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I worked with small / medium manufacturers in the prosperous part of the Southeast. Hiring is brutal currently. Last week one company setup interviews with 20

• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• QAPereo 9y ago
  This is what over 40 years of gutting education and social safety nets bought us. Idiocracy is coming!
  • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    No, this is what happens when employers show their workers absolutely no loyalty over decades. If people have no reason to care about their job, they won't care about it. The labor market is tight enough so that they can't just fire everyone who behaves like that, otherwise everyone would quit.
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      That’s a factor, but the collective dumbing down is as well. We now have a nearly feral workforce and body politic, because contrary to expectations, they’re unpredictable and hard to control.
      • TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
        > the collective dumbing down is as well Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Over 30% of people have Bachelors degrees or higher. Literacy rates are higher than they ever have been. Our people aren't dumber, they just realize that when the business managers and owners are making millions while they don't get wage increases above inflation, they have no incentive to care.
        • QAPereo 9y ago
          Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Producing it seems, graduates unfit for basic employment according to previous posters. Quantity is clearly not quality.
  • dang 9y ago
    Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, especially on divisive topics? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly and we've had to ask you before.
    • QAPereo 9y ago
      Bans on this site? Full of people who roll their own VPNs and so on? I’m sure that’s highly productive.
• Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
  Pretty sure half of my office at my white collar job wouldn't show up if they started drug testing. But I imagine if we interviewed 20 people for a position, we would most certainly not have 18 no-shows.
  • ransom1538 9y ago
    Yes. However, you don't worth with concrete cutters or 1k volt lines.
    • monocasa 9y ago
      Someone who smoked a joint a couple days ago can absolutely work with concrete cutters or 1k volt lines.
      • enraged_camel 9y ago
        It's not about whether they can or can't. It's about the massive liability for the company if they fuck up on the job and cause property damage or bodily injury.
        • Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
          Yeah, but a non-pot smoking worker (vs the pot smoker), both sober while on the job, are equally as likely to make a mistake.
          • opportune 9y ago
            That could be true in a causative sense, but not a correlative* one. Not that it's ethical to do so, but by testing for marijuana smokers, businesses/insurance companies may by proxy be testing for other traits likely to cause accidents
        • mgbmtl 9y ago
          Are the same standards applied for alcohol?
• throwawayjava 9y ago
  > Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows. I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary. > Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test. So don't give drug tests? > Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation. Try paying more?
  • toomuchtodo 9y ago
    > So don't give drug tests? While I agree that drug tests are a scam as a white collar worker, I do think they're necessary from a liability perspective if you're in construction, manufacturing, or driving a company vehicle. I fully support the use of recreational drugs on someone's own time, but you have to weed out (forgive the pun) those who are under the influence when loss of life or limb is a risk.
    • throwawayjava 9y ago
      So give sobriety tests, not drug tests.
    • sillysaurus3 9y ago
      We don't give breath tests, but people rarely show up drunk. Yet the same arguments apply. Doesn't that say something about the effectiveness of testing?
    • Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
      I imagine that there is probably an issue with these workers making half of what software engineers make, but with higher expectation of no drug use. I'd imagine recreational drug use is even greater in lower-waged workers. Culturally, recreational drug use isn't that big of a deal, at least to millennials. You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
      • 9y ago
• rainbowmverse 9y ago
  It's almost as if extended poverty has ruined people's ability to function in a job market that wasn't there for them sooner. Poverty is called a trap for a reason. It's a self-reinforcing cycle as much as it's an income bracket.
  • ryanmarsh 9y ago
    My father used to say, "doing nothing is a poison". I think he might be right.
  • moduspol 9y ago
    Is there a case at all to be made for personal responsibility when such a large percentage don't even bother to show up? How can one possibly ever get out of poverty if s/he can't even make it to an interview?
    • rainbowmverse 9y ago
      This is what's known as a collective action problem. I don't have the answers, and the few people who've actually tried solving it haven't had much luck.
    • noobhacker 9y ago
      You are right that this is a problem with personal responsibility. Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics. IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.
      • prawn 9y ago
        Wouldn't surprise me if this was achieved through apps as much as anything else in the future. Imagine an Uber-style app for odd jobs (lawns, etc) that focused on teen/young workers. The app could have gamification or reminders that if you commit to a job, you go hard and complete it well. If you don't have the energy or ability to keep performing jobs to that level, then take on fewer jobs or use a different app.
• throwawaytime 9y ago
  I see a lot of latent anger in this thread against lazy software programmers who don't show up on time. In case it's helpful, here's my story from two years ago about living with undiagnosed narcolepsy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478 One of my memories of that job was sleeping fully-dressed for work, then leaping out of bed when my alarm goes off. I'd carefully balance on my feet and wait for the tiredness to pass. That's not sustainable. I can't do that more than a week at a time. So there's all this anger focused toward people who are genuinely lazy, and it's impossible to separate it from people who have a genuine medical condition. What's the solution? One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. Recruitment in software has heated up to the point where any small flag against the candidate is enough to pass. No one would voluntarily jump in with someone whose attitude is "Well, I couldn't sleep until 3am because of being wide awake since 10pm, so I'm gonna show up around noon if that's ok." It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups? I still two years later have no idea what to do about this. I'm working remotely part-time, putting in full-time hours, just because I feel lucky to have any sort of job. The point is, the next time someone posts in a company-wide Slack channel that they're feeling sleepy and will be in later, consider there might be more going on than meets the eye. Relationship problems and medical conditions both need to be concealed, and it takes a toll. The thing is, it's not up to you to care. We have to deal with it or we're cut. And that's fine. But maybe some context will help, somehow.
  • Y7ZCQtNo39 9y ago
    > One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. It's a medical condition. Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. Are you able to do the job on a slightly shifted schedule? Chances are it's the case. > It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups? Could do afternoon standups. Problem solved.
    • humanrebar 9y ago
      > Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. How does an individual make sure that rule is enforced?
• technofire 9y ago
  > the prosperous part of the Southeast For those of us who are unfamiliar or ignorant about this, which parts of the Southeast are most prosperous?
  • Ascetik 9y ago
    Atlanta, Nashville TN, Huntsville AL, Charlotte NC
  • niftich 9y ago
    Let's define Southeast as below the 36°30' and east of the Mississippi (i.e. we're definitely excluding VA, DC, WV, KY, and anything west of the Mississippi including Louisiana). Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well. Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast. [1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/metro-monitor-2017/ https://www.brookings.edu/research/metro-monitor-2017/
    • danielvf 9y ago
      You got it. The companies I was talking about are covered in the cities you listed.
• lostlogin 9y ago
  I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time? The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast. And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why? It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
  • billmalarky 9y ago
    It is BS, but I was under the impression it's more a CYA strategy for liability if a worker has an accident that puts the company at risk. IE imagine a roofer drops a shingle on someone's head, accidents happen and the roofer was sober but if they can't pass a drug test the company could be in serious hot water in a negligence lawsuit. BS runs downhill, so to speak.
    • warcher 9y ago
      You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.
  • Ascetik 9y ago
    Because they are a liability if they come to work high, or they have illegal drugs on them at work.
    • lostlogin 9y ago
      Being mildly hung over is ok, but having had a joint just under 2 weeks ago isn’t? Who does that policy serve? It’s stupid.
  • solatic 9y ago
    > How is that relevant? You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not. Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate? We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.
• ErikAugust 9y ago
  I have a friend who is a general manager that deals in part-time, odd hour unskilled labor who spoke of a similar story. What do you think, time to build and monetize a solution to solve this problem? I think I have some ideas to help with this type of worker onboarding and retention, personally.
  • prawn 9y ago
    At the very least, it'd be worth contacting the noshows and finding out the reasons, encouraging them to be honest. Work out what it might be - - got another job but forgot to tell you - changed my mind - just too tired or busy - didn't think I had a real chance, so I didn't bother - too nervous about the interview
    • ErikAugust 9y ago
      Good call.
• ethagknight 9y ago
  As others have pointed out, wages for these job openings that cannot get people to show up are frequently so low that its not worth showing up for them in the first place. Many of these No-Shows have to prove that they are "actively seeking a job" to continue getting whatever benefit they currently receive. And these people are doing the (short term) math, the wages from the job + a full work week < money they get for free from the government. Brutal problem, but paying wages that are market for the kind of employee you want _should_ change that