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>These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the

by RickS 9y ago

>These beliefs are no longer plausible. In fact, they’ve become ridiculous, because there’s not enough work to go around, and what there is of it won’t pay the bills I've turned down like 40 candidates lately for a job that pays at least 80k. It's hard as hell to find someone who is both knowledgeable and personable. The word "shortage" pops up often in these types of conversations, but the word I'd prefer is "mismatch". Me and the people I know are hiring aggressively, all the time, for people who know about engineering, product design, data analysis, etc. There are lots of jobs. Most of the people you walk past on the street just don't know how to do them. > unless of course you’ve landed a job as a drug dealer or a Wall Street banker, becoming a gangster either way. I think this kind of thing is defeatist and intellectually dishonest. In a roundabout way, it says "I have trouble finding work, and I'm a good person, so all the people with work must be bad people" We've gotta stop otherizing successful IC-type employees and start training people to switch into those fields late stage (the current tech talent pool is overwhelmingly people who started early and stayed on board) The article goes on to talk about things unrelated to this comment, but it really started off on the wrong foot, IMO, by needlessly polarizing a complex situation and dismissing the abundant existence of genuinely good, chronically underfilled positions. edit: the article also bases some numbers on "official unemployment". I'm not an expert on this topic but I've heard that number to be somewhat deceiving, in part because it fails to count 1) people who have some work (like a few shifts at a retail store) but would like to be employed more of the time and 2) people who have given up actively searching for work. edit 2: > profits are pointless except as a way of announcing to your stockholders (and hostile takeover specialists) that your company is a going concern, a thriving business. You don’t need profits to ‘reinvest’, to finance the expansion of your company’s workforce or output, as the recent history of Apple and most other corporations has amply demonstrated. whoa. can't just... brush past that one. That paragraph is not followed up on robustly. I'm interested in entertaining the thought, but you can't just drop that pill and expect me to swallow it.

manicdee 9y ago
Highly skilled technical employees cost time and money to build/train. People who don't train for highly skilled jobs typically do not have the money or the support infrastructure required for that training. This gets compounded when a low skilled worker finds themselves between jobs: they now have the same constraints but also need to find money quickly to service debt such as rent or home loan. When you describe as "mismatch" what is a bona fide shortage, you are completely ignoring the structure of society which leads to this problem: education is a profit industry, at cost to the student. Industry has few apprenticeships or cadet ships available. Industry doesn't want to train the good people ("matches") to become skilled the way industry wants. Once the inividual has been trained, industry will trip over themselves to hire or poach them. So industry doesn't want to pay for training even though they can afford it, the individual can't afford training even though they want it. If only there was a way to provide training for highly skilled roles in such a way that all industry pays for the training and the individual only shoulders the time costs.
- pasquinelli 9y ago
  I agree with you but at the same time, if there was a bona fide shortage of labor then wouldn't industry be training people?
  - Terr_ 9y ago
    > then wouldn't industry be training people? Ideally, but there's also a sort of prisoner's-dilemma [0] going on, where if company A trains well and company B doesn't but puts the budget into wages, people will train at A and then leave for B higher pay. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
    - pasquinelli 9y ago
      If there's actually a labor shortage, B will starve for want of labor. Labor isn't just a cost, it's an investment, and the kind of loyalty you'd get by training someone without a lot of prospects in a high demand field for free shouldn't be ignored.
      - Terr_ 9y ago
        > If there's actually a labor shortage, B will starve for want of labor. B is able to offer higher salaries. Yes, employee loyalty is a thing, but it's also hard to justify to MBA-types and is softer when the employees are in demand.
  - Glyptodon 9y ago
    Maybe they don't believe there's enough demand and/or economic growth to justify the investment considering its risks and expenses? If given a choice between paying for 6 months of training, or 6 months of waiting for the perfect candidate, waiting is much cheaper. In fact, the longer training takes and the more valuable the trainee at the end (the more demand for the trainee from competitors, essentially), I would guess the less likely businesses are to want to foot the bill. Likewise, training means you have to pay/contract so as to insure that there's not a high risk of a trainee being sniped. On the demand/economic growth angle, witness all the large corporations hoarding record amounts of cash. It seems like many businesses recognize that disposable income is fairly well soaked - I think a general perception is that there's not enough disposable income to risk much investment in new products/industries unless they somehow clearly cannibalize from an existing market segment or specifically target upper incomes (and it takes a lot for something targeting upper incomes to be viable enough to not be boutique). Anyway, this is mostly speculation on my part.
tibbetts 9y ago
Why don't you pay more than 80k then and get someone to leave their other job? Employers responding to a skills shortage by complaining rather than raising wages is one major cause of the market failure.
pmorici 9y ago
80k is not a lot of money if you are talking about any of the major metro areas in the US. In fact is it definitely entry level as far as engineering salaries go. if you are in SF or NY it's laughably low. You haven't said the exact details of the job you are advertising but you probably aren't paying enough that is why you are getting bad candidates.
- paulddraper 9y ago
  Median household income in the US is $52k. In San Fran, $78k.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Sure, but the op isn't trying to hire a janitor. He is looking for someone with technical experience and social acumen. Those people aren't available for median salaries.
    - throwaway31234 9y ago
      Median != janitor
- exclusiv 9y ago
  In SF and NYC that 80k is laughably low because it's expensive to live but also because companies there are abusing young engineers and getting 60+ hrs per week in many cases. I have a senior engineer I pay 130k for 40 hours of work. He tries to bring me salaries of some of his friends that get paid more and I ask him how many hours do they do? 130k@40 hrs is 162k@50 hrs if you value your time. I always negotiate based on desired work load. Tech jobs should really be more clear about hourly expectations for the given salary.
  - pmorici 9y ago
    Hey if that argument works for you more power to you. I'm not talking about jobs with inflated work hour expectations though. You just happen to have lucked out and found an engineer who both has the skills you want and hasn't figured out the salary game yet. I'm guessing you would react differently if they brought you an actual offer from another company instead of anecdotes about what their friends make.
maehwasu 9y ago
This ignores the fact that the shortage exists for reasons beyond training. IQ/specific aptitude is incredibly important in tech. Being nice to everyone and pretending that aptitude doesn't matter is a recipe for disaster, and makes it harder to think hard about real solutions. I'm not fully on board with UBI, but I think it's a step in a better direction than dumping resources into "training."
coldtea 9y ago
>The word "shortage" pops up often in these types of conversations, but the word I'd prefer is "mismatch". Me and the people I know are hiring aggressively, all the time, for people who know about engineering, product design, data analysis, etc. There are lots of jobs. Most of the people you walk past on the street just don't know how to do them. Even if they knew they'd still be a shortage, because while you might have this kind of high-end jobs, the people on the street are much more than what's needed for those open positions.

by RickS 9y ago

manicdee 9y ago

Highly skilled technical employees cost time and money to build/train. People who don't train for highly skilled jobs typically do not have the money or the support infrastructure required for that training. This gets compounded when a low skilled worker finds themselves between jobs: they now have the same constraints but also need to find money quickly to service debt such as rent or home loan. When you describe as "mismatch" what is a bona fide shortage, you are completely ignoring the structure of society which leads to this problem: education is a profit industry, at cost to the student. Industry has few apprenticeships or cadet ships available. Industry doesn't want to train the good people ("matches") to become skilled the way industry wants. Once the inividual has been trained, industry will trip over themselves to hire or poach them. So industry doesn't want to pay for training even though they can afford it, the individual can't afford training even though they want it. If only there was a way to provide training for highly skilled roles in such a way that all industry pays for the training and the individual only shoulders the time costs.

pasquinelli 9y ago
I agree with you but at the same time, if there was a bona fide shortage of labor then wouldn't industry be training people?
- Terr_ 9y ago
  > then wouldn't industry be training people? Ideally, but there's also a sort of prisoner's-dilemma [0] going on, where if company A trains well and company B doesn't but puts the budget into wages, people will train at A and then leave for B higher pay. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma
  - pasquinelli 9y ago
    If there's actually a labor shortage, B will starve for want of labor. Labor isn't just a cost, it's an investment, and the kind of loyalty you'd get by training someone without a lot of prospects in a high demand field for free shouldn't be ignored.
    - Terr_ 9y ago
      > If there's actually a labor shortage, B will starve for want of labor. B is able to offer higher salaries. Yes, employee loyalty is a thing, but it's also hard to justify to MBA-types and is softer when the employees are in demand.
- Glyptodon 9y ago
  Maybe they don't believe there's enough demand and/or economic growth to justify the investment considering its risks and expenses? If given a choice between paying for 6 months of training, or 6 months of waiting for the perfect candidate, waiting is much cheaper. In fact, the longer training takes and the more valuable the trainee at the end (the more demand for the trainee from competitors, essentially), I would guess the less likely businesses are to want to foot the bill. Likewise, training means you have to pay/contract so as to insure that there's not a high risk of a trainee being sniped. On the demand/economic growth angle, witness all the large corporations hoarding record amounts of cash. It seems like many businesses recognize that disposable income is fairly well soaked - I think a general perception is that there's not enough disposable income to risk much investment in new products/industries unless they somehow clearly cannibalize from an existing market segment or specifically target upper incomes (and it takes a lot for something targeting upper incomes to be viable enough to not be boutique). Anyway, this is mostly speculation on my part.

tibbetts 9y ago

Why don't you pay more than 80k then and get someone to leave their other job? Employers responding to a skills shortage by complaining rather than raising wages is one major cause of the market failure.

pmorici 9y ago

80k is not a lot of money if you are talking about any of the major metro areas in the US. In fact is it definitely entry level as far as engineering salaries go. if you are in SF or NY it's laughably low. You haven't said the exact details of the job you are advertising but you probably aren't paying enough that is why you are getting bad candidates.

paulddraper 9y ago
Median household income in the US is $52k. In San Fran, $78k.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Sure, but the op isn't trying to hire a janitor. He is looking for someone with technical experience and social acumen. Those people aren't available for median salaries.
  - throwaway31234 9y ago
    Median != janitor
exclusiv 9y ago
In SF and NYC that 80k is laughably low because it's expensive to live but also because companies there are abusing young engineers and getting 60+ hrs per week in many cases. I have a senior engineer I pay 130k for 40 hours of work. He tries to bring me salaries of some of his friends that get paid more and I ask him how many hours do they do? 130k@40 hrs is 162k@50 hrs if you value your time. I always negotiate based on desired work load. Tech jobs should really be more clear about hourly expectations for the given salary.
- pmorici 9y ago
  Hey if that argument works for you more power to you. I'm not talking about jobs with inflated work hour expectations though. You just happen to have lucked out and found an engineer who both has the skills you want and hasn't figured out the salary game yet. I'm guessing you would react differently if they brought you an actual offer from another company instead of anecdotes about what their friends make.

maehwasu 9y ago

This ignores the fact that the shortage exists for reasons beyond training. IQ/specific aptitude is incredibly important in tech. Being nice to everyone and pretending that aptitude doesn't matter is a recipe for disaster, and makes it harder to think hard about real solutions. I'm not fully on board with UBI, but I think it's a step in a better direction than dumping resources into "training."

coldtea 9y ago

>The word "shortage" pops up often in these types of conversations, but the word I'd prefer is "mismatch". Me and the people I know are hiring aggressively, all the time, for people who know about engineering, product design, data analysis, etc. There are lots of jobs. Most of the people you walk past on the street just don't know how to do them. Even if they knew they'd still be a shortage, because while you might have this kind of high-end jobs, the people on the street are much more than what's needed for those open positions.