6 ms·

Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

55 points by wombatmobile 5y ago

cblconfederate 5y ago
Multiple people have mentioned that the pandemic was a profound period of self-reflection. Massive remote work coupled with a removal of distractions caused many people to change their future outlooks. I think it will be reflected in more things than just employment
voicedYoda 5y ago
Can we add that this is an opinion piece?
mabbo 5y ago
I spent 7 years taking the Toronto subway to and from work every day, thinking nothing of it. 45 minutes each way, and I considered it a great commute. After 18 months of remote work, my team decided to do an in-person meetup. Morning in the office, afternoon doing a team event. It was a great day, but I was blown away by how much I hated the commute. For the entire pandemic, I've been cooking great, healthy dinners starting at 5:30 every night. I got home after 6 that day and was too exhausted to do anything more than order in. I'm not going back to that every day. My employer can make their decisions, but I've made mine.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Yep. I don't mind making the trip to the office from time to time (once every 1-2 months maybe), but I can't see myself agreeing to showing up every day ever again. Unless I'm working on actual hardware maybe, like a job in robotics or something, and even then I'd try to stay home as much as possible.
  - randomopining 5y ago
    Yeah tbh 1-2 months would be ideal. Touch base, hit some stuff, grab a beer after work. But if we are just chugging along adding features and refining... why do you need to be in the office? Maybe for a period of heavy design work... but wth.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jleyank 5y ago
People have wanted boomers to get out of the way for years, and with COVID, many of them might have done so. This opens up positions at the upper end of the tech ladder as well as thinning out the herd of part-time workers. Coupled with COVID concern, going (back) to school, moving and child care issues it’s not surprising there’s fewer bodies out there to hire.
UncleOxidant 5y ago
Assuming the labor shortage is also there in tech - I suspect there are shortages in some areas of tech, but not all - how are tech employers adapting? Are they willing to dispense with multi-stage, multi-day Byzantine interviewing? Such as the old: phone screen -> take home exam of some sort -> all day onsite interviews (including several whiteboard technical interviews) -> sometimes extended interview days -> followed by a few weeks before a decision is made. I just don't think a lot of job seekers want to put up with that anymore.
- MatteoFrigo 5y ago
  The path of least resistance is to expand the labor pool by opening or growing a new office in another region or country.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  Mostly no, judging by my most recent job search. It seems to have been adjusted to have less contact with the company, though, at least upfront. This was pretty common for me: Recruiter Call, one of the following: 60 minute logic/psychological test, 60-120 minute website coding assessment, 90+ minute system architecture design, or a video interview where you answer questions recorded by a website, and the website might use A.I. to analyze how nervous and how good you are at eye contact and then uses your video as training data in the future. Get past that, and then you might hear back from the company finally, and have 2-5 Zoom/Teams/Webex interviews, which also might have a live coding exercise included, which you mostly have to schedule individually and during the work day, and then hopefully hear back one way or another from a recruiter. So for the most part you're doing 1.5-2 hours worth of effort before the company makes any effort on their part.
  - eropple 5y ago
    This is pretty unlike what I've ever seen at a company of any kind, and not what I've seen us do at Mux (oblig: we're hiring remotely--email's in my profile!). ETA: Like a take-home test or whatever, that happens--I personally elect not to do them, but they do--but a psych test or whatnot creeps me out a lot. There are plenty of companies out there who recognize that a developer's time is valuable, and while if you're very early in your career maybe you have to bite the bullet and put up with some garbage, there's value in dumping those sorts of orgs out of your inbox once you're safe to do so.
aerosmile 5y ago
It would have been helpful to understand if the labor shortage is happening at the top or the bottom end of the career ladder. I always heard about it in the latter context - eg: restaurants struggling to find waiters, as opposed to unicorn startups struggling to hire their next head of marketing. The author rushes to conclusion that the labor shortage is in the worker cohort that has the financial freedom to take a pay cut. It would have been nice to back that up with some data, especially since he did back up other parts of his essay - it's just that the conclusion comes out of the blue and with no supporting evidence.
- MatteoFrigo 5y ago
  The author links to FRED data that measure a 5% drop in workforce participation in the 55+ cohort. This is at least some evidence that older workers are taking it easy so far. (See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ if you have not heard of FRED before.)
  - aerosmile 5y ago
    For visibility, this is the graph we're discussing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k I think we all know why the 55+ year olds are seeing a dip - they have an exponentially higher chance of dying of Covid. A bit weird for such an obvious fact to not have been verbalized in the article. If anything, the graph above actually contradicts the title of the article - from what I can tell, all other age groups seem way more employed than I would have expected given the logistical and health concerns that the pandemic threw at us.
    - MatteoFrigo 5y ago
      I could not find a precise definition of what the graph shows, but that's a graph of participation rate and not absolute numbers. I.e., of all the people who are alive at a certain time, what percentage are neither employed nor unemployed (where "unemployed" implies "looking for a job"). To confuse things even more, the whole percentage is normalized to Mar 2020=100. Your estimate of the mortality in that cohort is likely off by an order of magnitude or more. I can't find an exact figure, so here is a back of the envelope estimate. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ tells me that about 30,000 more people of age 45-64 died in 2020 in excess of a typical year. For the purpose of estimation, I assume as a worst case that they all were 55+ and that the number of 65+ people working is not too large. How many 55-64 people exist in Europe? The euromomo graph refers to a region of about 400M people. For the purpose of this estimation, assume that people live 100 years and that age distribution is uniform, so maybe 40M are in that age range. Thus, the extra mortality in 2020 would be less than 0.1%. You can criticize this analysis in many ways, but it's hard to believe that I am off by more than a factor of 5 in either direction. Thus, I don't see how "dead by covid" can possibly justify a 5% decrease in participation rate.
shkkmo 5y ago
I don't think this is just boomers or just service / hospitality workers. I think that there has been a fundemental shift in how many people view / think about work and how it relates to society. I doubt we'll have a good grasp of what that shift consists of until years from now.
bob229 5y ago
Does anyone really read the NYT for anything other than comedy any more?
dang 5y ago
Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here. If there's a paywall workaround, it's fine to post it in the thread. (We've changed the URL now from https://archive.ph/WR2LA https://archive.ph/WR2LA to the original source.)
ernestoperez 5y ago
My anecdotal evidence, is that this pandemic has made me think what it important for my family and me, and working 80+ hours a week, even if very well paid, is not something I want to keep doing in my mid fifties. I am leaving a job abroad where I have been for 25 years, and returning home, to do some remote work. It may not work out, but I need to try.

55 points by wombatmobile 5y ago

Multiple people have mentioned that the pandemic was a profound period of self-reflection. Massive remote work coupled with a removal of distractions caused many people to change their future outlooks. I think it will be reflected in more things than just employment

voicedYoda 5y ago

Can we add that this is an opinion piece?

mabbo 5y ago

I spent 7 years taking the Toronto subway to and from work every day, thinking nothing of it. 45 minutes each way, and I considered it a great commute. After 18 months of remote work, my team decided to do an in-person meetup. Morning in the office, afternoon doing a team event. It was a great day, but I was blown away by how much I hated the commute. For the entire pandemic, I've been cooking great, healthy dinners starting at 5:30 every night. I got home after 6 that day and was too exhausted to do anything more than order in. I'm not going back to that every day. My employer can make their decisions, but I've made mine.

cableshaft 5y ago
Yep. I don't mind making the trip to the office from time to time (once every 1-2 months maybe), but I can't see myself agreeing to showing up every day ever again. Unless I'm working on actual hardware maybe, like a job in robotics or something, and even then I'd try to stay home as much as possible.
- randomopining 5y ago
  Yeah tbh 1-2 months would be ideal. Touch base, hit some stuff, grab a beer after work. But if we are just chugging along adding features and refining... why do you need to be in the office? Maybe for a period of heavy design work... but wth.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jleyank 5y ago

People have wanted boomers to get out of the way for years, and with COVID, many of them might have done so. This opens up positions at the upper end of the tech ladder as well as thinning out the herd of part-time workers. Coupled with COVID concern, going (back) to school, moving and child care issues it’s not surprising there’s fewer bodies out there to hire.

UncleOxidant 5y ago

Assuming the labor shortage is also there in tech - I suspect there are shortages in some areas of tech, but not all - how are tech employers adapting? Are they willing to dispense with multi-stage, multi-day Byzantine interviewing? Such as the old: phone screen -> take home exam of some sort -> all day onsite interviews (including several whiteboard technical interviews) -> sometimes extended interview days -> followed by a few weeks before a decision is made. I just don't think a lot of job seekers want to put up with that anymore.

MatteoFrigo 5y ago
The path of least resistance is to expand the labor pool by opening or growing a new office in another region or country.
cableshaft 5y ago
Mostly no, judging by my most recent job search. It seems to have been adjusted to have less contact with the company, though, at least upfront. This was pretty common for me: Recruiter Call, one of the following: 60 minute logic/psychological test, 60-120 minute website coding assessment, 90+ minute system architecture design, or a video interview where you answer questions recorded by a website, and the website might use A.I. to analyze how nervous and how good you are at eye contact and then uses your video as training data in the future. Get past that, and then you might hear back from the company finally, and have 2-5 Zoom/Teams/Webex interviews, which also might have a live coding exercise included, which you mostly have to schedule individually and during the work day, and then hopefully hear back one way or another from a recruiter. So for the most part you're doing 1.5-2 hours worth of effort before the company makes any effort on their part.
- eropple 5y ago
  This is pretty unlike what I've ever seen at a company of any kind, and not what I've seen us do at Mux (oblig: we're hiring remotely--email's in my profile!). ETA: Like a take-home test or whatever, that happens--I personally elect not to do them, but they do--but a psych test or whatnot creeps me out a lot. There are plenty of companies out there who recognize that a developer's time is valuable, and while if you're very early in your career maybe you have to bite the bullet and put up with some garbage, there's value in dumping those sorts of orgs out of your inbox once you're safe to do so.

aerosmile 5y ago

It would have been helpful to understand if the labor shortage is happening at the top or the bottom end of the career ladder. I always heard about it in the latter context - eg: restaurants struggling to find waiters, as opposed to unicorn startups struggling to hire their next head of marketing. The author rushes to conclusion that the labor shortage is in the worker cohort that has the financial freedom to take a pay cut. It would have been nice to back that up with some data, especially since he did back up other parts of his essay - it's just that the conclusion comes out of the blue and with no supporting evidence.

MatteoFrigo 5y ago
The author links to FRED data that measure a 5% drop in workforce participation in the 55+ cohort. This is at least some evidence that older workers are taking it easy so far. (See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ if you have not heard of FRED before.)
- aerosmile 5y ago
  For visibility, this is the graph we're discussing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k I think we all know why the 55+ year olds are seeing a dip - they have an exponentially higher chance of dying of Covid. A bit weird for such an obvious fact to not have been verbalized in the article. If anything, the graph above actually contradicts the title of the article - from what I can tell, all other age groups seem way more employed than I would have expected given the logistical and health concerns that the pandemic threw at us.
  - MatteoFrigo 5y ago
    I could not find a precise definition of what the graph shows, but that's a graph of participation rate and not absolute numbers. I.e., of all the people who are alive at a certain time, what percentage are neither employed nor unemployed (where "unemployed" implies "looking for a job"). To confuse things even more, the whole percentage is normalized to Mar 2020=100. Your estimate of the mortality in that cohort is likely off by an order of magnitude or more. I can't find an exact figure, so here is a back of the envelope estimate. https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ https://euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/ tells me that about 30,000 more people of age 45-64 died in 2020 in excess of a typical year. For the purpose of estimation, I assume as a worst case that they all were 55+ and that the number of 65+ people working is not too large. How many 55-64 people exist in Europe? The euromomo graph refers to a region of about 400M people. For the purpose of this estimation, assume that people live 100 years and that age distribution is uniform, so maybe 40M are in that age range. Thus, the extra mortality in 2020 would be less than 0.1%. You can criticize this analysis in many ways, but it's hard to believe that I am off by more than a factor of 5 in either direction. Thus, I don't see how "dead by covid" can possibly justify a 5% decrease in participation rate.

shkkmo 5y ago

I don't think this is just boomers or just service / hospitality workers. I think that there has been a fundemental shift in how many people view / think about work and how it relates to society. I doubt we'll have a good grasp of what that shift consists of until years from now.

bob229 5y ago

Does anyone really read the NYT for anything other than comedy any more?

dang 5y ago

Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here. If there's a paywall workaround, it's fine to post it in the thread. (We've changed the URL now from https://archive.ph/WR2LA https://archive.ph/WR2LA to the original source.)

ernestoperez 5y ago

My anecdotal evidence, is that this pandemic has made me think what it important for my family and me, and working 80+ hours a week, even if very well paid, is not something I want to keep doing in my mid fifties. I am leaving a job abroad where I have been for 25 years, and returning home, to do some remote work. It may not work out, but I need to try.