A Practical Solution to Employment

It's no secret that many jobs are being automated, outsourced, and in general becoming obsolete. Even the president admits that there are jobs that will never come back. Making clothes, manufacturing cars, agricultural production- many jobs have permanently left the US. It used to be that inmates and the homeless could learn some basic skills and adopt a blue collar job of this sort as a way to gain work experience and re-enter the workforce. Most companies require some sort of college degree, if not to ensure experience than at least to show that they can work at a single institution for some time. Granted, some professions are still available that don't require a college degree, where the skills can be obtained independently- automotive and electrical repair, construction, and various service jobs. But these are also becoming increasingly automated and they don't always translate easily into higher paying jobs, making retention fairly low. What can the government do, then, to try and create jobs? What jobs exist to be taken?

As things become increasingly automated, why not have people work on automation? Why not have training for computer science and electrical engineering jobs? Most programming does not require a complex knowledge of algorithms, data structures, or computer architecture. The majority of a coder's days are spent managing APIs, reading documentation, and writing very few lines of code. (Famously, Frederick Brooks wrote in "The Mythical Man-Month" that the average programmer writes 10 lines of code per day in development.) In most companies, the infrastructure is already set up and there are, in fact, very few minds working on high-level theoretical programming. Instead, most of their time is spent testing, reading government regulations, and cleaning up deprecated code.

One area that has extremely strict testing, bureaucratic regulations, and tons of out dated code is the US government. (I remember one upperclassman describing his experience as an intern for the government where he started off without access to a computer, so he had to write code on paper and have another employee type it in.) So, naturally, I think the government could help create jobs by offering training (either free or with minimal tuition) for basic programming and using the manpower for their own infrastructure. Additionally, most government development is ongoing- they don't typically ship products, instead offering ongoing services like healthcare and housing, and employment. A government-led programming-centered employment program could create thousands of jobs for Americans nation wide, jobs for which demand has been rising steadily as others have been dwindling.