37 ms·

It is an HR crisis on two points - 1) There is a business preference to find the best candidate for the lowest rate (practical sense) which leads towards hirin

It is an HR crisis on two points - 1) There is a business preference to find the best candidate for the lowest rate (practical sense) which leads towards hiring the youngest/cheapest resource available who meets the criteria. 2) Existing companies refuse to invest in building up / educating employees. In the old days you hired based on merit and potential, but you also provided training to make sure employees adapted with technology. These days, there is no training and employees are expected to adapt on their own (there are certainly arguments for keeping on top of things, but if you have a full time job and other obligations, external interests might not be technical/career related) Unfortunately, because of (1) and no requirement for companies to commit to (2), there is a push to allow for more non-domestic workers through programs like H1-B and related visas. Personally, I think most engineers should hone their skills and continue to learn and evolve. That said, some situations don't allow that and when coupled with a refusal of companies refusing to hire/train based off potential, we end up in the mythical "STEM crisis". I'm not talking the founder visa issue here, I am talking the normal boots on the ground. For which, no longer training and wanting the cheapest option have created a toxic environment for a certain segment of the tech community.

sker 13y ago
I was thinking of more than two points. The two you mentioned, plus looking for overqualified candidates, plus: 1) Requiring more experience than necessary or even plausible on certain technologies. 5 years of experience in X. When X is 2 years old. 2) Focusing too much in a specific technology stack. We use X, Y and Z. You lack Z? Bye. Or we use Z 1.2, you've only used 0.9? Bye. 3) The 3 day interview, the brain-teaser interview, the work-for-free interview, the you-only-got-1% psychometric test interview. Regarding your point #2, Mexico recently implemented tax incentives for companies hiring first-time employees. That's something other countries should consider.
- jmspring 13y ago
  Specifically regarding #2, I would like to see an emphasis on training and any company requesting a foreign worker visa pay into a pool that is dedicated towards training domestic technologists in transition. Unemployment is one thing, but, not everyone has availability to learn/transition into new skills. Again, my argument is based off the norm that companies invest much less in their employee development than they used to - the onus is strictly on the employee these days. Which is the other extreme.
  - eru 13y ago
    I don't understand this whole parochial line of reasoning. We shouldn't protect local capital and products with tariffs, and neither should we protect local labour. Free trade (and movement of labour and capital) is better for our economy, and better for the rest of the world. The people on the other side of the fence are human, too!
    - jbjohns 13y ago
      The kind of free trade you're talking about is better for buyers but as I'm an employee and not an employer, I'm more concerned about the sellers market. Complete, unrestricted labour movement means all wages average out. I'd rather not be getting paid the average between the lowest paying employer out there and the highest, so I'm all for setting up boundaries between them.
      - matho 13y ago
        Unrestricted labour movement will mean you get paid average if you are average. The positions with higher pay should be open to the candidates with better skills, wherever they happened to be born.
        jbjohns 13y ago
        > Unrestricted labour movement will mean you get paid average if you are average. There are quite a lot of assumptions in this statement. You assume an efficient market (something that does not and probably cannot exist at scale, if at all). You assume information equality, which is the exact opposite of actual practice, you assume the people who make the hiring decisions have some means of separating the average from the above or below average. In practice development skill is a completely separate and unrelated skill to marketing (of one's self). Ability derives from the former, salary from the latter. So no, unrestricted labour movement most definitely does not mean you get paid average if you are average (not that I care about this anyway: I think all developer pay should go up across the board). What it will mean is employer perception will be that they should be able to get even better talent at even lower prices. And since employers can wait literally years to fill positions and people can rarely go more than a month without a job, this will certainly drive salaries down even further. Of course, one could imagine that eventually everything would become more efficient and companies should recognise that better developers cost more. But how many companies actually care about having better developers? For the majority of IT jobs, the hiring company doesn't care about developer quality, they care about costs. If development takes longer, so what. Everyone else in their market will be working under the same constraints so it doesn't matter.
afterburner 13y ago
(2) is seen by the company to be in its best interest, because otherwise the trained employees can find better work elsewhere or demand more money.

sker 13y ago

I was thinking of more than two points. The two you mentioned, plus looking for overqualified candidates, plus: 1) Requiring more experience than necessary or even plausible on certain technologies. 5 years of experience in X. When X is 2 years old. 2) Focusing too much in a specific technology stack. We use X, Y and Z. You lack Z? Bye. Or we use Z 1.2, you've only used 0.9? Bye. 3) The 3 day interview, the brain-teaser interview, the work-for-free interview, the you-only-got-1% psychometric test interview. Regarding your point #2, Mexico recently implemented tax incentives for companies hiring first-time employees. That's something other countries should consider.

jmspring 13y ago
Specifically regarding #2, I would like to see an emphasis on training and any company requesting a foreign worker visa pay into a pool that is dedicated towards training domestic technologists in transition. Unemployment is one thing, but, not everyone has availability to learn/transition into new skills. Again, my argument is based off the norm that companies invest much less in their employee development than they used to - the onus is strictly on the employee these days. Which is the other extreme.
- eru 13y ago
  I don't understand this whole parochial line of reasoning. We shouldn't protect local capital and products with tariffs, and neither should we protect local labour. Free trade (and movement of labour and capital) is better for our economy, and better for the rest of the world. The people on the other side of the fence are human, too!
  - jbjohns 13y ago
    The kind of free trade you're talking about is better for buyers but as I'm an employee and not an employer, I'm more concerned about the sellers market. Complete, unrestricted labour movement means all wages average out. I'd rather not be getting paid the average between the lowest paying employer out there and the highest, so I'm all for setting up boundaries between them.
    - matho 13y ago
      Unrestricted labour movement will mean you get paid average if you are average. The positions with higher pay should be open to the candidates with better skills, wherever they happened to be born.
      - jbjohns 13y ago
        > Unrestricted labour movement will mean you get paid average if you are average. There are quite a lot of assumptions in this statement. You assume an efficient market (something that does not and probably cannot exist at scale, if at all). You assume information equality, which is the exact opposite of actual practice, you assume the people who make the hiring decisions have some means of separating the average from the above or below average. In practice development skill is a completely separate and unrelated skill to marketing (of one's self). Ability derives from the former, salary from the latter. So no, unrestricted labour movement most definitely does not mean you get paid average if you are average (not that I care about this anyway: I think all developer pay should go up across the board). What it will mean is employer perception will be that they should be able to get even better talent at even lower prices. And since employers can wait literally years to fill positions and people can rarely go more than a month without a job, this will certainly drive salaries down even further. Of course, one could imagine that eventually everything would become more efficient and companies should recognise that better developers cost more. But how many companies actually care about having better developers? For the majority of IT jobs, the hiring company doesn't care about developer quality, they care about costs. If development takes longer, so what. Everyone else in their market will be working under the same constraints so it doesn't matter.

afterburner 13y ago

(2) is seen by the company to be in its best interest, because otherwise the trained employees can find better work elsewhere or demand more money.