The State of Play in Contracting/Expertise

[Hoisted from the comments in a Naked Capitalism article discussing the incompetence of professional managers of the current COVID pandemic.]

from Arcady Bogdanov:

It is not just the [Professional Management Class] PMC. Although I must admit to being a member of the PMC, I am stunned at the lack of curiosity and lack of desire to learn ANYTHING that permeates this society. I’ve sort of fallen into a project management role, not due to my education, but due to my family history, which is steeped in the construction trades and management going back well over a century. I oversee projects and manage contractors for a government agency, and I have made a few observations that absolutely stun me, every time I think about them:

People treat those of us with specialized technical knowledge as people that practice something akin to black magic. I routinely try to educate those around me in basic engineering and planning principles, and they either express deer in the headlights fear, or they only pay enough attention in order to pick up a few words or phrases to become better frauds. In either case, there is zero desire to learn.

I cover a good chunk of a mid Atlantic state, and work on projects that range from $20k to about $2 million, I know a lot of contractors. Not one of them is under the age of 40. There are extremely few young people on their crews- 25 years ago, such crews were dominated by people in their 20s.

I do not know a single owner/operator excavator under the age of 45- literally just ONE in his 40s-the rest are all over 50. Of course with the price of equipment nowadays, the barrier to entry is very high, but most of the excavators I know began purchasing equipment in their late 20s, or early 30s.

Explaining practical limitations, how long things take to build, how weather affects schedules, why it costs more to build during certain seasons, why some things are impractical, why some changes are not possible at the last minute or once a project is underway is an exercise in patience, and I have found that the more highly a person is (formally) educated, the more difficult this is.

Basically, the investment in time and effort to actually learn or understand something is seen as an inconvenience. People assume there will always be someone that will be able to take care of technical issues, but the big problem with that assumption, is that technically oriented people are an aging and endangered species. Learning such thing is disincentivized through cost and/or negative social attitudes. We have become a society of bullshit artists.

I make one more observation. I grew up and live in northern Appalachia. People here cannot afford to hire specialists to do things for them (by specialists, I mean tradespeople mainly, but there is also a long tradition of things like medical self-treatment also) I recently turned 50, and I recall that both my parents’ and grandparents’ generation did things for themselves out of necessity. This also exists among my generation and the generation following me, but there is one general key difference- basic competency. 

The older generations, when they did something, made a good go at doing a proper job. Things looked professional or very near professional. My peers and those younger- well it often looks like a child performed whatever the job happened to be. No attention to detail, thought to longevity, effects on surroundings, and worst of all, no pride- and we are not talking about wage work. I’m talking about people’s own homes and property. To be clear, I’m not blaming these people or their generations, but something happened. It is very distressing to witness, and worse, it is terrible knowing that this collapse appears to have begun with my own generation/cohort. I wish I knew how to reverse this, but I am at a loss. I work very hard to motivate my family to learn and maintain skills, and I worry about what will happen to them when I am gone- sincerely hope they stick with it. There is a joy in all craftsmanship that I hope they come to appreciate as I have.

[Meanwhile, I've been hiring contractors for home renovation/maintenance tasks. With two exceptions, both over the age of 40, they are refugees from Ukraine, Syria, Mexico, etc.]