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The rise and fall of the skills gap
- autokad 8y agothe one thing that was befuddling to me, is that there wasn't a single smart company during the mist of the great recession (as far as I could tell) . What I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. This gives other companies insight into what you have left, and they can now poach your best. likewise if you don't lay off, you dont convey that data to competitors. If I were CEO during such a recession, I'd hire, not fire.
- flukus 8y ago> presumably they keep their best employees I don't think that's a safe presumption, especially in the case of mass layoffs. Often every team will have to shed people, so if a whole team is made up of high performers they'll still have to get rid of good people. Then you've got the cost cutting nature of laying people off, sometimes the highest paid will be the ones with a target on their back. The high performers are often on duties that have them directing the future of the company, things like planning to upgrade/rewrite that old legacy system. When it comes to layoffs they'll be let go while poorer performers maintaining the old system will be kept because they're needed for immediate operations. Companies will layoff anyone not involved with "keeping the light's on", that doesn't correlate with individual performance.
- mark-r 8y agoThere are a lot of factors that go into layoff calculations, and often it isn't performance. In fact it can perversely be the opposite. Finished your project early? You're not doing anything now so you're expendable, bye! Or maybe you got into one too many heated arguments with your boss because you knew you were right and he was wrong.
- mbrumlow 8y agoAnd if you are bought by a PE it is often some guys spreadsheet that does the cutting. And many times that spreadsheet is total BS and used just because it seemed to work that one time they used it before.
- toomuchtodo 8y agoVery similar to equities purchases. You want to be buying “when there’s blood in the streets” (heavily distressed markets) not at the market peak. This takes enough management savvy and foresight to manage your cash flow and reserves to enable absorbing talent from disadvantaged firms during times of economic uncertainty.
- AznHisoka 8y agoIs there blood in the streets right now? If so, why aren't you buying right now?
- toomuchtodo 8y agoBoth equities and labor are still relatively expensive at the moment.
- matte_black 8y agoChristmas Eve was the exact best day to buy. It looks like the rocket is taking off again and for real this time. Market has been very good the past few days and there’s a bunch of catalysts this week and earnings season coming up that could sustain the action. I opened positions again last week and am already up 12.8% with my portfolio. Good luck to all.
- AznHisoka 8y ago"This gives other companies insight into what you have left" I don't really understand... surely, you know exactly who the best employees in your competitors are just by searching for senior positions in Linkedin?
- peteradio 8y agoIs this sarcasm?
- maxxxxx 8y ago"What I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. " That's typically not how it's done. Most layoffs are by department or division and there is not much consideration for individual performance. Some people with a good network may be able to jump to a safe position.
- Finnucane 8y agoYep. In 2009 I was temping at a large textbook publisher until they laid off the entire copyediting department. curiosly, not so many cuts in upper management.
- wbl 8y agoThey sacked the what again? That cannot have been good for quality of the product.
- ilikehurdles 8y agoA lot of times the people being kept around are those cheapest to keep, or those lucky enough to have been placed on a well-performing project at the company.
- strken 8y agoThe company may want to keep its best employees, but those employees are by definition the best equipped to leave, the most likely to have experienced lay-offs before, the most expensive, and the most knowledgeable about the financial state of the company. Most of them are going to hop on LinkedIn the moment lay-offs are announced.
- gaius 8y agowhen a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees That is not how it works. Firstly positions are made redundant, not people. If the company is closing the widget factory, it doesn’t matter who is the best or the worst widget-wrangler, those positions simply don’t exist anymore. Secondly you can’t hire wranglers just for the sake of it, you need demand for widgets in the market, and if there is such demand why did your competitor close the factory?
- tabtab 8y agoDevelopers often joke about job ads that require "5 or more years of experience" in about 10 different technologies. I once calculated the probability of a real person matching such a description and came to something like 1 out 500 trillion people. Unless the job ad is published to the entire Virgo Galactic Supercluster, they won't likely get a match. There are rumors such ads are written so companies can officially reject citizens for H1B visa workers. However, Hanlon's Razor could be at play.
- tenpies 8y agoThere is also the classic "need X years of experience with Y technology" but Y technology has only been in existence for <X years. I love HR departments.
- Mountain_Skies 8y agoSaw one last year that required enough Android experience that only the guys who were acquired by Google would be able to fulfill the requirement. It was for a mundane geeks-for-hire type company that churn out template type apps so probably didn't need anywhere near that level of experience.
- tabtab 8y agoI was at an interview for a job ad that had similar illogical requirements. When it was clear I wasn't getting the job for other reasons, I pointed out their error. They got all huffy. My doing that is a bad practice people-skill-wise, but it sure felt good getting deserving fools to eat their own cat-food.
- rossdavidh 8y agoI could imagine it might sometimes be the H1B thing, but more common are hyper-precise lists of technologies needed, when they already know the candidate they want but have a legal or administrative requirement to post the job. Also, I get the impression hiring managers start with what they would like, and out of a long-bred instinct to have an opening bargaining position that's more than they actually want, they put down too many things. Of course, if no offers come in, and they don't actually have an H1B or other candidate in mind, then maybe they go back and reduce what they're asking for, which would lead directly to this article's conclusion.
- sitkack 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
- imh 8y agoVox's headline is ridiculous, but the study in question is pretty neat. https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/yySyK7fd https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2019/preliminary/paper/yyS... (pdf warning) They show that even within a specific (job-title, company, state) tuple, higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way. That doesn't mean the skills gap is a lie, or any other nefarious bad behavior on the company's part. The study doesn't go into that.
- partiallypro 8y agoI knew as soon as I saw the source, this would be the case....Matt Yglesias isn't exactly...honest. He has a history of false claims and or really bad ideas. More of a commentator than a journalist, though somehow he is treated as one by Vox.
- sigil 8y agoHe co-founded Vox, so bias in that direction isn't terribly surprising.
- partiallypro 8y agoWhat amazes me if that Vox has a show on Netflix that is supposed to explain things when their organization is notorious for getting basic things wrong. Look, everyone gets something wrong, but they sometimes do so with intent to mislead. I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary. I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.
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- ralusek 8y agoThis is probably the first article from Vox that I've read in years that isn't biased to the point of being useless. What is presented here, that employers have the luxury of choosiness when unemployment is high, makes perfect sense.
- knoxa2511 8y agoFactfullness, one of the best books on Bill Gates summer reading list covers "the gap instinct" Factfulness is . . . recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be. To control the gap instinct, look for the majority. Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all. Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be. The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
- wink 8y agoWhat good is lower unemployment if no one can live from their job? I know it's a problem in Germany, but from what I've heard it's a lot worse in the US, with people working 2 or more jobs...