dev. My brother doesn’t have one, he’s doing just fine. He took a boot camp but put WAY more effort in on his own time than a simple course. He did manual labor before the boot camp and made less than a third of what he is paid now. He’s looking at roles that pay well above 100k after less than two years of experience.
Saying that programming roles are being placed by AI or offshore labor is the biggest red flag that exposes that you do not know how things actually work in CS. I will say that going offshore is a thing many businesses decide to do but it bites them in the ass in this kind of position.
Warehouse fulfillment is skilled labor. Fast food work is skilled labor. I’m having a hard time thinking of an example of a truly unskilled labor job.
Skilled labor is economists jargon, so the meaning of it does not match the dictionary definition.
No one is saying there is literally no skill involved in unskilled labor.
Skilled labor = real human deserving of a fair wage.
Unskilled labor = meat machine that we need to pay by law, but we gladly wouldn’t pay them a dime if we could get away with it because they aren’t real people.
-Asshat Owners
Technically skilled as in requiring education (financed by the state), unskilled can learn on the job within days.
But politics has a way with twisting those words into a us/them dichotomy.
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I’m a software engineer. There’s people on my team that went to Yale for computer science. There’s also people on my team that took a six month coding boot camp. They’re both great at their jobs.
Specifics of software engieneering. Doesn’t work with civil engieneering, electrical engieneering and many other fields.
I agree, I was purely agreeing with
I still think the formality of some fields is still too “can you afford it,” but that’s for another topic
You can’t learn those things online or in books?
in six months
Some people just can’t be trained to write code. You still need the aptitude at the end of the day.
For me it’s not really an us/them opposition, my disgust is with how unskilled laborers are viewed/treated because of our lack of education. That somehow makes us subhuman and undeserving of a living wage. That we should be thankful for a minimum wage.
I have no issue with skilled laborers, I have an issue with owners/CEO/etc… us laborers of all skills are in the same boat. Best friend works for Intel, Intel makes tons of money, friend gets pay cut and added responsibility. ¿Que?
The problem lies in the fact that we need to categorise these subjects to write more effective policy. And it doesn’t matter what words you use, they always get these connotations as familiarity grows.
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Education requires no skill, you just kiss professor’s ass and do as you’re told, your reward is a diploma. Here, is that reductionist enough for you?
By the way, cashier job can’t be learned within days, you need to be literate and know at least basic math and average kid goes to school for at least 8 years so fuck you. I can’t even think of a job that requires no education.
Some more sarcasm and condescension
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Is it made less difficult to achieve a living wage for everyone by affirming, or by challenging, the practice of characterizing some labor as “unskilled”?
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You seem to be inserting an appeal to purity, by characterizing certain skills as “special”.
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An appeal to purity is not good, in case you are not aware if the term.
Sure. To the economist the terms are jargon, but to the bootlicker they are sacred words. Your heresy is unwelcome.
Landlord
Close, but that’s not a job. It’s no coincidence that the destructive practice of using your wealth to suck wealth out of society without adding anything beneficial is called Rent-seeking
That requires no labour though.
Warehouse fulfillment and fast food. It takes little education and training. I can be doing it in a week. Tops.
It’s far harder and longer timeframe replacing an engineer for example.
That’s not skilled labor though, that’s white-collar office worker stuff.
A better example would be a lathe operator.
White collar has nothing to do with skilled or not. It’s a calculation on time and cost to replace.
I don’t know anything about lathe operators but it’s very clear that it’s harder to replace engineers vs cooking fast food.
probably the “labor” part
You’re comparing the bottom person at a restaurant with a mid level engineer. You should be comparing an engineering intern with a dishwasher or something. Both are somewhat replaceable (but try running anything without them).
Compare an actual engineer with a restaurant manager or head chef. Both of those require experience and education.
An entry level engineer is going to have 2 years of additional math, or coding, or whatever after highschool. I was cooking burgers and running a register at 14. It’s easy to learn. Most people can cook a burger as a part of their existence, no training but the specific way they want. Far far more easy to replace and train.
I don’t think the issue is with the term skilled, I think it’s with labor.
Unskilled labor is McDonald’s.
Skilled labor would be like a machinist or a plumber.
It takes a lot of training, maybe an apprenticeship, etc. maybe even vocational school.
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Walmart door greeter, maybe?
I think all jobs at least have the potential to be skilled labor. The issue is with many of these types of jobs the work isn’t paid well enough for someone to stick around and really develop the skills.
Obviously there are many exceptions as there are a lot of really skilled workers working jobs that still pay well below what they should but hopefully, with more awareness and union membership uptick, this is improving.
Yep most of the time they just stand there they just watch you walk by. To be fair lots of assholes on this side of town.
I guess one thing I learned reading this thread, there are very few unskilled jobs nowadays.
Maybe old time admin assistants just collating papers, making copies, etc but even then those are really just unskilled tasks moreso than an unskilled job. They also had appointments to set up, calendars and rolodexes to manage, organization, etc.
I think any unskilled job can be made skilled labour if you’re thoughtful about how you do it, and do it well.
Whatever job Eminem had in 8 Mile on the Up/Down button machine?
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You’re gonna tell me catching a stray cat, butchering it correctly and making mincemeat that tastes no different from cow to average customer doesn’t require copous amountso of knowledge?
Don’t get me started on making a dead rat look like a KFC chicken nugget.
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No it doesn’t. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kn9EpGqrOE
This one is just condescension. But the pattern is there
I’d asume some of the jobs where you just test meds all day doesent require any skill
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Skilled labor requires a degree, unskilled labor does not.
All skilled labor can be represented by the unskilled labor required to recreate it, ie training.
The only one I can think of is the guy that carries the nitroglycerin into the train tunnel when they’re digging it.
It’s so unskilled that if you mess up, you die and don’t even learn a lesson. The job is literally walk without splashing this liquid.
This job doesn’t exist anymore. Human rights and all, but a lot of train tunnels are coated in the blood of “unskilled labor”.
Skilled labor meaning it took more than a twenty minute introduction for the job. If the guy flipping burgers can cook multiple burgers at multiple Temps, than that would classify as skilled labor. They guy that drops the fries in the fryer and just has to wait for the ding, not skilled labor. Another example, a welder who knows how the mixture of gas affects the welds, skilled labor. It’s knowledge of why and how to get to the end result rather than following basic instructions just because that’s what you were told.
Fruit picker, maybe? I know it’s physically hard but is that skilled?
The skill is being able to endure hard labour
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Every single action can be mastered to perfection, then relearned from the basics. There’s endless depth to everything
Fruit picking can be grabbing, twisting/pulling, then putting a thing into a basket. You can do it faster and more precisely to use less energy, you can stack fruits so more fit without bruising, you can change how you walk and hold the basket to strain yourself less. You could relearn it so you toss it all in a basket still on your back, perfectly so they don’t bruise or bounce out of place. You could learn to identify how long until a fruit ripens and chart an optimal path day by day, or even learn to smell them out.
An “unskilled job” is a job where you can get someone up to basic competence quickly. It’s an effort to use people like a fungible unit of man-hours, and to make up the difference by essentially being strategically wasteful.
A better fruit picker will have more and better fruit in less time, a better fast food cook will make a better burger. By standardizing it, you can reduce the floor - you can throw out bruised, under ripe, or overripe fruits. Maybe you can even process the rejects make juice or fruit snacks from them… You can use machines to minimize the cost and chemicals to cover for inferior ingredients
But you also cap the ceiling. An amateur fruit picker or chef can make better food than McDonald’s or Dole, because capitalism doesn’t care about “better”, it incentivizes everything to be “good enough” and punishes quality control beyond that… It’s far more profitable to put more effort into marketing an inferior product than to produce something of higher quality.
And that’s why everything sucks - because it’s more profitable to lower standards than to produce better goods.
We worry about AI alignment with little reason, but we’re blind to the fact corporations are not aligned with human values
So to you what is the difference between a job that requires years of experience to become fully capable vs a job you can pick up and learn within a couple of minutes/hours/days?
You gonna pay your plumber the same as a fry cook?
A nuclear safety engineer as much as a cashier?
Cardiac Surgery M.D. the same as a box packer at an amazon distribution center?
Teacher the same as a universal basic income recipient?
Your fry order being wrong means nothing, the business owner pays for it to be replaced.
The cashier may scan an item twice or miss scanning an item but the nuclear safety engineer stopped that worker who was careless from dying due to radiation exposure.
The cardiac surgery M.D. gave your mom a new heart letting her live another 25 years but with a simple mistake instead she dies on the operating table and the insurance they pay for covers the inevitable malpractice lawsuit. The amazon box packer packs the wrong item so the recipient at worst asks for a replacement, and the business owner replaces the item if it’s a private seller or provides a refund - or amazon ships a brand new one at their expense.
The teacher helped you understand basic concepts of mathematics, geometry, physics, biological processes… the UBI recipient rents their flat in Strasbourg at no cost.
When your definition of skilled labor is basic cognition ability then apparently no labor requires advanced knowledge of concepts that are difficult to understand and the risk undertaken has no tangible value. It’s fine if the cardiac surgeon shows up drunk or high because the fry cook could without anyone losing their life, right? After all, their labor isn’t valuable- anybody can do it because it’s just skilled labor on par with packing boxes.
People are paid based on outcomes of their role and the amount of competition there is in that labor segment. Nurses right now, especially the ones that deal with the real messy cases are an excellent example of great pay and benefits due to a shortage of workers in markets where there is demand (e.g. population centers where nurses are needed.)
Software developers can make 250k++ - why isn’t everyone just doing that? it’s nearly free to learn (need internet and a basic computer) and building a portfolio just requires learning a skill and practicing it. You don’t even need to leave the house. Packing boxes is way harder on your body. Cooking fries or dealing with customers is way messier and no one wants to really do those gigs… so why not just dev? isn’t it an easy “skilled labor”?
That last paragraph is miles away from the truth. Developers are not coders and you need a lot of fundamental knowledge in things like math, logic, design, etc., a degree, very strong grasp of a lot of technical skills, and plenty of practical experience to be worth six figures, much less 250k. Well paid coders are quickly being replaced by either AI, offshore resources, or a combination of both and at the best of times they made half of what you suggested.
If you were able to grind your way into 250k with only a GED and skills you taught yourself off the Internet, consider yourself a unicorn and also an artifact of the past that is basically impossible to replicate now.
A buddy of mine just cracked six figures. He has a degree in development. His degree literally says “programmer analyst”.
Even after all that, he didn’t hit six figures until many years into his career.
This is more of QA / testing than programming. What title did he start with, how many job changes and what is the current title?
I know TONS of people who went to school for CS but couldn’t cut it because they didn’t sit down and continue learning and building a portfolio to really be the shining star to land the job they wanted. If you count them the average cs major probably gets paid like 40k or some shit. It’s easy to not make it over the bar because you have ADHD, can’t keep enough things in your head, don’t have the work ethic etc.
Also i’m talking US salaries, not other nations. Not working for non profits, schools, startups etc that are low wages.
Yeah, no.
It’s a title solely meant to pay less for software engineers, and usually dedicated towards IT folk working with vended products.
I know this because I got a 30k bump when my org remapped people’s titles based on their work, and they really didn’t want to keep losing software engineers.
You misunderstand. That’s what his degree says.
He’s been a developer since starting his career. He has no intention of moving to QA.
He’s spent a lot of time between colleges and universities and holds several diplomas for programming, and even spent time teaching during his degree. He has deep knowledge of programming fundamentals, logic, even dabbled in AI and compiler design, making his own compiler at one point as a project for school.
He’s spent the better part of a decade acquiring the knowledge he has. He’s been a senior developer at several companies, and when he broke six figures, it wasn’t a raise he asked for, nor one he had to change jobs to get. He’s also not the type of person who changes jobs for a raise. He’s had four different employers over the past 5-10 years…
He’s a very smart person and very logical. I feel very privileged to be his friend since highschool.
What school offers a degree in “Programmer Analyst”?
I don’t really feel like doxing him, since he doesn’t live too far from the school.
Interesting. I would be happy to get to know y’all
That’s what I said, it’s possible. It’s not everyone. It’s not show up first day after your coding bootcamp with 0 self study and 0 effort outside of an education program. It’s a few years of learning bleeding edge skills.
There have been machine learning roles paying over 150k for someone with 2 years of experience programming and “an interest in machine learning” all this year because of the AI craze. 150k is way beyond low income by all measures and is very realistic for the typical dev after 2-3 roles and fiveish years of experience. every year that goes by someone with practical experience designing and implementing ML projects in business is going to be worth their weight in gold, so long as businesses are willing to pay.
You don’t need a degree for dev. My brother doesn’t have one, he’s doing just fine. He took a boot camp but put WAY more effort in on his own time than a simple course. He did manual labor before the boot camp and made less than a third of what he is paid now. He’s looking at roles that pay well above 100k after less than two years of experience.
Saying that programming roles are being placed by AI or offshore labor is the biggest red flag that exposes that you do not know how things actually work in CS. I will say that going offshore is a thing many businesses decide to do but it bites them in the ass in this kind of position.
The claim was that different kinds of labor require different skills.
Do you have any substantive argument to the contrary?
Without first I don’t get water, without second I don’t get food. Yeah.
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I’m sorry you’re unable to do basic plumbing tasks though.
Says who?
You said you don’t get food without fry cooks
OK.
OK.