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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

by 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?

by roc 13y ago

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?