College-educated workers are taking over the American factory floor
I always wonder about qualifications and if anyone is paying attention what is really required to do a job.<p>I worked for a tech company that was acquired by some big valley tech company.   They couldn&#x27;t find any of the fancy CS degree folks they were looking for in the valley so they decided to &quot;try&quot; bringing a few of us over from this nobody company (that they had picked up just to absorb customers, we were just the folks left over after the layoffs because they didn&#x27;t want to deal with supporting those customers themselves).<p>I didn&#x27;t finish college, and I was warned that this was high tech stuff and they usually hire some pretty smart people to do it.<p>So out to the valley they fly me and some others and first day i&#x27;m absolutely overwhelmed ... by how simple a job it was they were doing, and some pretty poorly.<p>They were so invested in their resumes and being in the valley I don&#x27;t think they really understood that day to day the job was basic troubleshooting.  At one point one of them showing me how things worked asked &quot;What do people do in Minnesota for work?&quot;  I told him &quot;The same thing you&#x27;re doing...&quot; He found that hard to belive.<p>In about 6 months a handful of us from nobody company were churning through work at twice the rate of the other folks and with higher customer satisfaction scores (it was basically technical support)... and engineering was asking that critical cases be transferred to us &quot;for efficiency&quot;.<p>Ultimately the job was customer support some mild technical skills &#x2F; ability to learn &#x2F; take good notes &#x2F; ask good questions &#x2F; the ability to formulate a theory, test it, and so on.<p>I knew dozens of people who could do that job at a third the cost, but they&#x27;d never hire them.<p>Years later I change careers and I sit through interviews where they hum and haw about my lack of CS degree again ... for a job maintaining their wonky CRUD app.