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"For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." So what? If there's a thousand Node

• wgerard 8y ago
  The openings seem to be largely in trades or nonskilled labor: > Competition for workers has gone crazy, Joe McConville, who co-owns a popular chain of made-from-scratch pizza restaurants, told me. “At almost every restaurant that I’ve worked at, you always had a stack of applications waiting,” he said. “You’d call somebody up and half the time they're still looking for an extra job. That’s not happening anymore.” > “There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work. The construction trades, the roofers, the framers, the dry-wallers,” said Dan Culhane, the president of the Ames Chamber of Commerce. “Those are [workforce] challenges that Ames and Story County and Des Moines face.” > The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in.
  • lainga 8y ago
    The last sentence is the big problem. I feel like a lot of industries didn't just make the best of the advantageous labour market in the last 10 years, they reshaped themselves to become dependent on it (i.e., on cheap and easily-replaced human capital). Now that labour's tight again, they're finding that they've worked themselves into a hole they can't get out of.
    • adventured 8y ago
      Business just got a massive tax cut. They can dig themselves out by spending on increasing productivity and paying higher wages. The economy needs to be run very hot for an extended period of time, instead of getting crashed by an obnoxiously over-eager Fed that likes to kick the economy into a recession to dampen wage growth for the benefit of businesses in the guise of controlling inflation. Businesses need to be made to squeal in pain here. Run the economy as hot as we can get it for as long as we can and shove wages through the roof at the cost of business margins (which were just considerably boosted via the tax cuts). If the Republicans and Democrats weren't collectively so stupid, they'd be cooperating on hammering out a massive infrastructure spending plan paid for by a trillion dollars printed by the Fed across 10-15 years (or similarly constructing an infrastructure bank filled courtesy of abusing the global reserve currency while we still have it). And doing that would juice things that much more right now and for the next decade.
      • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
        Not much point increasing wages if you are just going to erode them with inflation.
        • cmurf 8y ago
          Avoiding worker revolt is the point. If the inflation is bad enough, workers feel pain, demand wage increases. So far inflation has been low, wage increases low and thus cancel each other out (June wage increase 2.7%, May inflation 2.7%). But from a business standpoint, no point in increasing wages above inflation until workers revolt. So what's needed is a healthy dose of inflation to get workers to revolt, and make business compete for workers by taking the risk, instead of hoarding, and paying more. Businesses and their shareholders have had it really good compared to workers, because workers have been docile and shareholders have been there to scoop of the profits that workers refuse to fight for.
        • saas_co_de 8y ago
          The myth of the link between rising wages and inflation is very common in the media, but there is hardly any connection in reality. Wages will naturally adjust to the equilibrium supply and demand. If the needed increase in wages to increase production pushes prices up such that supply falls then production will be cut to adjust. That is what actual economic theory says. In the real world their is a lot of lag, so some market participants will be increasing wages and producing too much, and then they lose money, and have to overcut on the other side, but in a massive diverse economy this random noise balances out. The market will never over price labor, therefore inflation cannot come from increasing wages. Inflation comes from printing money (or creating it digitally since we don't actually print any more). When the inflation from printing money results in rising wages, then that is a sign to the bankers that they should cut back so that they can keep the poor in line, and keep them from paying off their loans so that they can't get out of debt. Real world economics.
          • tonyedgecombe 8y ago
            Yes, I was thinking about the comment "a trillion dollars printed by the Fed" when I posted my reply.
    • rdlecler1 8y ago
      This is one of the most insightful comments I’ve seen for awhile. Perhaps this is why low wages tend to create recessions as inefficient businesses start to fail. One could argue that these system stressors act as a cleansing agent.
      • azernik 8y ago
        This is actually a pretty common interpretation; Google "positive effects of recessions". Also, all kinds of stressors can create recessions - from a supply shock (the sudden increase in oil prices in 1979 forcing the US economy to restructure to adapt), to a demand shock (a sudden drop in consumer access to credit in 2008), to sudden shifts in the type of demand (both WWI and WWII ended in steep, short recessions during the switchover from wartime to peacetime production).
    • HillaryBriss 8y ago
      yes. i often think that, too. from the article itself: Yet the experience of towns like Ames and Des Moines show that such “labor shortages” might be due to insufficient wages and crummy working conditions — not an unwillingness of workers to switch industries or improve their skills for a job.
    • mac01021 8y ago
      > they reshaped themselves to become dependent on it What does such a restructuring look like, in concrete terms?
      • lainga 8y ago
        Slashing benefits and wages. Making long hours and unpaid overtime the industry norm. Getting rid of whole departments and replacing them with third-party contractors. These all seem uncompetitive for businesses, but it must seem easy to do when your entire industry sector is doing it: truckers can't leave you if every other company is just as bad. The dependent part is where these slashes and cuts are accompanied by lowering prices in a race to the bottom within the industry, to the point where every business in the sector is operating on near-zero margins. Then, when wages overall start to go back up, the first business in the industry to flinch has to raise prices immediately as well, and ends up getting out-competed into oblivion. But if nobody flinches, the entire industry's labour pool dries up, harming everyone.
  • sbjs 8y ago
    I don't know much about the job market, but it seems weird that they push people throw college for degrees they can't use. My friend got a masters degree in pharma and he didn't get a job for about 2 years, his wife had to work as a retail manager to support their whole family, and he had a mental breakdown because of it. That's the point I was getting at.
    • pkaye 8y ago
      > masters degree in pharma Is that a pharmacist degree? Don't those need a PhD equivalent to be most beneficial?
      • sbjs 8y ago
        It may be a PhD for pharmacist, yeah. We lost touch a few years ago when they moved away, but he went to school for something like 10 years. So I think it is a PhD. But there were no jobs. Last I heard, even the job he has now doesn't cover insurance, so he pays for that himself and they're still living like he works at Burger King.
        • tzahola 8y ago
          Why didn’t he learn JavaScript?
        • pkaye 8y ago
          I've always heard it was in high demand because every drug store needs a pharmacist and the education requirements are stringent so the supply is not great.
        • s73v3r_ 8y ago
          There was a 10 year lag time between when he started school and when he finished. It's extremely difficult to predict what's going to be in demand and what's not over that time period.
          • pkaye 8y ago
  • Animats 8y ago
    “There are not a lot of welders sitting around looking for work." That's a good thing. Welding is hard to learn and takes a lot of practice to get right. There shouldn't be people sitting around idle with that skill. Ask employers who are whining about a shortage of skilled labor "how many people do you have in training right now?"
    • toomuchtodo 8y ago
      And ask what they're paying. When an employer says they can't find anyone qualified, it's usually because they're not willing to pay enough. There is always someone qualified.
      • tastythrowaway 8y ago
        truth
    • module0000 8y ago
      FWIW, I sit around idle all day long as a 6g certified welder. By "idle" I mean sitting at a desk writing python and trading commodities. Welding is for the birds, and humans that want to lose their sense of smell and eventually degrade their vision. Welding is not fun over any stretch of time.
      • azernik 8y ago
        Same for trucking. Who wants to spend a month at a time away from family? When people talk about higher wages for these jobs as a solution for the labor shortage, I always bring up improvements in working conditions (safety, hours, etc.) as a perhaps more cost-effective way to make these jobs attractive.
        • mmt 8y ago
          > Same for trucking. That strikes me as an exaggeration. Notwithstanding "sitting is the new smoking", I don't imagine trucking has nearly the permanent health risks of welding, especially considering that maximum-time regulations are now actually getting enforced, thanks to electronic logbooks. > Who wants to spend a month at a time away from family? Someone without a family (usually modified by "yet") or who's into making shorter-term sacrifices for the longer term. The latter would apply if the pay were high enough, but it isn't. The latter type seems to exist in the military. The question makes an assumption that isn't necessarily valid, as there's another kind of person: one who has no kids and brings a spouse along to drive as a team. None of this, of course, necessarily translates into an attractive long-term career, but it's also not high- or increasing-skill labor. > improvements in working conditions (safety, hours, etc.) as a perhaps more cost-effective way to make these jobs attractive. I suspect the reason such measures are particularly unattractive to employers is that many would be practically impossible to roll back once the job market turns. Wages are a "knob" that turns both ways, but once you've spent money on all those safety upgrades at the plant, there's no un-spending it. As cynical as that may sound, for low-margin businesses, the fear of being out-competed is always on their mind. Whether the fear is exaggerated compared to reality is another matter.
  • Animats 8y ago
    The trucking industry is instructive here: Trade groups have argued that it is facing a shortfall of 51,000 workers, yet businesses have not yet shown much willingness to cut hours, boost pay, and improve conditions to lure workers in. Now that's a good point. The job could be much better if the employers were better organized. Employers want to send someone out on the road for weeks at a time. With better scheduling, the first driver drives for four hours, stops at a truck stop, and swaps trucks with another driver going the other way. Both drivers end up back home at the end of their shift. Where's that Flexport guy who's always on here when you need him?
    • sverige 8y ago
      There are many loads where that system would create a lot of inefficiecies. The type of loads where it makes sense are already run that way. It's called LTL (less than truckload) and is one of the most volatile sectors of the industry. Wages tend to be higher in that sector, though, and there's more home time, so they tend to go to more experienced drivers with excellent driving records.
      • Animats 8y ago
        Yes, overworking drivers is more "efficient". Right now, the labor market won't let employers do that. The winners will now be the employers who figure out how to give their truckers a better life without wasting too much time sitting around at crew change points.
    • ponzored 8y ago
      Or buy a semi-autonomous truck that can be used in convoy mode - one driver in the lead, two trucks behind following. Once it gets to a city they all get drivers to navigate to the depot. This is already a feature of the Tesla Semi.
• Ultimatt 8y ago
  No they expect you to learn COBOL and keep the economic machine turning.
• Animats 8y ago
  "For the first time in recorded history, the number of job openings is higher than the number of people looking for a job." No way. WWII, for example.
• desireco42 8y ago
  You would consider yourself lucky if it was dentist jobs. Most likely it is crappy jobs in service industry.
• shados 8y ago
  If your thousand "node developers" aren't at least willing to drop the "node" part (assuming there was saturation in that segment) to use their skills in other languages/environment...then they probably have a problem. (I know that wasn't really your point since you were comparing with something more different like dentists...but the fact that the example specifically said "node developer" instead of just developer is scary)
  • scarface74 8y ago
    Because most companies aren’t just looking for “developers”. They are looking for developers who know “X”. The companies that are willing to hire someone who is not a perfect fit are going to usually pay a lot less.
    • avarun 8y ago
      That's... basically the opposite of true.
      • scarface74 8y ago
        Outside of Silicon Valley in the rest of the country -- look at the job reqs.
        • shados 8y ago
          Job reqs are a lie, and a lot of jobs (I almost want to say most, but I don't have data to back it up) never even make it as far as the job boards. The ones that do are often not even drafted by the hiring manager, and just written by someone who asked "So, what kind of skills would be nice?". Most companies will absolutely hire outside of what's written. They don't have much choice unless they're looking for entry level folks. Competent senior folks get snatched up very, very quickly, so if you're looking for something too specific, the req will stay open forever. At least, that's been my experience working in both Canada and in the US, and I've never been close to Silicon Valley (or the west coast for that matter, so if its true there, I stand corrected).
• scarface74 8y ago
  How much of underemployment is caused by people not willing to move? For instance, I can almost guarantee you that if you’re a good Node developer you could find a job in less than a month in my market.
  • duxup 8y ago
    Where? Not being sarcastic or anything... really want to know.
    • scarface74 8y ago
      Atlanta. Don’t aimlessly submit to job boards. Go through local recruiters.
      • duxup 8y ago
        Yeah I would like to find a good recruiter for my area.
        • scarface74 8y ago
          I don’t get why it’s so hard to find good recruiters. I’ve had relationships with reputable recruiters for 20 years.
          • duxup 8y ago
            I think for some of us it is just our only recruiter experience are the folks who talk to you and never call back who work for a specific company, and the folks who want to spam your resume or something. It's hard to know who is who.
            • scarface74 8y ago
              When a recruiter reaches out to you on LinkedIn, check to see whether the company they work for is local to the area. I just picked a random city -Boston - and Google’d “Boston software recruiters”. I found two or three just now. Even with the job boards, recruiters post jobs thier and instead of sending your resume, talk to them. If you have the skills, and interview well, they will be more than happy to work with you. They get a 20% finders fee from the company you are eventually hired through and it doesn’t affect your salary. If they won’t give you the information for the hiring company when you ask - don’t deal with them. Also, don’t be shady. Don’t go behind the recruiters back, make sure you aren’t being submitted by more than one company and make sure they always ask before they submit your resume. The general rule of thumb is not to tell them your current salary. I’ve never gone by that rule. I always tell them the minimum salary I want - and no “target compensation” and bonuses don’t count - and don’t waste my time discussing any company that can’t meet my requirements. I’ve had them negotiate on my behalf after a company was interested for more than the salary the company offered. The more I make the more they make.
• duxup 8y ago
  Amen. Try just breaking into it in a world where entry level is 3 years experience minimum.
• nitwit005 8y ago
  I'm not sure it's possible to measure the number of job openings anymore. It used to be an expensive thing to do, as a human would read all the responses, but now they sometimes advertise a bunch of fake positions just to measure the current available talent.
• defertoreptar 8y ago
  The "so what" of it is that more jobs than people looking for jobs is a good thing, in the general sense. As for mismatches, what is your solution?
• dpods 8y ago
  That’s exactly where wage growth begins to occur. If the market supply can’t match demand, wages rise and employers compete for talent.