When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse
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Those who study anthropology are familiar with Malthusian Collapse which is often at its early points when we start to burn fertilizer as fuel and in its final form when we eat the seeds instead of planting them or cut down the last tree.
I present a different kind of collapse - when we start to eat the teachers, that is to consume those that should be educating others by having them work in normal working roles we begin Millerian Collapse. Once this happens, we see a spike in economic output as the workforce swells with the well educated, but at a high cost. The cost being that the next generation comes up without access to educational resources and mentors and has little opportunity to be as well prepared for the world as the generation before them.
This begins a downward spiral, the fewer people who are capable of teaching, the higher the demand for those few to be in the workforce. If we don't keep pay and benefits for educators high enough, they will choose other options that have short term benefits, but do not supply the world with its next batch of thinkers and skilled workers. This is an endless downward spiral, each generation will be less educated than the one before which will, in turn exacerbate the problem.
Right now, IT is facing this as an individual discipline. Pay for professors is a fraction of pay in private sector jobs. Each generation is being taught and mentored less and less than the one before. There are fewer and fewer educational resources for the next generation and more and more need for those with the increasingly unavailable skills.
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Where did IT ever have a good amount of teachers?
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@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
Where did IT ever have a good amount of teachers?
I learned more myself than I ever did in school about IT, even tho I was enrolled in a program supposed to specialize in IT. Don't think you'll find many people disagreeing with you here @Dashrender.
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@travisdh1 Same, I did a lot of the teaching for a few of my systems and networking classes. My professor got paid to read off of powerpoint slides while I assisted people in actually learning the material.
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@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
Where did IT ever have a good amount of teachers?
It never had a lot, but it used to have a lot more. When I was in engineering school in the early 1990s, we got more system admin training as non-IT people than most system admins in the SMB get today. So much of what I talk about on SW for example, is stuff that was simply considered "power user" knowledge a quarter century ago.
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@scottalanmiller said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
Where did IT ever have a good amount of teachers?
It never had a lot, but it used to have a lot more. When I was in engineering school in the early 1990s, we got more system admin training as non-IT people than most system admins in the SMB get today. So much of what I talk about on SW for example, is stuff that was simply considered "power user" knowledge a quarter century ago.
I guess the bigger question is - where would you even go today for classroom training like this? I think my local municipal college has some courses, but I have no idea how far behind they are, and I fully expect the teachers to be more like Coliver mentioned (which was also my experience when I took some training classes at a "IT training" facility. They just read from a book at us.. and rarely could answer a real world question. I considered the value that company provided at near useless to anyone but the most basic of Office users.
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Your postulation @scottalanmiller appears opposed to your other writings about the lack of value in formal IT education where you have advised others that getting a degree in an IT discipline is a waste. Am I misunderstanding your stance?
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@Kelly said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
Your postulation @scottalanmiller appears opposed to your other writings about the lack of value in formal IT education where you have advised others that getting a degree in an IT discipline is a waste. Am I misunderstanding your stance?
Actually, it's the same. We've already eaten the teachers, making the value of education today below zero. It's because we are already far, far into this kind of collapse that the education is so bad.
So... it's not that I don't recommend that we fix education, I certainly do and that's why I've put in so much time volunteering with universities. But until it is fixed, I recommend that students avoid it as it isn't working today.
So my position, that education is worthless as it stands, is actually the reason that I feel that the article is demonstrated in the real world. We currently pay professors as low as a quarter what a qualified person to teach should earn in the private sector, with less flexible benefits! It's a rare person that will give up an awesome, flexible, stable job to take a risky, low paying, uncertain teaching job.
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And it is also important to note... I believe that the career value of university is very, very low. The overall value of university, if you understand the loss to career value, can be... moderate. If you measure it in the value of the party, the exposure to people and ideas, forced to learn things you would never have taught yourself, it has value that it lacks in career value. But even that, there are alternative ways to gain all of that knowledge. But not as dramatically so as IT career knowledge.
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Are teachers being consumed as a result of there being too many and too few job openings, or are they being consumed due to the lack of pay in their profession or specialty, therefore choosing a different, higher paying job with more or better personal benefits?
Are there other factors?
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What are the benefits that are so bad? My wife is a college teacher, her benefits are pretty great.
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@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
What are the benefits that are so bad? My wife is a college teacher, her benefits are pretty great.
When talking about IT the pay and benefits are generally terrible compared to what someone could be making in the private sector. Your wife may be in an area where private and public sectors pay similarly.
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@coliver said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
What are the benefits that are so bad? My wife is a college teacher, her benefits are pretty great.
When talking about IT the pay and benefits are generally terrible compared to what someone could be making in the private sector. Your wife may be in an area where private and public sectors pay similarly.
I was only asking about the benefits... pay and benefits were split out.. so sure, I know the pay can be vastly different from the private sector, but I was wondering about the non pay benefits.....
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@Tim_G said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
Are teachers being consumed as a result of there being too many and too few job openings, or are they being consumed due to the lack of pay in their profession or specialty, therefore choosing a different, higher paying job with more or better personal benefits?
Are there other factors?
Those are kind of the same thing. It's supply and demand, the demand outstrips the supply so the only way to get any teachers is to pay somewhat competitively, which is why many schools can't get any at all. Those that they do get often compete with interns in the workplace.
What we have today is high demand in the private sector and low pay in the teaching sector. It's a bad combination.
There might be demand from outside of IT skimming them of as well, that's hard to say. But private IT jobs are so lucrative, that only those insanely passionate about teaching would even look at teaching positions.
Examples: in any professional peer group for IT (online, in person, etc.) there should be professional educators there every time. There in person to get peer support, to provide academic insight, to bring students, to make professional connections... but how often do we see them? Almost never. I know of none in ML, one in SW, none in any SpiceCorps, Spiceworld, MangoCon, etc. Were they invited? Yes, I did so personally. Do any care about professional development? None that I know. It's just not something that they do.
SpiceCorps Waco is actually run by the local college. Could they be bothered to attend any SpiceCorps that they didn't run themselves to see how things run or participate? No, too much effort even though a busy one is nearby. DId they get offers from vendors and SpiceHeads for help? Yup, lots of it. Did they bother? Nope. Have they had a single meeting? Nope. All they've done is block anyone else from starting a group.
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@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
What are the benefits that are so bad? My wife is a college teacher, her benefits are pretty great.
Does she have set hours to be at work? That's pretty huge. IT at a level where they should be able to teach would have essentially unlimited flexibility in their schedules. Be able to work from home, not need to take sick days when sick, get loads of vacation (that they can take at good times when school is in session), and so forth. No college professor I've known gets those things. They tend to have inflexible hours, inflexible work locations and only get vacations when "laid off" during the worst possible times so that the entire concept of vacation is a very, very different thing making travel essentially useless.
The timing of teacher's vacations needs to be considered in their pay. For example, my SIL is a teacher and for her to go to Italy is about $2,000. For me it is $200, because anytime she can travel, the costs are a premium.
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@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
@coliver said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
@Dashrender said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
What are the benefits that are so bad? My wife is a college teacher, her benefits are pretty great.
When talking about IT the pay and benefits are generally terrible compared to what someone could be making in the private sector. Your wife may be in an area where private and public sectors pay similarly.
I was only asking about the benefits... pay and benefits were split out.. so sure, I know the pay can be vastly different from the private sector, but I was wondering about the non pay benefits.....
What good benefits does she get?
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In comes the internship. If employers see that college grads are asking for salaries that don't offer a value to the business, they will hire high school students and teach them themselves.
If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.
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@Mike-Davis said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
In comes the internship. If employers see that college grads are asking for salaries that don't offer a value to the business, they will hire high school students and teach them themselves.
If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.
Internships fail from the same problems, though. As the senior people in the field get busier and busier, the opportunities for internships get less and less. Internships only work when there are plenty of idle resources to handle them.
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@Mike-Davis said in When We Start to Eat the Teachers: Millerian Societal Collapse:
In comes the internship. If employers see that college grads are asking for salaries that don't offer a value to the business, they will hire high school students and teach them themselves.
If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.
We talked about internship value in a different thread. It works for some people and not others... really depends on the organization.
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@scottalanmiller for anyone that spends a good chunk of their day on Spiceworks or MangoLassi educating others, having an intern is not much additional effort.
