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"Meanwhile, companies in a range of sectors — manufacturing, construction, healthcare and other STEM fields — report severe skilled labor shortages." Construct

• crygin 13y ago
  They have skilled labor shortages at the prices they're willing to pay. Every time you hear an employer claim they can't find someone for a position, inquire about the salary they're offering.
  • enraged_camel 13y ago
    This type of bullshit seems to be widely believed on HN. I work in the engineering department of a software company and I'm closely involved with recruitment and interviews. I'll tell you this: the vast majority of people (over 95%) we turn down are unqualified, period. Meaning, we wouldn't hire them even at half the salary level advertised for the position. It has nothing whatsoever to do with what we're willing to pay - our salaries are actually very generous and we aren't afraid to pay someone what they are actually worth. The problem is we can't actually find people like that. So yes, from our perspective (250+ person tech company in SoCal), the talent shortage is very, very real.
    • aantix 13y ago
      So why not train them yourselves? Why do they have to be the complete package upfront? You get the liberty of guiding their education in a way that most benefits your company and they get to extend their skillsets. Sounds like a win-win.
      • enraged_camel 13y ago
        >>So why not train them yourselves? Why do they have to be the complete package upfront? I didn't say they have to be the complete package upfront. We actually do have comprehensive training programs for new hires, most of which were designed by me. The problem is that people need a certain mix of base level skills and character traits to succeed and excel. Most people we interview don't have those, which means they are unqualified.
    • Iftheshoefits 13y ago
      "Unqualified" by what standard? What makes you think your standards are appropriate for the positions you're offering? And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion. Software developers aren't (typically) stupid. They have a reasonable idea of the value they provide the company. My estimation is that almost every company under-compensates their engineering staff. I doubt yours is an exception.
      • enraged_camel 13y ago
        >>"Unqualified" by what standard? What makes you think your standards are appropriate for the positions you're offering? Because we do very rigorous analysis of why successful employees are actually successful. We know what it takes to perform well at each job function. >>And what makes you think your salaries are "very generous?" Lot's of companies think their salary/benefits packages are "very generous" when they're anything but. Without context your post is a giant meaningless assertion. Lots of websites aggregate salaries by position and geographic region, so we know the numbers. We also have very good benefits. For instance, our 401k program is a dollar-for-dollar match up to 15% of salary, which is extremely rare.
        • deleted 13y ago
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      • tbrownaw 13y ago
        What I've seen is supposedly-experienced programmers who can't write FizzBuzz, or claim database experience but don't know why a cross-join is bad or what it is, or who claim to be experts at $TOOL but can only recite a handful of memorized answers and just pick whichever sounds closest to the question. Software developers (supposedly) aren't stupid. Applicants for software development positions on the other hand...
        • randomdata 13y ago
          I'll admit, I had to look up what a cross join was, despite being quite familiar with the subject once I understood the terminology. I'm sure you apply much more rigour to your hiring process, but at the same time, it is difficult to know who is throwing out great candidates (I'm not suggesting I am one) over silly little things like this. How do we know if people are hard to find because people are actually hard to find, or people doing the hiring are terrible at their job?
    • nsxwolf 13y ago
      Parent may be talking about the jobs discussed in this article, not software engineers: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-t...
    • acuozzo 13y ago
      > at half the salary level advertised for the position. Tell me, Ege, what salaries are advertised at the following URL? http://jobs.laserfiche.com/Jobs?dep=engineering http://jobs.laserfiche.com/Jobs?dep=engineering I can't find any.
      • enraged_camel 13y ago
        "Advertised" was the wrong word. But recruiters are quite upfront with the salary range for each position when they speak to candidates.
    • fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
      In that case, it's your pre-interview screening process.
    • randomdata 13y ago
      In the presence of a shortage, the value of an employee approaches infinity. I expect that you are really constrained by the amount of money your company can afford, else you'd just walk over to Google/Facebook/Microsoft/whoever and walk out with their best employees in hand. Almost nobody is going to turn down a multi-million dollar offer, if it even takes that much.
      • WalterBright 13y ago
        Then Google/Facebook/Microsoft/whoever is without that talent. How does this prove there's no shortage?
        • randomdata 13y ago
          I'm not sure I was trying to prove that there isn't a shortage, rather if you're only offering a "generous" rate and not the rate that actually attracts people, then you are not really playing in the market. With that said, what is a shortage? Is there a shortage of Ferraris because I cannot afford one, or am I just too poor to consider owning one? Is there a shortage of developers until every developer is working for minimum wage so that the poorest of poor companies can afford them too?
          • tbrownaw 13y ago
            A shortage is what happens when there is a significant delay between prices rising and supply rising. If demand gradually increases, both quantity and price will rise steadily. If there is a shortage, price first rises sharply with little or no increase in quantity and then falls with a significant increase in quantity.
            • deleted 13y ago
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    • runako 13y ago
      You're omitting the likelihood that your applicant pool is tainted by compensation that's not inline with what your desired candidates want. (Note: this is not the same as what comp firms tell you is the 85th percentile or whatever.) (I know, you're "generous" for the market, which also claims a talent shortage and may have the same problem.) But...approaching the edge case, do you think you would see more qualified candidates in your applicant pool if you advertised & offered a $1m/year package for the positions? Have you tried advertising the positions at double (or triple) the compensation to see if that changes matters? If you didn't test this, how do you know that the applicant pool has nothing to do with what you're willing to pay? I'm here in Atlanta, and I can cite examples of people leaving for SF because their expected compensation goes up by a triple-digit percentage (sigh, candidates ignore costs but that's a different story). This effect changes the applicant pool in SF, perhaps boosting comp by 100%+ would work for your company locally? Certainly poaching talented employees gets easier when you offer a raise of $100k to join your firm. Put another way: why would employment be different from other supply/demand markets where price matters, even if the price being asked is potentially distasteful to the buyer (see TSLA, AMZN, TWTR, FB, NYC apartments, or the flavor of your choice)?
    • soganess 13y ago
      To me this could also be prima facie evidence of possibilities outside of the one you listed. (1) You're company maybe an undesirable place to work. In Fresno, CA there are couple self described big-name software firms that fancy themselves "local google". Only willing to hire the best and brightest as it were. But sadly for them, the best and brightest aren't cutting it for them. They verbatim claim the same thing you are now, good salaries, but no one coming in for an interview is worth it. The real truth is that the word has gotten out: their products stink, they treat their employees like children, and their competitive salaries are not that competitive in the larger market. The so called "best and brightest" just avoid their front door. (1b) Just highlighting something in part 1. You are getting what you are paying for and that means you are not paying well. (1c) Your other employees suck. I don't want to work at a place where people are rude or incapable or working in teams, or simply bad at their jobs. It makes my experience worse. Whenever an interview goes well, I always ask to meet the rest of the staff, if only just for a second. To see what they are like. (2) Your interview process is flawed. Assuming (1) is provably untrue, then it might be time to take a good look at the interview process you are employing. I've been through so many interviews where it was clear that the (wo)man doing the interview was simply looking for someone to solve exactly one problem, or the name a specific function, or the input format for a function in a given language, or for me to suggest a specific solution(and no other), etc. Worse still, the moment you cannot answer the question or suggest that a simple Google search would help produce a more ideal solution, or lord forbid simply suggest that an alternative solution might be better, there is this shift in perceived power. It almost seems like the interview process can be an adversarial means of verifying that the interviewer is indeed smarter than the interviewee. At this point during such "skills test" interviews, I politely tell the interviewer that I'm not the candidate they are looking for and conclude the interview. (3) You haven't gotten the word out. How many people really know that your company is looking for someone (1, 10, 100)? Are you really getting the message out to the greater engineering community. Perhaps you are only reaching a single subset, and that subset is not skilled in what you are looking for.
    • SteveLivesInSLO 13y ago
      I totally 100% agree with you-- there is a crazy shortage of qualified software and IT engineers. The funny part is the only people who will agree with you are other hiring managers. Everyone else will say you aren't paying enough or some other excuse. They are never sifting through the resumes or sitting through the interviews. If we ever stumble across a qualified candidate, we make it happen. We just can't find very many qualified candidates.
• roc 13y ago
  Labor shortages have this habit of producing wage spikes for the in-demand employees. Absent such spikes, I'm not sure I would take self-reporting as anything more than gossip or political speech. I would like to see asked, of these people who can't find employees, is how much they've had to increase their salary offers to fill positions. Because my anecdotal experience is that the people who can't fill positions are essentially looking for the higher-quality, more-modest-salary 'deals' that were more common in 2008/2009. And they're simply not in any hurry to hire anyone at all, so the disappearance of such deals results in continually-open-positions, rather than increased offers or decreased requirements.
  • crpatino 13y ago
    I more or less agree with you, but would like to add into the big picture. This is where economic theory meets really... and falls short. Salaries cannot be increased ad-infinitum. Even an extraordinary candidate's potential contribution can add so much value, since it is constrained by the way it fits in the business (and ultimately by the market for the product/service your team is helping to provide). Requirements cannot be decreased arbitrarily either. The relationship between skill and value added is non linear, and may fall rapidly into the negatives below some threshold (it takes more time for a mentor to teach a rookie how to do things than to do things himself, borderline incompetent employees make costly mistakes, etc). So, we are basically in a situation where a market cannot sustain itself (Paul Graham wrote about this in one of his essays, the example he used is how this same forces drove out the existance of butlers). So, in this sense, I believe shortages of labor are very real.
    • roc 13y ago
      The experience of the dot com bubble suggests the general shape of how much salaries can increase and requirements decrease. [1] As we're not remotely approaching either end of that envelope, I'm not too convinced that any hard limits are coming into play. I mean, we're not talking about whether anyone can hire couriers to write web services for six figures. We're talking about whether employers are willing to hire people with 5 years of experience with Technology X at X% more than their last comparable hire, as opposed to waiting around for the posting-perfect-match outlier with the requested 10 years experience, but who'll accept essentially the same wage as that last 5-years-experience hire. [1] Much of that might have been arguably unsustainable, but not all. And again, we're talking about degrees and trends: are offers going up at all? Are employers budging on requirements at all?
• Spooky23 13y ago
  Master tradesmen are impossible to find. Skilled plumbers, electricians, HVAC people, welders, and some machinists make more than the average programmer and are always employed. Also, the unemployment system is basically designed for them. If you work for someone and get laid off between projects, you still get paid. The other path is going out on your own.
  • pflats 13y ago
    At least in the trade unions by me, there were journeyman workers who were getting such little work that their unemployment lapsed. It's gotten a good amount better, but the jobs still aren't steady enough for everyone to be employed full-time. Aside from data centers, there's not a ton of construction going on.