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Destruction of Australia's engineering and construction expertise

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I've quoted your whole post because it's worth repeating.

A part of the problem is that many people, both at an individual level and as employers, have come to associate having a degree, any degree, as being proof of intelligence and similarly that anyone without a degree can't be the brightest bulb on the tree.

In reality having a degree says nothing more than that you went to uni and passed the exams required to get that degree. Not having a degree says that you didn't do this.

Sure, if someone has a medical or legal degree then they're no fool but it's wrong to think that someone else is a fool just because they lack a university education.

Those with a medical degree usually stick at medicine. Not always but they generally seem to.

Those with legal or economics degrees tend to be more problematic however since they tend to end up in charge of things they know nothing at all about. I mean no offence to anyone personally, but crux of it is that lawyers and economists think in a very different way to how scientists, engineers or for that matter tradesmen think and that becomes a problem when it ends with a lawyer or economist in charge of something scientific.

Where it goes next is disregard for the technical aspects. A view that all that really matters is complying with laws, writing contracts and so on and that anything technical is just a sideline that we'll get someone in to tell us about. Much like saying we'll get someone to fix the computers or a dripping tap. Irritating nuisance stuff that's getting in the way of the real work producing a document with all the right buzzwords in it.

As a society we've simply put lawyers or economics / business types in charge of most things and devalued pretty much everything that's technical or scientific in any way. That's tail wagging the dog stuff and it won't end well.

All this stuff used to bother me but these days I just accept how it is and watch the show unfold.

Victoria's a classic one. The state government's got a policy of having 50% renewable energy by 2030 but they've also got policies which prevent consumers using renewable energy. Thing is, I doubt they're even aware of the flaw since their own public servants don't seem to have picked it up and the Minister has, wait for it, an Arts degree. They'll be in an even bigger panic when they spot the roadblock in the way of their plan to put solar on 650,000 homes and realise that it's a roadblock of their own making.

An electrical engineer or for that matter any decent electrician would spot the flaws pretty quickly upon seeing what's planned indeed even someone who was simply good at applied mathematics would likely be at least somewhat concerned that there's a problem. Not many of those in parliament however.

All that stuff used to bother me but these days nah, I just see it as comedy really. Can't stop the fools so just make sure I'm not caught up in it and watch the show unfold. It's frustrating though watching those who insist on doing everything wrong and failing.
 
The teachers union is very strong.
Whether that is a good or a bad thing who knows.
Making teaching a degree, helped raise wages, but IMO didnt end up with better teachers.
Teaching at primary level, is more a personality skill than an accademic skill, but now the "ability" to teach is valued the least. IMO
 
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A lot of truth here. I have an environmental science background and spent 90% of my career doing environment policy stuff for governments. In the 1980s and 90s there was a deliberate push to "de-professionalise" most public service jobs - ie. make us all "generalists" and managers. That was actually justified to some extent as technical and scientific areas of government DO have a tendency to become obsessed with "facts" and "truth" rather than understanding their role in the bigger picture. They can also suffer from groupthink as they tend to recruit people from the same "stream of thinking". When you are part of big machine, it helps to have others around who think differently. I think this hit a sweet spot when we had a good mix of science, economics, engineering, law (plus even a few historians, political science and psychology experts). We also had people with actual "life" experience outside unis and the public service - people who'd run mines, farms, been in the services etc.

What happened next was weird. By around 2010 I ended up working for people whose main focus was marketing, journalism and accounting and people with environmental and other technical backgrounds or experience were disappearing and being replaced by consultants (or sometimes by nothing at all). The impact on how we operated and, more importantly, what we focused on, changed radically - it became all about the political "optics" and what "stakeholders" wanted, rather than anything actually related to environmental risk or mitigation. We made a total 180 degree turn from "evidence-based policy" to "policy-based evidence" - making the facts fit the desired outcome.

To be honest, I did enjoy some of that. I was senior enough, and had picked up some management and other "generalist" skills so that I wasn't seen as totally "techie" or as a "propeller head". In the end, I "woke up" one day, got my (financial) act together and bailed just as the Abbott government came to power (the government least interested in either facts or due process I have ever seen).

I know this has happened all over the public sphere. My wife's last nursing job was a senior nurse working under a "Nurse Manager" who was an accountant and had no medical experience at all.

But, hey, we now have a budget surplus and that's what's important.
 
Brilliant post Jack, I can relate to a lot of it.

I also worked in a State government environmental organisation collecting environmental data. When I first joined we were basically all government funded and we collected data where we wanted to with the objective of assessment of the states resources as a whole and the data was freely available to all.

Eventually this imperative was diluted and basically sold off to as you say "stakeholders" like farmers, mines and various others with a commercial interest in the data. This data then became "commercial in confidence" and not for public release. Of course we still collected general data but most of the managers time was diverted away from that public good objective and towards promoting our services to those prepared to pay for it.

Public good becomes private interest, money always wins.
 
Agreed there definitely.

Something I can recall working extremely well under very difficult circumstances involved having lots of people, all with their areas of expertise, but all being sure to understand exactly what others were concerned about and why.

Without being specific, there was no easy option. It was bad versus bad versus worse, there was no "good" choices to be made.

That it all got done was ultimately because everyone understood what the real issues were and there was no "positioning" going on. Nobody was trying to say their bit was more important or anything like that. It was just OK, what are all the limitations, what are we sure of and what else do we reasonably expect could happen and can we find a path through all of that? And if we can't avoid anything bad then can we at least only damage things, be they machinery or environment or whatever, which can be fixed pretty easily with no permanent impacts? So what's the stuff we really mustn't break under any circumstances?

Once everyone understands that sort of thing, what's critical versus what's nice to have if possible, then it's easier to find a path through.
 
I was involved in the "competency standards" and writing them in the mid 90's, identify a skill which required a different knowledge base and skill set, then define that competence.
I said at the time all this will do is de-skill the trades, and allow employers to just train people to the level required in their workplace, rather than train tradesmen to understand all aspects of their trade.
Well it certainly has proved me right.
But having said that, it did give tradesmen a real leg up, in the wages stakes.
 
sptrawler said:
I was involved in the "competency standards" and writing them in the mid 90's, identify a skill which required a different knowledge base and skill set, then define that competence.
Click to expand...
At least you have the knowledge to base it on.
 
So are there ways we can invest to profit from all this?

One I'll note is that construction contractors etc rarely walk away with a loss from the mistakes of others and sometimes make a gain from it all.
 

My dealings with educational experts always left me dumbfounded. Bureaucrats, academics and industry "leaders" seemed equally unable to comprehend or articulate future workforce and skills needs. They seemed barely able to say what present shortfalls were. I guess we see some of the fruits of that in the current NBN debacle and flaky solar installations. When the people at the top don't even understand the current technology, let alone trends, we seem to end up with half-arsed implementation and excuses.
 
My concern is that we’ll end up doing much the same with EV’s just as we’re messing it up with solar.

The fist step in getting technical things right is to understand what needs to happen in order for it to be right. Only then can you actually go about doing it sensibly.
 

I can't understand why standard charging voltages and plugs haven't been forced on manufacturers. It will end up another pigs ear, like the early days of mobile phones, every manufacturer had a different charging voltage and model specific plug, untill micro usb was made standard.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/...makers-quest-one-plug-to-charge-them-all.html

From the article:
Indeed, charging the car’s battery pack at home, or topping up at the office or shopping mall, will work fine for most drivers. But what about trips that are beyond the range of a single battery charge? Couldn’t a driver in need simply pull up to a charging kiosk and plug in for a rapid refill?

It’s not that simple.

Sure, there are already public charging stations in service, and new ones are coming online daily. But those typically take several hours to fully replenish a battery.

As a result, the ability for quick battery boosts — using a compatible direct current fast charger, the Leaf can refill to 80 percent capacity in 30 minutes — could potentially become an important point of differentiation among electric models.

But the availability of fast charging points has in part been held up by the lack of an agreement among automakers on a universal method for fast charging — or even on a single electrical connector. Today’s prevalent D.C. fast-charge systems are built to a standard developed in Japan by Nissan, Mitsubishi and Subaru in conjunction with Tokyo Electric Power.
 
To many layers of bureaucracy with to many clueless idiots sandwiched in between. The guys with the knowhow are rarely the ones in charge of major decisions. Price point is also a major factor.

Some of the major government contracts I've worked on have been nightmares in the past. Especially when there is pressure on politicians to get it done. You have an array of idiots telling you how to do the job (wrong). Constant meetings about nothing. God knows how much these dips get paid, but you could fire half of them.
No one wants to take responsibility and nobody gives you knowledgeable answers.
 
Something else Australia seems to be sucking at is sport. Just watched the wallabies get smashed. But we seem to have stopped striving across all fields.
 
Apparently the biggest problem with placing people now, is them passing the drug test.
 
moXJO said:
Nrl isn't much of a world sport. We are only good at that because no one else plays it with much funding behind them.

We were good at swimming, tennis, union and a host of Olympic sports. We had semi decent boxers.
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We were good at Union when it wasn’t much of a world sport
 
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