6 ms·

The minimum wage makes it difficult to hire unskilled workers. If it didn't exist, there would be a lot less unemployment for young people just starting out.

_delirium 16y ago
Is that true? My understanding is that classical economic theory predicts this, but empirical evidence has been very mixed.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
lsc 16y ago
Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people who work part time, but would like full time work. the idea being if one guy with one of those parking lot cleaning trucks can clean my parking lot in an hour and it takes, say 10 man hours to clean my parking lot with brooms, if the guy with the truck costs $50/hr to clean my parking lot and a guy with a broom costs $10/hr, it's cheaper for me to hire the guy with the truck. If I can get guys with brooms to work at $4/hr, suddenly it makes sense for me to hire 10 guys with brooms (assuming I need it done in an hour, and the work scales that way) rather than one guy with a truck. On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour. I mean, even my company. right now, most of the provisioning is done by hand... this is because I'm able to obtain fairly cheap (well, quite a bit over minimum wage, but still, cheap by the standard of such things) SysAdmins who /can/ provision people by hand. If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins, and my current mostly-manual situation would be untenable. Granted, either way, automation is a high priority, but with current market conditions, 'just do it by hand' is an option, and that simply wouldn't be the case if the job market was in better shape.
- jrockway 16y ago
  If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins. Wow, now I know why it takes a week for my machines to be rebooted.
  - lsc 16y ago
    pretty much. How come you couldn't reboot it yourself? Also note, we're pretty liberal with refunds if you decide we aren't good enough.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Because where I work, rebooting machines is the Domain Of The Sysadmins. And there's no refund policy :)
      - lsc 16y ago
        ah. I thought you were a customer complaining about my bad customer service. We have a ongoing problem of dropping tickets on the floor that we're working on. Part of my problem is that /within my financial constraints/ I will choose someone who is skilled who is not particularly customer focused over someone who is unskilled but customer focused. the other part of the problem is that until recently, I haven't really been 'backstopping' the customer support queue. The problem is getting better, I think, as I have been putting more effort into it, but it's not solved yet. Of course, unless something breaks on my end (or, more often, the customer loses his auth. key) my customers can reboot their own server, no matter how badly the mess it up. For my system to scale, this is absolutely essential. Tell your SysAdmins to setup powerman. it's a wonderful tool that lets you control access to different brands of remote rebooters in a very sane way. They could easily set it up so devs can reboot, say, dev, test, and staging but not prod. I think a /whole lot/ of this current 'cloud' craze is just an overreaction to the bureaucratic problems with internal IT departments... like SysAdmins not providing timely support /and/ not allowing access/tools so that devs can do it themselves.

_delirium 16y ago

Is that true? My understanding is that classical economic theory predicts this, but empirical evidence has been very mixed.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

lsc 16y ago

Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people who work part time, but would like full time work. the idea being if one guy with one of those parking lot cleaning trucks can clean my parking lot in an hour and it takes, say 10 man hours to clean my parking lot with brooms, if the guy with the truck costs $50/hr to clean my parking lot and a guy with a broom costs $10/hr, it's cheaper for me to hire the guy with the truck. If I can get guys with brooms to work at $4/hr, suddenly it makes sense for me to hire 10 guys with brooms (assuming I need it done in an hour, and the work scales that way) rather than one guy with a truck. On the other hand, if you hire 10 guys with brooms, you just eliminated a higher paying job in favor of 10 low paying jobs. this will tend to increase the number of people taking work that is beneath their skill level. so one could say that a high minimum wage is a subsidy on skilled labour. I mean, even my company. right now, most of the provisioning is done by hand... this is because I'm able to obtain fairly cheap (well, quite a bit over minimum wage, but still, cheap by the standard of such things) SysAdmins who /can/ provision people by hand. If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins, and my current mostly-manual situation would be untenable. Granted, either way, automation is a high priority, but with current market conditions, 'just do it by hand' is an option, and that simply wouldn't be the case if the job market was in better shape.

jrockway 16y ago
If the job market was better, I'd be forced to pay much higher rates for my sysadmins. Wow, now I know why it takes a week for my machines to be rebooted.
- lsc 16y ago
  pretty much. How come you couldn't reboot it yourself? Also note, we're pretty liberal with refunds if you decide we aren't good enough.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Because where I work, rebooting machines is the Domain Of The Sysadmins. And there's no refund policy :)
    - lsc 16y ago
      ah. I thought you were a customer complaining about my bad customer service. We have a ongoing problem of dropping tickets on the floor that we're working on. Part of my problem is that /within my financial constraints/ I will choose someone who is skilled who is not particularly customer focused over someone who is unskilled but customer focused. the other part of the problem is that until recently, I haven't really been 'backstopping' the customer support queue. The problem is getting better, I think, as I have been putting more effort into it, but it's not solved yet. Of course, unless something breaks on my end (or, more often, the customer loses his auth. key) my customers can reboot their own server, no matter how badly the mess it up. For my system to scale, this is absolutely essential. Tell your SysAdmins to setup powerman. it's a wonderful tool that lets you control access to different brands of remote rebooters in a very sane way. They could easily set it up so devs can reboot, say, dev, test, and staging but not prod. I think a /whole lot/ of this current 'cloud' craze is just an overreaction to the bureaucratic problems with internal IT departments... like SysAdmins not providing timely support /and/ not allowing access/tools so that devs can do it themselves.