Why Bad Jobs (or No Jobs) Happen To Good Workers 1201
sean_nestor writes "Back in October, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal with the headline 'Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need.' It noted that even with millions of highly educated and highly trained workers sidelined by the worst economic downturn in three generations, companies were reporting shortages of skilled workers. Companies typically blame schools, for not providing the right training; the government, for not letting in enough skilled immigrants; and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages. The author of the article, an expert on employment and management issues, concluded that although employers are in almost complete agreement about the skills gap, there was no actual evidence of it. Instead, he said, 'The real culprits are the employers themselves.'" The linked article is an interview with Peter Cappelli, author of the WSJ piece, who has recently published a book on the alleged skills gap.
O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages
Unfortunately, a company's definition of "good wages" is all too often directly at odds with what the workers themselves would consider to be good.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
That costs money and would negatively affect short-term profit margins.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
How dare you demand a living wage. You actually expect your managers to give up their bonuses so you can actually pay your bills?
flexible work schedule (Score:5, Insightful)
There are lots of people having kids these days, i've read its like the 50s baby boom. both parents work but need to pick the kids up from school/day care.
if you really want to lure people other than onsite child care have a flexible work schedule allowing people to work from home. there is very little that i cannot do from home and a lot of times i'm more productive at home than in the office.
welcome to economics 101 (Score:5, Insightful)
There is supply and demand to empolyment. If the companies want people with specific skills they need to provide the money. The companies real complaint is that they can't find the people they want at the money they are willing to pay.
To the companies I say welcome to basic economics. If you want something specific you may have to pay a lot. In this case the companies are consumers of the labour market. And as we know it sucks to be a consumer.
re: O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
From TFA:
There is no skill shortage.
There is no worker shortage.
The companies complaining are just refusing to pay the wages to get the skilled people.
Which is why those companies want more visas for cheap, foreign workers.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sometimes unemployment benefits, both the size and duration, are a better option than a good job at a good wage.
Of course that's exactly why the republicans are so against unemployment benefits (or any other form of government benefits). It simultaneously makes it harder to exploit workers, while also allowing unscrupulous people to sit on their bum.
The "paradox" of networking... (Score:5, Insightful)
1.Networking. This simple word defines 99% of all recruitment decisions. If you don't know someone, then you cannot get the job. As a result, if the company provides good benefits, the chance that you, the lonely wold would pass the initial test and interview are very close to zero, minus zero actually (no pun intended).
2.As a result of the before mentioned networking, most of the bad developers are having the perfect resume, the perfect references, and the perfect self-confidence. And of course, as Darvin already proved, no skills are required, so they don't have them.
3.The consequence of 1. and 2. is that once they are hired, and prove their lack of skills, the HR team would panic, and would try to use some funny ways of finding the best candidate, which will end up hiring the worst candidate of course (the one with networking), and so the cycle is repeated....
It is not coincidence that the Great China Empire fall, not because of some external treat, but because of the corruption, ops, sorry, i mean "networking".
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, look it's Joe McStrawmanBeater.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
That costs money and would negatively affect short-term profit margins.
Seems a little redundant calling it specifically "short-term profit margins". All appearances indicate most companies are only concerning themselves with the short term lately.
Re:In Canada, if you're on EI... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Welcome to neoconservativism.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
So now you're being a Communist to want a decent wage ommensurate with your skills?
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they won't jump to anything if they weren't treated like a cog. But loyalty hasn't been a part of most employer's vocabulary for going on 30+ years. If you want good, loyal employees it *gasp* means you might have to spend a bit more to treat them well.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
That's just being bitter about the root cause.
Of course it's about money, but it's not about affecting short-term profit margins. The problem is that if you invest a lot of money in training people but are the only company that does so in your field, you face a very real danger that your competitors are going to poach the trained staff by offering them slightly more money, but less than it would have cost to train themselves. Now you've sunk cost into staff you no longer employ, and wasn't particularly useful to you while you employed them. The article refers to this as as the Silicon Valley model. This makes it very, very unattractive for any given company to heavily invest in training until the majority of their competitors does so, too.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Duh. Getting a living wage decreases short-term profits and that's just anti-capitalist.
Re: O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd read, it's not that either. It's that companies are only looking for perfect candidates for the particular thing they want done, as that saves them time and effort, and allows them to downsize as soon as the requirement is done. The removal of the concept of a "trainable" employee has been sabotaging their ability to find anyone, and since everyone else is engaged in poach-based hiring, the system is self-reinforcing.
In particular, it also explains why unemployment among the recently graduated is so high.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
All just a big H1B visa scam (Score:4, Insightful)
This whole "We can't find the skilled workers we need thing" is just a big H1B visa scam (here in the U.S. anyway):
1) Post ads for jobs with impossible qualifications (i.e. 20 years of Java development experience) or so specialized that only a specific H1B candidate can meet them.
2) Turn away every applicant as unqualified
3) Cry to Congress and the Labor Dept. that you can't find enough qualified workers to fill positions, ask for more visas
4) Get more H1B visas
5) Pay foreign nationals a pittance.
6) Profit!
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bullshit. Unemployment benefits are a fraction of what you made last, not a multiple. It's enough to live off of, but not at the lifestyle you previously had. The number of people who would happily take that decrease in life style is miniscule.
Re:Training! (Score:4, Insightful)
WAH, then pay your employees more money.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages
Unfortunately, a company's definition of "good wages" is all too often directly at odds with what the workers themselves would consider to be good.
Quite true. Where I live (pacific northwest) I've found there is no problem finding jobs in software but employers have a difficult time finding good people. In this case it's partially due to the low unemployment rate but also companies that are used to paying sub par wages because "this is a desirable place to live".
The last employer I worked for I gave them a chance to compete on wage before I left. Initially they thought they were paying me quite fairly, but were willing to do a 3rd party wage review (to hopefully confirm their beliefs). I claimed I was under paid by at least 12% for the local market (I know a lot of other software devs, I was quite certain about that number) and considering a position that would be close to a 30% raise. Their wage review did in fact show I was under paid however they offered a paltry 6% raise and one time 5% bonus (when I was clear I wouldn't accept less than a 12% raise).
The smart employers have started offering wages close to 20% above the norm and relocation expenses. Why? While this is a desirable place to live the cost of living is exorbitant compared to most of Canada. To attracting outside talent (rather than poaching from the local pool) you really need to sweeten the pot. Also, in order to poach from the local pool you need to offer better wages. I forget the study (I think it was in "The 7 Hidden Reasons Employees Leave"), but I read a claim that employees won't leave a good that's "good enough" for less than 20%. If you don't 100% enjoy your job you'll put up with it rather than the risks of leaving for a small raise, the threshold being a 20% increase in pay.
Now I have my own small business. One of my contractors (who just graduated) I pay pretty much what I was making when I left the previous company (which is a sizeable jump from the local norm for new grads). Why? Because tying experience to wage is ridiculous. He can code circles around devs I've worked with that claim 20+ years experience. He's easily worth it. Plus it makes it harder for others to poach him. He was taking on some other side work part-time and they complained that his rate was quite high for a new grad (of course they needed him, so they sucked it up and paid).
Re:Training! (Score:4, Insightful)
Boohoo. It costs money and takes real effort to keep people. Either accept this and find those good people or keep perpetuating a broken system, but don't complain to me about your woes.
I can verify this is happening... (Score:5, Insightful)
I work at a Fortune 5 company, where we outsourced to Oracle, and Oracle in turn applied for H1B workers because they "could not find suitable US applicants". Most of the Indian contractors that showed up had no expertise in installing the software, and were completely lost when they could not find something in the manual.
This is not about experience, this is about screwing hard working and capable Americans out of jobs so that Larry Ellison and creeps like him can buy private islands and retire. It's about putting shareholders above employees and morals. It's about damaging the country that made your success possible in the first place.
People will work for _less_ money actually (Score:5, Insightful)
On work/life balance, companies should be offering 4 weeks vacation after 30 days of employment. They should offer a two month sabbatical every 3 years. I don't believe it "working from home" but time off and vacation _should not be audited_ unless a problem occurs with a particular individual. Scary though, huh? We're all adults, treat people like them rather than high school students.
On environment, they should allow drinking in the workplace (oh gasp!). They need to tear up timesheets (no one takes them seriously anyway). They need to _fight_ actively to retain key talent. Furthermore, they need to cut the crud out of their management chain by routinely firing incompetent managers (which creates a morale boost). The need to hire fresh talent for the older jockeys to train.
Finally on the work itself, they need to allow their engineers to drive the majority of the decision making process. First, if an engineers comes and says, "hey if we cut this out of our software stack, it'll make our stuff faster." Rather than say, "No, that's a key investment we chose two years ago" say, "Oh yeah? well prove it. Take one of your teammates and come back to me in two weeks with a POC." This will do two things, first, it will get them to shut up. Second, it may turn into something awesome; win-win situation. The biggest mistake is companies with management overhead blocking engineers from creating value. Engineers are loose cannons. You don't reign them in, instead you let them create lots of raw product, then you pick the best ideas and refine them. Failure to leverage a company's key assets (their engineers) will result in your business paralysis. As soon as engineering decisions become political, you'll see an exodus of your key talent and you won't be able to hire anyone, in essence, you have created your own starvation.
Re: O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the point.
From TFA:
So the companies complaining are really complaining that the people they want to hire FROM THEIR COMPETITORS are not willing to take a PAY CUT to work for them.
Imagine getting a call from a head hunter who wants you to leave your current job to go to work for another company (doing the exact same thing) for either less money or the same money.
Why would you do that?
No. (Score:2, Insightful)
Price is set by supply and demand. If the point where those curves meet is higher than a bunch of potential buyers would like it to be, that is not a shortage, that is just greed.
Increasing the supply will bring the price down. But that isn't the automatic right response to an unpleasantly high price. If increasing the supply also brings quality down, flooding the market with cheap crap, everyone winds worse off in the long run.
When employers need people with a difficult and costly-to-obtain skillset, they should not expect such people to be cheap and should not expect that lowballing and bargain hunting will yield them a cheap but high-quality product.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
Call the wahmbulance!
If you don't want your valuable employees poached, then pay them more than they'll make somewhere else, and make sure their work environment is good so they won't want to leave. It's that simple. You don't even need to pay the absolute max, you just have to be in the top 80% probably, and make sure that they like their job; not that many people will jump ship to a risky new job (where they might hate the work environment) for just a few $K more. But if your work environment sucks (because you have an "open plan work area", for instance), then expect people to leave as quickly as they get a better offer.
Lie on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
"Needs 5 years experience with Pascal." (edits resume to change C++ to Pascal). It's a catch-22 where they want people to have experience but they can't gain experience if they never needed Pascal previously. What former-sorority girls or fratboys - now HR people - don't comprehend is that if you are a programmer, you are a programmer. It matters not what language you are using.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you'd lose a wife because you couldn't get a new job quickly enough, then it was a gold-digger that wasn't worth keeping.
Re: O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Training! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:O RLY? (Score:0, Insightful)
How dare you demand a living wage.
Demand the sky. You won't get it. The smug sense of entitlement is problematic at best. The world owes you a living? Fat chance. Work or starve.
Re:Agree (Score:4, Insightful)
People with full-time jobs spend more waking time during the week with their coworkers than with anyone else, usually including their spouse (whom they presumably love and chose to spend their life with). I'd prefer those people to be ones I like.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
And it sounds like you used at least some of that time to expand your knowledge and skills, rather than do something half assed and boring. Doesn't sound like sloth to me.
Re:O RLY? (Score:0, Insightful)
I love bigoted left wing comments, which take the crack pot right wingers and assume that's the majority. There are crack pot left wingers too, which are just as awful as the previous AC, but in no way is he/she representative of the majority of right wingers.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think another piece of the problem is that raises are a lot more rare than they used to be. Especially in IT, you can't start in at barely-living wage and expect to be where you need to be in 5 years. Odds are, you'll be making the same wage (or possibly less) in 5 years. Thus, workers are now looking for the wage they want up front.
Re: O RLY? (Score:3, Insightful)
I would argue that the vast majority of IT positions do not need someone who would be a hot commodity in Silicon Valley. Sure, there probably is a real shortage at the very top; that's why it's the top, those people are rare! But any person of above-average intelligence can learn most IT jobs on the fly in a matter of weeks, given the chance. In 20 years in IT spanning a dozen or so jobs, I have gotten exactly one job for which I was fully qualified; the rest, I convinced the company that I could learn what I did not know. This is what changed sometime around 2007: that approach is useless now. It's not that I can no longer learn or demonstrate the point, it's that people aren't even talking to me. Most of the jobs I apply for (each one of which I have actual experience with), do not even contact me for an interview. Several of them are still not filled, either.
I don't know what system businesses are using to weed out candidates, but it is a bad one.
No one trains anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
In the olden days, you would hire someone at an entry position. They they would work with someone experienced who would both train and mentor the employee. At the end of the process, you had someone trained and ready for the position.
But some time ago, companies realized it was cheaper to poach from other companies. Let them do the training, then swoop in, and offer just enough to pry them away.
What we are seeing today is the end result when everyone poaches from other companies and no one is actually doing the training. For some reason, there's a lack of qualified people. DUH!
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Not sure how anyone can say that with a straight face, as Florida benefits ($275/wk) are less than 40 hours at minimum wage ($290/wk).
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
And more bullshit from managers trying to blame the employees for their incompetence.
The trend of Americans hopping jobs "easily", as you put it, is entirely the fault of management. There was a time when loyalty was valued, on both sides. You worked hard for the company, and the company would go to bat for you, and take care of you. Then management broke that, and told employees they can fornicate themselves with an iron stick. And now they're bitching that employees have no loyalty toward them anymore.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hell, it's not always about the money, either. Yes, you have to be competitive, but having a work environment that doesn't make workers want to kill themselves, and in fact makes them happy to show up to work is a huge part of it. And this is something that employers have great control over.
Poach, train, or whine (Score:5, Insightful)
The article pretty clearly states the real underlying problem: Companies strongly prefer hiring experienced people who are doing the exact same job, right now. But they are not owning up to the fact they may be poaching from a limited pool, because they and all their competitors are bidding for the same people. Obviously that will inevitably create a bidding war when the sector is doing well.
Investment in training people can help here -- that is the traditional answer. But companies are scared of that investment because their competitors will poach once the investment finally begins to really pay off, of course.
Now we come what we slashdotters see as the elephant in the room: the the H1B visas. The visa process is so long that provides a partial lock in, and therefore a measure of safety for the employers. Not only will many H1B visa candidates accept slightly lower salary offers, but they are more likely to accept lesser raises until they has their visa.
I do not feel strongly one way or another about more or fewer H1B visas. But it is clear that large companies have a powerful incentive to simply throw up their hands and claim they need more H1B visas, regardless of the underlying reality. They do not care if there is a thousand potential employees who be fabulous after 12 months of in house experience lining up on the street, clamoring for a chance.
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
I require nothing of the sort. But, if a company wants a loyal, long-term employee it will cost them money and effort. If they don't want to put in that effort I'm not going to shed tears for them. The broken system of cut-throat poaching is the one they created and perpetuated once loyalty was thrown out the window.
Re: O RLY? (Score:3, Insightful)
HR folks will assume by your experience that you'll think you're entitled to good pay.
It's not really explicit age-ism. It's just a corollary of what's being said elsewhere: they don't want to pay good wages. They don't really care whether you are good or not. They also want you to "fit in" with the "corporate culture". This means "don't be married and don't have kids and be willing to work insane hours". Anyone over a certain age is assumed not to fit that bill.
Well, in fairness, that doesn't apply to all (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Agree (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Training! (Score:5, Insightful)
So once again, the problem is entirely management's fault for making workers disposable in the first place.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whine when people want more pay, but WHINE when you cant hire people at insulting wages.
The market has a cure for that... those who can afford the skills requested get the employees who can provide them. You assume that the government is required for this... why?
When I went job-sniffing last year at this time, I had my pick of offers to choose from. I negotiated the offers I was interested in, and the one with the best mix of pay, culture, and benefits won. The ones who refused to budge upwards were discounted. The ones with a boiler-room culture were discounted. The ones with little/no benefits were discounted. The one I accepted wound up bumping by annual salary by almost $15k (before bonuses), the culture was very friendly, and the benefits were adequate for my needs.
Note that I never demanded or even desired that the government do it for me. I simply laid it out for those who had to keep looking. Whether they choose to do something about it or not (e.g. offer a better salary, benefits, etc) is their problem, not mine. If I were in a position where I had no choice, I would take whatever I could get until I could get something better, then pull the D-Ring on the current employer the moment I do find/get better. I've done that a few times before in my life, and I can do it again.
If the employer doesn't want to pay for the talent, the employer can do without.
Re:Lie on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
A programmer is not always a programmer.
For example, I would not expect someone with only experience in decades old mainframe cobol to be able to pick up a modern OO language and be productive in any decent time frame (if ever).
Learning is a constant challenge. Those that stop learning for a long period of time have a very difficult time re-engaging it. That's why I always keep up on everything, because if I stop learning then it will be very hard to jump the gap.
I would say someone who has several languages under their belt is a better candidate (if they don't already know the language) than someone who has only worked in one their entire life.
Re:O RLY? (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot- where over the top ideological quips are rated insightful.
FFS, you really think a TEA Party type or whoever you think you are parodying doesn't want living wages?
The geekverse just gets more insular and pig ignorant with every passing day.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
But the flip side is KNOWING our true worth, and being able to negotiate your own bill rate. If they don't want you...someone else will.
If you're good, there are jobs to be had..plenty of them.
In this day in age, however, you do need to be prepared to move to where the jobs are, or commute, etc...the day of one job, in one city for life have LONG been over.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't quite understand your logic. "You want a job? You're not entitled to a job. Go get a job, you hippy."
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly. Why do they imagine that, given the high unemployment numbers, people are turning down "good jobs at good wages"? Either we should assume those people are all independently wealthy and they're not interested in working, or we would have to guess that those workers believe that the jobs and wages are not good enough.
To me, these complaints read as, "Poor me, I can't find enough people to work like dogs at wages that will barely pay rent. Adding to my woes, the government won't let me import poor 3rd-world people who will work for table scraps. What a terrible world we live in that I might have to sacrifice my 4th summer house in order to pay enough money to get a qualified employee. Meanwhile, I'm going to complain about the education system, even though I have bribed public officials to cut education spending so I can have tax breaks. Poor, poor me."
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I don't think you understand how this works. (Score:5, Insightful)
"To conservolibertarians,"
I love that Libertarians have made such impressive political inroads that, in your obvious and abject fear of them, you resort to your reflexive "MY TEAM IS BETTER THAN THEIR TEAM" screed, and don't even realize that in combining "conservatives" and "libertarians" you're admitting you don't realize they're completely opposing idealogies.
Next time, save space and say "I have no fucking idea what Libertarianism is, and because I'm a partisan hack, it SKEEEERS ME! MY TEAM".
Re: O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
But it IS a bit disingenuous to claim a shortage every time wages creep above minimum wage. Especially when many of the people actually complaining make enough in one year for several families to retire on.
The hiring difficulties are entirely predictable and were , in fact, predicted. It's what happens when too many employers go offshore-crazy, eliminate entry level jobs entirely and start deliberately listing jobs with actually impossible requirements (10 years experience in something less than 5 years old, huh?).
Employers are just going to have to learn to be a bit more flexible. Offer telecommute. Offer for real 40 hours/week (not 80 for the price of 40) offer flex time. Quit trying to push good people into management or out the door at 45. Stop looking for a degree and start looking for people with the needed skills (there is far from a 1 to 1 correspondence there)
You personally may not be guilty of these sins, but so much of the industry is that it's assumed you will commit one or more of them until you prove otherwise. That's unfortunately what happens when employers forget that employment is a bi-directional agreement, not 'job creators' showering the unworthy rabble with manna from heaven.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
I love posts like yours that thinks an employer like me somehow owes something to qn employee
I love posts like yours where you somehow think you're entitled to decent workers, regardless of your pay. You're not.
Yes, you do owe stuff to your employees. If you want to keep the good ones, and not have to constantly scramble to replace them, then you do. Get over yourself.
Re:Well, in fairness, that doesn't apply to all (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, that's why you require that the developer stucks with a single language during his entire life, this way you filter the good ones out and prove your point that developers can't adopt new languages.
I don't understand why people see a problem with that.
Where to start? (Score:5, Insightful)
All those kids that used to live on family farms? Well let's school them to be good factory workers. That's not enough though, let's use the "no child left behind" notion to, not integrate every kid but rather, start lowering standards for every student. And why are we spending so much money on those inconsistent teachers with their different approaches to differing students. And get rid of teacher unions, which just work for livable salaries and benefits which are well below that of the typical CEO giving advice to newspaper transcribers (used to be journalists, now hardly even reporters).
Then, then! Let's eliminate those factory jobs we trained those students to obey without thinking or resenting too much by moving the factories to cheaper countries. Countries where pollution controls and labor laws are rarely practiced. And place them in tax-free zones so no taxes are wasted on schools and infrastructure and such. Yeah the local workers have crap lives, but it's slightly better than farm life, right? And those factory workers in the original country, the ones that lost their jobs? They can go back to school!
And those people that pursue higher education, especially the ones doing it for better jobs? Well let's make universities extremely expensive, so graduates are in debt and will take any job and abuse in order to start paying back loans. Especially their credit card loans, which were offered in hopes of burying them in 12-30% interest payments for life; in addition to the 1.5 to 3% the credit company skimmed off the top. There is a need for a few scientists to figure out what's really going on in the world, and to make new devices (to simplify jobs, reduce worker headcounts, and entertain the poor who can't afford a vacation). And a need for a few financial wizards (that since the 1970s have gained control of 1/3 of the US economy), but those can come from the 1% of already rich families which have about 50% of the country's wealth; and the occasional (H1-B?) computer mathematician who can figure the odds on stocks, nanosecond currency exchanges, and credit default swaps--and fix the laptop. And if those financiers screw up and the whole economic system crashes, there's always the regular taxpayer providing insurance (why is it called "bail outs?") to corporations and their executives, keeping the cash flowing. Those same corporate execs who whine about paying taxes even when they don't. Yeah the newspapers publish that once in a while, but no one changes the tax laws to be more fair; so the facts recede from memory and we can get back to blaming immigrants, teacher salaries, sexuality, skin shadings, religions, and other nationalities--and if someone investigates too honestly there's always "national defense" to end inquiries.
Well, the laws do get changed, mostly by corporate lobbyists, who want to decrease taxes on the rich, remove laws that are costly to corporations (no matter what the effect on people and the environment), and increasingly shift jobs that are performed fairly well by government (social security, healthcare, military, prisons, schools, water, energy, roads) to the private sector. The private sector, AKA corporations, where a select few can make big salaries, shareholders can get their dividends, and workers can be replaced by someone even more poorly off who's willing to work for rent and food money while doing without healthcare (that's what the ER is for, and credit cards, and payday loans). And to make the business profitable, why not reduce expenses like retirement, healthcare, living wages, long-term livable surroundings, education, clean water, cleaner energy, and reliable roads? It's just business, got to keep those shareholders from selling their stock. Nevermind the stakeholders or the public.
And those people with a bad job or no job, what about them? Well they're poor or homeless because of the schools. Obviously. We should implement vouchers for private sector schools, and start training children correctly.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's exactly what the AC was saying. "The world doesn't own you a living wage". Yeah? Well the world doesn't owe you competent employees either. Pay them excellently, or bitch and moan that you can't find good employees while you can't compete.
Why is it acceptable for companies to spout bullshit like "We can't find good employees," but the second a worker brings up needing to be paid a living wage, they're scorned as some entitled prick?
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
| |How dare you demand a living wage.
| Demand the sky. You won't get it. The smug sense of entitlement is problematic at best. The world owes you a
| living? Fat chance. Work or starve.
You're at least partly right, that feeling of entitlement is a BIG problem around here. But as long as we're attacking entitlement, let's be fair about it. If I'm not entitled to my low-6-figure job, then it may well follow that my CEO is not entitled to his 8-figure job. If that bad mortgage back before 2008 was the fault of the poor shmuck who didn't read and comprehend the fine print, then it may well follow that the mortgage investor who bought those too-good-to-be-true certificates deserves a share of the loss, too.
If the average American is no longer entitled to "The American Dream", the perhaps the 1% is no longer entitled to take all of the American Dream for themselves, either.
Re:Training! (Score:2, Insightful)
"Person A can earn potentially $80,000 a year for his company long term. However, in his first year, he'll only earn $20,000 for the company and cost $50,000 in lost earnings from having experienced workers train them. Now your studies show that even if you pay a person a package worth $80,000 a year, which will only break even for the person, he'll only stay 5 years on average. He may want to switch careers, go back to school, move somewhere else, start his own company, just try something different or any number of personal reasons."
In reality, Person A makes $20K a year, and 20K each year for the rest of his life because the boss is a scumbag and does not give out raises. OR have you missed how business has changed in the past 5 years.
This is why people jump ship, companies DONT GIVE RAISES, so the way to get one is to get another job.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
According to many, yes. The only non-communist viewpoint is to want to take all the money from everyone in the country and give it to the richest people. After all, the richest people are also the smartest, wisest, and most moral people in the country. How else do you think they got rich, if not by being the superior human beings?
Again, communism is a form of government, it is not an economic system. Socialism would strive to spread the wealth equally. What you are describing, however, with the wealth going up to the top is actually a form a fascism, which seems to be alive and well in the USA (even if the trains don't run on time).
Re:Lie on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
That's simple to solve. Given the option, nearly everybody prefers to not even think about their salary, and won't go job hunting for small gains. Thus, you make the results of job hunting to be small, and you are done.
You don't even need to pay the hightest salary around. You just make the work conditions good (that includes not working for sociopats) and the salary competitive. Yes, that includes giving raises that keep pace with the market, even if nobody asked for them.
The loyalty of people to the status quo is so strong, it is hard to understand how people belive that BS about employees not being loyal. You must subject people to an incredible amount of pain before they endure going through job interviews again, face HR again, risk everything again.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
I love bigoted left wing comments, which take the crack pot right wingers and assume that's the majority.
It's the same argument as with the muslims: if you don't want the extreme element of your organization to represent you, you should try being a little more vocal in your opposition when they spew their shit.
Re:Lie on your resume (Score:3, Insightful)
Why spend a lot of time and money training somebody who will get headhunted away as soon as they can check the experience box? But once everyone is expecting someone else to hire the fresh grads and finish training them up the game is over.
We probably can't return to the old 'company man' ways and it isn't even clear we want to. So we can't go back and we can't stay where we are either; so what next?
I'm sorry, but how is this difficult? If your well trained employees are easily headhunted away, you are either not paying them enough, or your job environment clearly is not as attractive as another company. Isn't this the law of supply and demand in action? Make sure that your experienced employees are compensated accordingly! Giving someone a 10% raise should not be an impossibility (rare, of course). Switching jobs, I've always increased my salary substantially, yet it is usually impossible to do so within the same company. I would have liked to have stayed at several of the jobs, but if they are unwilling to come close to what another company is willing to pay and then complain they can't find the right people...
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are jumping into the problem half way through. The real question to ask is why did the Bubble form in the first place? The Austrian school says it is because the government set the interest rates lower than the natural interest rate. In a free market economy borrowing can only come from savings. This is logical because assume your economy is based on acorns. You can't borrow someones acorns unless they saved them. But in the fractional reserve fiat money system we can create money and lend it out without creating the wealth. Fiat money separates the money from the actual thing of value.
So when the Federal Reserve creates below market rates it is telling the economy there is plenty of savings to borrow. This causes businesses to shift from producing consumer goods to capital goods. This means more people are put to work building productive capacity. But eventually the market adjusts to all of this new money. Prices rise and the true value of the money is revealed. Now there isn't enough money to buy the consumer goods because there aren't enough consumer goods because production was shifted to capital goods. Now many people working building capital goods have to be reallocated back to consumer goods.
Think of the problem this was. Assume acorns are food and money for a tribe. They then come up with a paper acorn that can be traded for acorns at the tribal acorn reserve. Then the bank starts cranking out more paper acorns than exist in the bank. For a while people think that times are great since we all must be working hard saving acorns. They can then think of the future like building an automated acorn harvester. So they stop harvesting acorns and get to work building the harvester. Half way through people notice that it's taking more paper acorns to buy other things. Now the reserves they thought they had is smaller. Eventually the tribal acorn reserves will vanish and people will have to abandon all projects and get back to harvesting acorns.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
An asset would accrue value & have to be maintained, resources not so much.
Poor hiring managers and HR (Score:5, Insightful)
There are basically 2 ways a company can hire. The old way, which is based on gut instinct. The interviewer reads your resume, meets you, and if they like you, you're hired. This method is fraught with problems that revolve around the basics of human nature. Someone with a weak handshake will almost never get hired. They are immediately seen as passive, slow, lazy. Someone that understands the system (like me) can thoroughly thwart the system by simple changing the subject during the interview. You talk about things that interest the interviewer. Their questions are ALL bad. Every question they ask is a question that is meant to in some way disqualify you. The more you can get them distracted from their questions, the better chances you have. Do they have a sports teams pin on? Pictures of their kids? You bring all of this up... they talk about everything but you and leave the interview with a warm/happy feeling about you.
Some businesses have recognized the inherent problems with human nature and tried to implement methods to get around them. Unfortunately these systems almost always involve scorecards of some sort. The hiring manager lists out the key skills he's looking for... this is the first problem, the managers expectations are almost always wildly over the top. Their asking for someone with a doctorate and they really need someone with a 2 year degree. The person conducting the interview basically scores you off of your resume. As well as on things like appearance, personality, etc... etc... The solution to this type of interview is rather simple... lie. Just flood your resume with technical data. The interviewer gets so overwhelmed they just score you high, irrelevant of your real skills. Always ware a suit. Suit = 10 points. Anything else is < 10 points. A firm handshake and confidence is easy to fake.
The simple fact of the matter is, it is impossible to judge someones ability to do the job you want them to do based on a resume and interview. A degree is slightly better, but as we all know the vast majority of people with those degrees have proven nothing more than that they are good at memorizing things for tests. Actually being competent in a working environment is something entirely different. The entire system is flawed to its core. Many people refuse to be misleading in their interview or on their resume and think that shows integrity... when all they really get shown is the door.
When employers hire people... they hire the people that aggressive at selling themselves as a product... People that are fluent and at ease in an interview. If that person also happens to be good at the job... great! Despite what many people think, if you bluff your way into a job your not qualified for, you don't just get fired immediately. The manager doesn't want to look like a fool for hiring the person and usually they can hang onto the job for as long as they'd like to. Raises and promotions are another thing.
The basic problem with the workforce today is employers have no idea what they need, and even if they did, they have no way of finding out who has the skills they actually do need. Simple as that.
Re:Lie on your resume (Score:5, Insightful)
The old work contract implied loyalty in both directions.
The old work contract was formed against the background of a strong labor movement, whereas nowadays most of the entertainment-addled high-schoolers think they are going to become the next Bill Gates.
Up to a point the company would be loyal to their more valuable workers
There's your clue right there on what's wrong and how to fix it: Workers already receive differing pay scales based on their skill sets. But your attitude suggests that the less valuable positions should also suffer an absence of loyalty from their employers (from everyone, actually, so worker solidarity would be nonexistent as indeed it is within most American work environments today).
I don't think the "most highly skilled" workers can have a thriving field to work within if that field exists within a society of expanding desperation and squalor. That is, unless the area of expertise is the kind sought after during a civil war.
Re:O RLY? (Score:4, Insightful)
More properly, neither side "owes" anything to the other - it's an employment *contract* for a reason.
It's fine for both sides to try and get as much as they can. It's when they start whining that no-one will take the short end of the stick that there's a problem.
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Speaking as someone who has managed his own finances well, I'm going to yell "moral hazard" here. That is, if my reward for not getting in over my head is to have my future tax money used to pay off the debt owed by those who did, then clearly I'm playing the game by the wrong rules -- I should simply get in as deep as I can and hope for a bailout.
Re:Lie on your resume (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't hard. Look, it's a market. You can get any kind of person you want, if you pay what it costs. They're just whining that they don't get the people they want for the price they wish for, but that's how -markets- work.
The article is spot-on: we don't talk of a "gold gap", you can buy any amount of gold you wish for, but you need to pay the market-price, which is the price that someone is willing to sell for, not the price you *wish* it would be.
I went to interviews at 3 other potential employers before selecting my current job. I'm sure they would claim that getting qualified employees is "hard", but in actual fact their only problem was that they where not willing to pay market-price. (hint: offering 70% of the salary of the best offer is not paying "market-price")
Skills that are in demand are expensive. What a shock !
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because I can hire an Eastern European, Indian, Oriental or Asian worker with a better work ethic with a living cost less than a quarter the fee I'd pay to an American and I don't even need to worry about employment contracts or benefits or anything. Right now more than half the programmers I use are foreign and I get better code from them for $500 a month than I did American and Canadian workers at 3k+ a month. Sorry, that's just reality.
Then why don't you move to their country and make a living? It has all the advantages, so go! What could be stopping you? Oh yeah, 20 percent of your current salary and no benefits. But as a consistent person, you're okay with your job being outsourced when that happens, right?
As we tramp down this road where we are reminded that the path to prosperity is through poverty, and that in order to make more, American workers must make less, and go without benefits, eventually what happens? Americans tried for years to keep up via using huge amounts of credit. Even as their wages remained stagnant, where the median income went up. That only works for a few years, then 2007 is the invertible result happens.
But the new normal is going to mean that the greedy, fat, and lazy American worker is not going to be purchasing as much - because they cannot afford to. Maybe they don't have a job, because the industrious and ethical non-Americans are allowing the stockholders to be serviced. Maybe they are working at a fast food joint. And maybe they are just paying half their now reduced wages for health insurance. Since we shifted to a consumer based economy from a manufacturing based economy, it does not look too good. But Perhaps we will all become managers?
So we might shift back to a manufacturing based economy? But there is that problem of pay. Maybe we could revitalize the consumer based economy. Not without a healthy middle class. We've already proven that via insane home prices and 50 year mortgages and maxing out credit cards, and the resulting crash which has to happen. People only live so long, Real Estate prices can only rise so high, and they can only have so much credit. You can't have a consumer based economy without consumers.
So what do we do? I fear the present endgame plan is to suck the economy dry, and then the wealthiest few will all renounce their citizenship and move to Hong Kong or Singapore. Your "reality" is our demise, it is as unsustainable as the million dollar 2 bedroom one bath ranch houses in California. And assuming that you aren't at the top, someday your salary and benefits will be excessive, and you will become redundant.