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U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs
- molestrangler 9y agoGo and read "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O’Neil. This has an excellent chapter of the use of ATS software the majority of recruiters use these days. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicant_tracking_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applicant_tracking_system
- expertentipp 9y agoResume optimization to get the foot in the door, take home assignments, automatic platforms verifying programming skills, algorithm and data structure teasing. This is getting inpenetrable. I wonder how many of those smartasses inventing another question or an assignment would be able to get a job again.
- monksy 9y agoI would argue that the reliance on technology have made people worse off and enables them to do the worst/laziest behavior. The ATS are that bad because people spam their resume out. It's basically a spam filter. People skills matter. Most people don't want to do the work to get to know other people.
- dabockster 9y ago> automatic platforms verifying programming skills Somewhat related, I withdrew from an entry level physics course in college after only two weeks since the professor insisted on using an automated homework platform that cut your grade in half if you couldn't figure out the problem on the first try. This problem isn't exclusive to tech.
- qudat 9y agoIn my mind this is screaming for apprenticeship programs like in Germany.[1][2] Companies need a more streamlined process to get employers early in their career so employees have the necessary training and then get promoted within. All the while employees get paid to learn and work. This one-size-fits-all 4-year college track that every U.S. citizen is being pushed through is failing miserably. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-germany-is-so-much-better-at-training-its-workers/381550/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-ger... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany
- surfmike 9y agoEven for people who go to college, more work experience is a huge plus. Waterloo's coop system (4 months of school, 4 months of internship, repeated) provides a great mix of practical experience and academics. It would be great if all majors could have an experience like that.
- atom-morgan 9y agoIt was somewhat unbelievable how much my jobs working at Gamestop and Walmart helped in college when so many people around me had never worked a job in their life. Time to rethink minimum wage?
- vermontdevil 9y agoRochester Institute of Technology has a similar program - Co-op experience. All students are required to complete a specific # of semester work experience before obtaining a degree. I've heard often from employers that they love hiring RIT graduates because of this.
- ethmarch 9y agoI've heard great things about Waterloo's program. Just wanted to give a shout out to Northeastern for its coop system as well. I've learned tons of things on the job that I never would have come across in the classroom. Also, almost every student in every major participates in the program!
- stevenwoo 9y agoI graduated from college 30 years ago and every engineering major at every state university I ever heard of had a coop program.
- maxerickson 9y agoWaterloo places much more emphasis on it. The program is built around every student doing coops.
- fiblye 9y agoTo sum up the article, businesses are making ridiculous demands and expecting to pay prospective employees marginally above nothing. Aside from the people posting these job ads, nobody is really surprised.
- ComradeTaco 9y agoDon't forget the steady reduction of benefits in addition to a base pay. I've spent time at fortune 500 engineering firms where the annual deductible for health insurance was $8,000.
- lotsofpulp 9y agoThat's a good thing. Non-cash or non-equity remuneration needs to be separated from employers and employees. It will help employees not be beholden to the employer, help comparing different offers easier, and help smaller employers compete with larger employers by leveling the advantage larger employers have from huge HR departments.
- turk183 9y agoIf you're not in some high-level management role, expect to be shat upon.
- crispyambulance 9y agoJob postings are ridiculous, but one would think employers would gradually learn a lesson when not enough applicants come forward and relax puffed-up requirements. But if anything, job "requirements" in postings have been getting even more absurd and persnickety in the last 10 years or so. Are employers simply not adapting or is there something else more complex going on? I suspect the latter.
- kbart 9y agoDon't forget visas. Many of these puffed-up requirements are just to show regulators that company "can't find" a suitable candidate in a local market so they must bring somebody from abroad (usually that somebody is from 3rd world country who agrees on worse pay/conditions).
- revmoo 9y agoThis is just like the airline industry and it's "pilot shortage" (pay shortage).
- 5trokerac3 9y agoInsert comment about requiring 5 years of experience in a 3 year old language HR gating really is the worst thing going in American hiring practices today. "Do you have multiple years of experience with 99.9% of the skills listed as requirements, which only a handful of people in the country have? Yes, but I see that on our web form that you had to use to submit your resume you didn't check the box next to 'Degree in X', so you're automatically disqualified."
- jarsin 9y agoOr in the software world...I see you have essentially built my exact company before and have tons of experience, but what I really need to know before I hire you is...Can you show me how many queens you can put on a chess board in code!
- chrisbennet 9y agoH.R. Interviewer: "Now Mike, may I call you Mike? Pope Julius II is looking for someone to paint the ceiling of the new Sistine chapel. Frankly, I passed on you initially because you didn't have any ceiling painting experience but I've been told to talk to you anyway. To start, I'd like to ask you to take a test with some Egyptian art history questions..."
- dabockster 9y agoI've had a interview like this. It was for a web dev position at a local business, but the interviewer had used a copy/paste algorithms question from Leetcode that reeked of CTCI influence and "Google used it, so it must be good at filtering candidates".
- expertentipp 9y agoThere is flood of American outsourcing centers in post-Communist EU countries. Top salaries for software devs/eng, including seniors, are USD 40k gross annually. They can treat the employees in the worst "corporate America" ways - their offices, available hardware, policies, laughable benefits, annual leave, create a perfect package for miserable professional and private life.
- turk183 9y agoThomson Reuters did this using Belarus. Any systems in "maintenance mode" get sent to code monkeys in former Eastern Bloc nations. The quality is fair, but a lot better than what happened with India (sorry, India, I still love some of you guys, but the frustrations have left deep scars, too). It's not like American developers are faring much better in those items you listed--offices have become crap, hardware middling, policiies, Ha! Whatever they can geta away with, typically mental torture. Benefits and time off have been historically good but are dropping, pure misery, you betcha!
- expertentipp 9y agoWhat quality are you expecting?! The salaries aside, the policies (VPN only with permission, only Windows allowed, problems with remote working, getting paid to sit on chair 9-5, some weird virtual machine setups motivated by "security") are killing creativeness in the most talented people.
- pilsetnieks 9y agoThe complaints being so specific, it feels like you're having some discontent with your workplace and feeling that you're trapped there because "there's nothing better out there anyway." Well, don't despair, look around more, you might find that there are places you could actually like. In the conditions you described, it may be worth it to take a small pay cut to get away from a soulcrushing job that makes you question your existence. Money really isn't everything.
- 9y ago
- CoolGuySteve 9y ago"A players hire other As, B players hire Cs..." "The cost of a bad hire is higher than a false negative..." "... culture fit.." "We solve hard problems so we need the best.." It's pretty clear that hiring in technology is a cargo cult that mostly serves to waste time and haze newcomers. But I think the hiring ritual in general of 'post requirements -> get resumes -> interview' is ineffective bullshit. Each filter is progressively more error prone than the last and you mostly get noise out the other end.
- crispyambulance 9y ago> post requirements -> get resumes -> interview' is ineffective bullshit I agree, but that's not necessarily the way many (most?) jobs even get filled. There are other channels, professional networks and word-of-mouth, etc.
- dkhenry 9y agoThe tech sector is the worst at this. The skills we test for are the ones that can be figured out in about a month, and the ones we don't test for are the ones that need to be learned over a lifetime
- avoutthere 9y agoWell said. I've been telling people for years that tech sector interviews select for the wrong skill sets.
- pgwhalen 9y agoWhat skill sets should they select for?
- existencebox 9y agoHaving done a good handful of interviews, I tend to look for "generic problem solving" (not in the sense of trick questions, but in the sense of running through ambiguous engineering and mixed social/engineering scenarios to see how they'd move forward) communication skills (the ability to communicate the above effectively, talk about past work, problems, successes) and frankly track record. (this is obviously harder for new hires so you look for things like coursework, projects, even successes in other lines of work can demonstrate someone's professionalism and capability) You may note that these are all primarily "soft skills" and I would hope this is the takeaway from my ramble. My experience has been that it's often easier for a hire to pick up the technical rather than the nontechnical side of things. Depending on the level of the job, of course you have to filter for a certain level of competency as well, but I can usually get a good sense of that within the questions I ask above. When I get someone to really start talking about "what have I succeeded/failed at; why; what would I do different" I tend to find I can get a decent read on if they're bullshitting me or not.
- seanmcdirmid 9y agoAre you hiring programmers/developers or people like sys admins? It sounds like the latter, I can't imagine anyone hiring the former claiming dev skills are easy to pick up.
- jdhn 9y ago"They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay." In my opinion, this is the key paragraph in the article. I see this all the time when recruiters send me job postings, and they want someone with 5 years of experience for the salary of someone with 2 years of experience.
- csdreamer7 9y agoIndeed, I think something like it should have been the title.
- jdhn 9y agoI feel like that would've made the title too politicized, as it is it's quite neutral.
- kartickv 9y agoBut maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue. Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.
- notyourday 9y agoIf they need to fill this job and it is not worth the higher salary and it cannot be filled at this salary or lower then this job should not exist as a job: the owner of the company, the manager of the company, the HR person of the company can either do that job themselves or that job should be eliminated.
- dilemma 9y agoEmployers always struggle to to fill openings. It's the same thing as selling a product - you have to work on marketing, promotion, advertising. This says nothing about the state of the job market.
- notyourday 9y agoPay. More. Money. There, I solved it for every single one of the "struggling" employers. Money is a proxy for everything.
- tim333 9y agoThough with unemployment around 4.3% you may be paying up for mediocre employees you are then stuck with for a long time.
- notyourday 9y agoThat's simply pay inflation.
- UK-AL 9y agoWhich over a long term can attract more people to the field.
- notyourday 9y agoWhich in turn creates a supply pressure which allows companies to lower the pay.
- quantumhobbit 9y agoIf you want better than mediocre employees then guess what the solution is? More money! Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching.
- owebmaster 9y ago> Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching. Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some MORE MONEY!
- 9y ago
- chrisbennet 9y agoI love what Joel Spolski said about this "problem" in his article "Whaddaya Mean, You Can’t Find Programmers?" back in 2000. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-cant-find-programmers/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/06/15/whaddaya-mean-you-... "Now, let’s review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That’s a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It’s just a matter of both sides accepting the market price."
- dabockster 9y agoBut, when the price of other labor sources is cheaper (eg H1-B, interns, your nephew, etc), economics dictates that you should use those instead of the local population. The solution, imo, is to raise the price of the other sources somehow. That way, the local population is cheaper.
- chrisbennet 9y agoIf a company can find "other labor sources" then they really don't have a reason to say "we can't find labor". Employers are saying "there is a shortage of workers" when what they really mean is "the market price for workers is more than we want to pay" or "we don't want to share more of the profits with the employees (who actually make the product) then we used to". To "fix" this, they want some sort of special treatment that will decrease the cost of employees - like being allowed to employ more indentured servants (H1-B) at below market rate.
- stale2002 9y agoIf bread costs 100$ per loaf, and people are literally starving to death in the streets because they can't pay for food, is this just the "market clearing rate" for bread where supply is meeting demand, or is there a shortage of bread?
- altotrees 9y agoRecently had a recruiter call me, interview me over the phone once, in-person once, and via skype once. The job seemed to be a great fit, the pay was there, everything seemed to be lined up. The recruiter called me again to tell me that they were going to be taking the next steps with me very shortly. A week of silence goes by, then another. I email, inquiring about the position. "Oh, we gave that to someone we had been interviewing for months, but we'll keep you in mind for the future." Unprofessional disconnects and other encounters like this have taken place several times, in my experience. It turns out I knew the person who did get the job I was all but promised. After talking to them, the company had contacted them three days after its last interview with me, and the successful candidate had been asking for $10,000 dollars less and had less experience than myself. A month later, that candidate emailed me and told me they were let go for "being unable to meet the requirements of the position." Anecdotal experience like this really makes me skeptical when I hear employers bemoaning that they cannot find employees. Can they really not find employees or good talent, or do they just not want to pay the wages that people are asking for?
- aianus 9y agoIf OPEC embargoes the US, you would still be able to buy a gallon of gas for $10 or whatever but that doesn't mean there wouldn't be a shortage.
- jordache 9y agohow does that random candidate get a hold of you?
- jedmeyers 9y ago"It turns out I knew the person who did get the job"
- altotrees 9y agoThey were in my Linkedin network, and a college friend coincidentally. I simply pinged them and asked them a few questions about the new job and interview process. I disclosed that I had also interviewed for it. They were a bit leery of their own skill level upfront, so even they were surprised when it was offered. An interesting situation.
- quantumhobbit 9y agoI've recently started mentally comparing tech companies that complain about the "lack of talent" to SUV drivers who complain about the price of gas. There is so much low hanging fruit in terms of improving engineers productivity, but the companies refuse to even consider the possibility. If you offered private offices or remote work and the opportunity to use more productive tools, candidates would line up to apply. And would need fewer workers because they would get more work done.
- maxxxxx 9y agoMaybe they should allow people a little time to learn the exact skills needed? These days you need to have done already what you will be doing on the new job. No time for learning anything even if it would take only a few days or weeks to get up to speed. How are people actually learning new stuff? If Uber had looked for a CEO that way they would have rejected any candidate that hadn't run a fast growing ride sharing company with HR problems and an extremely high valuation and no clear path to profit. They would also complain about not being to find suitable candidates.
- HillaryBriss 9y ago> How are people actually learning new stuff? on their own time. companies want to avoid investment in people if possible. this is probably a false economy.
- crispyambulance 9y ago> How are people actually learning new stuff? You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission. This doesn't work for all skills, unfortunately, and some people have jobs where they are project-managed to a degree that every minute needs to be accounted for. But mostly, there's some slack to pick up new skills.
- maxxxxx 9y ago" You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission." That's what I generally do and I recommend doing it to others. But there are limits to the size of things to learn that way.
- dabockster 9y ago> You just do it. On the job. Without asking for permission. And hope your boss is forgiving.
- crispyambulance 9y agoPerhaps, but I have NEVER heard of somebody getting fired for "up-skilling" while still getting work done.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoI've been watching this tension grow for a while (otherwise qualified workers unwilling to work for the pay offered). I keep expecting the system to crack and boost pay, and then we'll see some more severe inflation in the US economy as a cycle of product costs go up rather than down. And yet it is stubbornly hanging in as employers try ever more intricate ways to avoid having that cost bump. It is very much a prisoner's dilemma sort of situation. If one company boosts their pay (and their product prices to cover that pay) then they lose market share. If both boost pay they both make a bit more money as their prices go up simultaneous (no change in market share). If neither boost pay they continue to operate at a restricted level which doesn't allow them to do additional development or increase sales.
- alain94040 9y agoThat dam has burst years ago. Facebook, then Google, significantly increased their pay to software engineers and it lifted all the salaries in the bay area. What's interesting is that this tide hasn't propagated very far outside California yet.
- jasonlotito 9y agoAre you sure? Google participated in an anti-poaching deal that would result in lower pay because of less competition. Even if they did increase pay, it could still be below what they would have paid if they had not had this policy in the first place. I'd need to see something that takes this into account before I believe it.
- stephenhuey 9y agoExactly. It began at least a dozen years ago and the case lasted a long time: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-six-high-tech-companies-stop-entering-anticompetitive-employee https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-s... http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/ Most likely the $5K payout per employee was 5-10 times lower than what was lost by all the employees collectively. Maybe that's not true and the tech giants wouldn't have hired as many people but I think all those companies collectively could've easily afforded an extra $5 billion over that timespan. Perhaps they would've innovated even more! I expect the effects of this to last a lot longer. Edit: I changed "nearly a dozen" to "at least a dozen"
- jasonlotito 9y agoYou can partly blame the tech elites like Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe for this. They were found to have a no poaching agreement [1]. This kept wages down, and because their wages were down, other companies benefited by not having to pay as much compared to them. They could remain competitive even with these companies. You cannot pay "competitive" salaries and "only hire the best." 1. http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/ http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/
- dreamcompiler 9y agoPart of this comes from executives being taught to think of employees as expenses rather than assets. "Less money to employees = more money to me." This attitude is part of a larger systemic problem: A great deal of American business is now more about gaming the system than about building products. Take the VC money, build nothing, and cash out. Sell customer data to ad networks and cash out. SEO the hell out of that thing and cash out. Cook the books and cash out. Sell bundles of subprime loans and cash out. Buy your competitor, harvest its assets, kill their product, and cash out. Pump and dump and disappear. "What, you still have seed corn? Eat that shit!" It's all just bullshit short-term arbitrage. It has nothing to do with adding value, which is what sustainable business is based on. It works well in an environment where such behavior is not punished, and where business executives are rewarded for "maximum profit in minimum time" and penalized for long-term thinking. It's certainly not sustainable, but alas, that's exactly where we are in the U.S.
- BoiledCabbage 9y agoAn underrated comment. It sounds harsh, but It's institutionalized get-rich-quick. A lot of it is the hyper-focus on efficiency. Which gets interpreted as efficiency of time, which turns to "get money back out as quickly as possible". And as people look for faster and faster ways to get money out at some point the only route/scheme that can keep up is "create an illusion of value and sell that." And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.
- RealityNow 9y agoThe reality is that you need your job more than your employer needs you. We're all replaceable, and this is further exacerbated by technology and outsourcing. Hiring in the tech industry where senior engineers have to go through multiple rounds of answering data structures & algorithm riddles is probably the epitome of this absurdity. As long as this is the case, employers are always going to demand the moon, only hire the "best", and offer as little money as possible. If employers really needed you, they wouldn't be holding out for the diamond in the rough willing to work for peanuts. It boggles my mind that we as a society still cling on to this notion that everybody must rent themselves out to somebody else to survive. Wage slavery should not be the backbone of our economy. Something like a basic income would go a long way towards evening the playing field, so that desperate workers can walk away from this nonsense.
- dogruck 9y agoThis article has little relevance to the kinda professionals on HN. They're talking about relatively low paying labor. I think the problem boils down to vanity. Companies want to post glamorous jobs, and figure they'll hire if the glass slipper fits. Conversely, job seekers aren't too hungry.
- robodale 9y ago...for the price they are willing to pay.
- newforice 9y agoA better title would be, U.S. Employers are cheap and if they don't cut it out; unions might be on the rise in America.
- habosa 9y agoThere are a lot of comments in this thread about how recruiters are bad at their jobs, they want X years of experience in framework Y and they want to pay for X/2 years of experience. What can we really expect from recruiters though? They get paid a fraction of the salary of the jobs they are recruiting for, and they're asked to evaluate someone's potential competency in a field that's complex and rapidly changing. So of course they pick proxy metrics. They just ask "do you have 10 years of C++ experience" because it would be impossible for them to, say, read your GIthub code and see that you're really good at C++ even without the years of experience. The only way you're going to have a good experience with a recruiter for a technical position is if the recruiter has the technical aptitude to make judgement calls on your qualification. So maybe we need to pay recruiters more and then convince people with software engineering degrees to become recruiters? Of course the companies would have to be willing to invest in their recruiters, and they won't do that.
- throwaway-sorry 9y agoMost of the commentary here is focused on the high end, but there's a bigger problem on the low end of the labor market. Our government plows tons of money into job services, training add, and other programs at the state/local level. There are some really successful agencies, but there is a hell of a lot of waste where the system just helps enough to "check the box" that you're trying to find work and eligible for unemployment. A huge part of the problem is that the workers don't trust the system. And why would they, when massive data breaches happen due to poor handling of data. See http://www.securityweek.com/joblink-breach-affects-job-seekers-10-states http://www.securityweek.com/joblink-breach-affects-job-seeke... Unfortunately, this problem is only going to get worse as more data is accumulated by state agencies unqualified to watch over it. I firmly believe that if we reformed the data systems and the programs relying on them at the state level we could make a lot of progress on the lower end of the labor market to get people re-engaged, more productive, and start growing skills. As those people increase skills and responsibilities shift to them, the people who are freed up will be able to become more productive and move up-market as well. Which sounds like a pipe dream - but what person in IT hasn't been tied up with "junior work" they would be happy to unload if there was anybody to do it? And once that task finally goes away, you go on to do better things.
- Animats 9y agoAt the low end, few people will move to take a $8-$17/hr job. Moving costs are too high, and selling a house in a declining small town doesn't provide enough cash to buy a house in a town with jobs. This is why there are so many people stuck in small towns with no jobs. Moving to a place where there's one big employer, the case in too many small towns, is signing up for indentured servitude. You can't quit without moving. Employers like that situation - it's called having a a "compliant workforce". It's common in the southern US. From the employer perspective, hiring for low-end jobs means first filtering out the druggies, the crooks, and the crazies. Druggies alone are about 20% of applicants. The U.S. Army says that only about 25% of young men meet Army recruiting standards today. The Army won't take fat people, druggies, crooks, or anyone requiring frequent medical care, and they require a high school diploma. It's scary that only 25% pass that basic screen.
- pasbesoin 9y agoEmployers are unwilling to invest in employees. Then they wonder why the (good) employees they do have don't stick around. U.S. labor market: Everyone running around, looking for "something for nothing." We had a couple decades of outsourcing and off-shoring, coming from this perspective (and law and regulation effectively neutered on its behalf). Let's hope the MBA's and short-term-focused executives find out just how fungible they are. (A suit is, after all, just a suit.)
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- B4CKlash 9y agoThis is largely a problem of "informational asymmetrics between agents," as Nassim Taleb would describe it. Or Gharrar as describe in Sharia law. "It is an extremely sophisticated term in decision theory that does not exist in English; it means both uncertainty and deception –my personal take is that it means something beyond informational asymmetry between agents. It means inequality of uncertainty. Simply, as the aim is for both parties in a transaction to have the same uncertainty facing random outcomes, an asymmetry becomes equivalent to theft." The employer sees the entire talent pool and can therefore leverage this informational advantage to drive prices (wages) down. http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/equality.pdf http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/equality.pdf
- partycoder 9y agoIf this happens is not due to lack of candidates bur rather because of extraneous and extravagant expectations.
- kartickv 9y agoIt's possible for there to be a shortage of people AND millions of unemployed people if they're unskilled. That's certainly the case in India, where the majority of "software engineers" can't tell me the maximum value an 8-bit integer can have, or claim that an object's instance variables can continue to exist after the object gets deallocated. One clown even wrote an if statement with two else clauses, the second one "just in case the first doesn't execute". http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/engineering-employment-problems/1/713827.html http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/engineering-emp...