4 ms·

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

by 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.
    - shubb 13y ago
      You are arguing that distorting the market to increase pay for developers is a good thing for you. Some work can be easily moved around the world. Some can't. For instance, workers on your local railway can for up wages because the railway can't move, and local people need it. Software can be written anywhere, so if US wages are high, it will be written elsewhere. And you do see this. US wages, and Japanese wages, are higher than in Europe for developers. Here in the UK, a lot of engineering is essentially R&D outsourced from the US to a place with cheaper STEM workers. At the same time, I feel wages can be at current levels because developers don't realize how much they are worth. A big part of this is because it's hard to link revenues, even at a software company, to an individual developers achievement. If profit is a pie(chart) carved up between different workers and the share holders, then the worker who has best visibility how the money gets there, and how they contributed, will do best. Hence sales/marketing, management, and finance, all tend to do better, because they get to see the budget.

by sker 13y ago

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.
  - shubb 13y ago
    You are arguing that distorting the market to increase pay for developers is a good thing for you. Some work can be easily moved around the world. Some can't. For instance, workers on your local railway can for up wages because the railway can't move, and local people need it. Software can be written anywhere, so if US wages are high, it will be written elsewhere. And you do see this. US wages, and Japanese wages, are higher than in Europe for developers. Here in the UK, a lot of engineering is essentially R&D outsourced from the US to a place with cheaper STEM workers. At the same time, I feel wages can be at current levels because developers don't realize how much they are worth. A big part of this is because it's hard to link revenues, even at a software company, to an individual developers achievement. If profit is a pie(chart) carved up between different workers and the share holders, then the worker who has best visibility how the money gets there, and how they contributed, will do best. Hence sales/marketing, management, and finance, all tend to do better, because they get to see the budget.