5 ms·

Lowering the minimum wage, the theory states, will open up more unskilled job hours, and thus decrease underemployment, if you define underemployment as people

by 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
        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. That's definitely one of my reasons for going that direction. As a soon-to-be-an-academic grad student, it's nice to have my own thing I can take place-to-place anyway, but due to inertia, it being free, and essentially infinite bandwidth, I'd probably be using university IT stuff if they would let me do anything on it. But, the fact that I have to round-trip through a person to get anything installed, and also have a big hassle of explaining why I need it and hoops to jump with their security policy, just makes it easier to buy a server somewhere not on the university network where I have root.
dantheman 16y ago
That is only looking at one side of the minimum wage coin. There are also a lot of people who may only contribute 4$ of value per hour (inexperienced, etc) who would like to work at that wage but won't get hired due to their lack of value. But if they could get a job, they would gain experience and eventually start contributing more value and thus be able to justify a higher wage. Minimum wage hurts those who it is trying protect -- in fact when I worked menial "minimum wage " jobs, I was always actually paid more than minimum wage.
- lsc 16y ago
  did you read what I wrote? specifically: "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." So yeah, a higher minimum wage does favor more expensive people who can be more productive over less expensive people who are less productive. My first job didn't pay minimum wage, and I know that some 15 year old fixing computers is rather different than an adult labourer trying to feed a family, but I feel that I benefited from having the job; It got me my next job (which was minimum wage) which started me down the path, a few years later, to a 'real job' with real pay.
  - codexon 16y ago
    It got me my next job (which was minimum wage) which started me down the path, a few years later, to a 'real job' with real pay. It's all relative. When everyone starts having 2 unpaid internships or related work as a kid paid under the table, businesses start to expect this level of experience before hiring someone for a "real" job.
    - lsc 16y ago
      start to, nothing. most businesses expect you to have experience now, and, uh, you need to get that experience somehow. for me, it was a bigger problem than for most people. I didn't have a degree. It's hard to get a real job with a degree and no experience. getting a 'real job' with no degree and no experience is pretty much impossible. My brother, on the other hand, has been making $20+ an hour at his internships; a line I didn't cross until I made programmer. To be fair, he's the age I was when I got a 'programmer' title, and his responsibilities and accomplishments are similar to mine at his age; the only real difference is that when school starts, he heads back to school, while I kept working.

by lsc 16y ago

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
      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. That's definitely one of my reasons for going that direction. As a soon-to-be-an-academic grad student, it's nice to have my own thing I can take place-to-place anyway, but due to inertia, it being free, and essentially infinite bandwidth, I'd probably be using university IT stuff if they would let me do anything on it. But, the fact that I have to round-trip through a person to get anything installed, and also have a big hassle of explaining why I need it and hoops to jump with their security policy, just makes it easier to buy a server somewhere not on the university network where I have root.

dantheman 16y ago

That is only looking at one side of the minimum wage coin. There are also a lot of people who may only contribute 4$ of value per hour (inexperienced, etc) who would like to work at that wage but won't get hired due to their lack of value. But if they could get a job, they would gain experience and eventually start contributing more value and thus be able to justify a higher wage. Minimum wage hurts those who it is trying protect -- in fact when I worked menial "minimum wage " jobs, I was always actually paid more than minimum wage.

lsc 16y ago
did you read what I wrote? specifically: "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." So yeah, a higher minimum wage does favor more expensive people who can be more productive over less expensive people who are less productive. My first job didn't pay minimum wage, and I know that some 15 year old fixing computers is rather different than an adult labourer trying to feed a family, but I feel that I benefited from having the job; It got me my next job (which was minimum wage) which started me down the path, a few years later, to a 'real job' with real pay.
- codexon 16y ago
  It got me my next job (which was minimum wage) which started me down the path, a few years later, to a 'real job' with real pay. It's all relative. When everyone starts having 2 unpaid internships or related work as a kid paid under the table, businesses start to expect this level of experience before hiring someone for a "real" job.
  - lsc 16y ago
    start to, nothing. most businesses expect you to have experience now, and, uh, you need to get that experience somehow. for me, it was a bigger problem than for most people. I didn't have a degree. It's hard to get a real job with a degree and no experience. getting a 'real job' with no degree and no experience is pretty much impossible. My brother, on the other hand, has been making $20+ an hour at his internships; a line I didn't cross until I made programmer. To be fair, he's the age I was when I got a 'programmer' title, and his responsibilities and accomplishments are similar to mine at his age; the only real difference is that when school starts, he heads back to school, while I kept working.