Recently had a recruiter call me, interview me over the phone once, in-person once, and via skype once. The job seemed to be a great fit, the pay was there, everything seemed to be lined up. The recruiter called me again to tell me that they were going to be taking the next steps with me very shortly. A week of silence goes by, then another.
I email, inquiring about the position. "Oh, we gave that to someone we had been interviewing for months, but we'll keep you in mind for the future." Unprofessional disconnects and other encounters like this have taken place several times, in my experience. It turns out I knew the person who did get the job I was all but promised. After talking to them, the company had contacted them three days after its last interview with me, and the successful candidate had been asking for $10,000 dollars less and had less experience than myself. A month later, that candidate emailed me and told me they were let go for "being unable to meet the requirements of the position."
Anecdotal experience like this really makes me skeptical when I hear employers bemoaning that they cannot find employees. Can they really not find employees or good talent, or do they just not want to pay the wages that people are asking for?
I feel like there's two tiers of the software industry: those employable at AmaFaceGoogFlix or a competitor, and everyone else; but the "everyone else" is completely unaware that the first tier exists. It's like if minor league baseball had no idea about major league baseball.
You even see it on HN. Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal". $250k is honestly on the average-lowish end for a senior eng at a major SV company in 2017. Much of the industry is not only unaware of reality but refuses to believe in it. This includes real engineers who do real work at real companies and comment actively on Hacker News. $250k for a senior engineer is just completely outside their reality.
On my last job search, my best job offer was about 2x as high as the worst one. The guy who made the worst one--which was about 30-40% below my minimum stated range, depending on how you valued the equity, so he had been stringing me along, but anyway--he started arguing with me about my unrealistic expectations, and wouldn't stop talking until I told him I was going to hang up if he kept trying to talk me down.
I know it's considered bad negotiation, but if I can't figure out the salary range of a job opening, I'll name my requirements up front. Over 50% of the time the conversation ends there. I know at least twice people assumed I was over-highballing as part of some misguided negotiating tactic when I actually was a little conservative.
The main reason for this is RSU. The base salary at those companies is not much more than rest of industry. But at senior levels the RSU matches or exceeds the entire base salary.
Other companies have a hard time matching this. Startups try but the common wisdom now is to value those at zero. It seems only public traded companies stock is now considered as having value. And only public SV tech companies give these massive RSU to engineers. Other public companies don't do this. And they are not willing to match the RSU amounts with cash. It's possible this situation will only exist as long as this bull market. When the stock market bear comes, will these tech companies continue the massive RSU? And if not will they replace it with cash?
I'm in the first camp, and there are people who think we are ridiculously underpaid. "If you're so good, how come you haven't hit seven figures?" is something I've heard a couple of times already. So there is a tier above us too. Go figure...
Some are very well paid/employable/competent, but the vast majority are not. Many people think the job search should be like a normal/Gaussian distribution, most people rambling about the mean. But it's not that for the searcher nor the employer; the employees you want are to be paid on a power law, and the jobs you want are as a common as a power law.
Curiously, this works for populations of cities, star luminosity, start-up success, and many other things.
it's not. the more assertive you are with your compensation requirements, the more likely you are to get paid what you want.
i don't know where this crazy idea of "don't tell anyone what you want to be paid" came from, it sounds like some real amateur hour nonsense that will get you passed up in favor of someone who is more straight forward with the entire process.
imagine trying to buy a product or service, but nobody will tell you how much it costs, but instead tries to subtly hint that you should name your price.
> Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal".
That's the thing. On one side, you have people who at least have a bit of publicly available data to point to (although sure, one could point out flaws in salary.com and glassdoor.com). On the other side, you have random people saying "Bro, you're totally wrong, lots of people make $400k." Even if I didn't have a dog in this race, I know which side I'd believe.
I make exactly half of that here in Florida (a fairly low cost area) as a senior dev and my salary has definitely plateaued (and I haven't had a raise in a few years).
I know I make more than most of my peers and local recruiters scoff when I tell them my current pay (I had to talk my current employer up about $30k just to match my salary at my previous employer to get me to switch -- and they only did so because they were quite obviously desperate).
Who are the competitors to AmaFaceGoogFlix? I'm based out of nyc, and the common logic here is that dev salaries start maxing out in the 150-170 range. If you go to a hedge fund, you can get more, maybe pop 200. But for more than that? You have to go to AmaFaceGoogFlix.
That tier distinction is way too fluid in my experience to claim it as a real thing; a large (not small) number of people I know who've worked at or work at Google easily belong in the 'minor leagues', but it's just an over the top confidence even arrogance, often combined with a lot of years of sticking with tech, that got them their job. Seriously, a lot of mediocre developers if you add a bunch of years (or a post grad degree), maybe a month of leetcode if they haven't already, and double their ego can a get a job there. (New hires get assigned to the uncompetitive, boring projects at Google, so there's that negative compensation too).
Btw talking about total comp and not base salary is highly misleading. Yeah sure, by that standard with recent valuations I'm making >250k at a post Series A startup.
The latter, hands down. I quit college to startup an IT support company, and despite going back in spurts, never finished. I got quite a few jobs after I left the startup though, and in retrospect I think the primary factor that got me those jobs, despite my many years of expertise, was the fact that since I didn't have a degree they could pay me less vs most of the other candidates. The most recent one, that promised 6 month pay raise, turned into a year, then more, and finally, having spent at least a year working late nights and weekends salary exempt (no OT), getting the infrastructure out of enough technical debt that I no longer needed to work the excessive hours, the company tried to make me go hourly...
Companies simply don't want to pay what they should for the level of talent they want. They are trying to find the edge case that can still get the job done but that they can also underpay so they have more money for the company/execs.
For what it's worth, I quit the sysadmin game and am now pursuing my degree in data science using my GI Bill, which I think will compliment my many years of senior sysadmin knowledge quite well. I'm there to learn, and am very excited about my classes, but I have to admit, a large part of me just wants the degree so I don't suffer the same poor pay not having a degree set me up for, mainly through weakness in the negotiation process.
I generally agree with your premise, but wages are sticky, economically speaking. There might be a few people here who'd be okay with fluctuations of 10 or 20 percent in their salary on an annual basis, but by and large, most people would expect that there's not a decrease in their salary over time.
There are people here who'll do the work, do any work, for the right money.
Employers don't want to pay, though. You've seen those charts about productivity graphed against worker pay, and how for the last 40 years, the productivity has gone up while the worker pay has stayed mostly flat?
That's the problem.
And why pay more, when you can sink a tiny fraction of what you would be spending on labor, to fund a congressional campaign and have the laws changed in your favor?
If there's an answer to this besides unionization and better pro-worker laws, I'd love to hear it.
"They're just asking for the moon, and not expecting to pay very much for it," Cappelli says. "And as a result they [can't] find those people. Now that [doesn't] mean there was nobody to do the job; it just [means] that there was nobody at the price they were willing to pay."
In my opinion, this is the key paragraph in the article. I see this all the time when recruiters send me job postings, and they want someone with 5 years of experience for the salary of someone with 2 years of experience.
There is a shortage of workers in as much as there is a shortage of BMW 7-series sedans for under $30k. I looked everywhere at that price. Massive shortage.
This is true in certain cases, but not all. I just offered an unemployed family member (and recent computer science grad) a freelance opportunity worth $100 an hour to build out a simple e-commerce site. They didn't want the work.
I think part of the problem is that you can have a lot of "fun" these days for very cheap (video games, YouTube, etc). Maybe it's time for us to reexamine why people don't even want high-paying jobs.
But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.
Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.
If they need to fill this job and it is not worth the higher salary and it cannot be filled at this salary or lower then this job should not exist as a job: the owner of the company, the manager of the company, the HR person of the company can either do that job themselves or that job should be eliminated.
> I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended.
I always wondered why 50% of job listings were totally fake. "Selfish hiring practices" being the reason makes a lot more sense than "appearance of growth" that usually gets stated.
>But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.
In that case, something's got to give. Either the wage has to go up, or they'll have to accept the fact that they won't find anybody who's willing to work for that wage and the job will remain unfilled.
This is a great point. One can think of a job posting as a bid on the market. Not every bid results in trade. Similarly, not every job posting is a job, like your example demonstrated.
Businesses complain they can't find the skills they need, but what they mean is they can't the skills they need for a derisory price. Particularly in the UK there seems little appteciation that software is a valuable thing, created by professionals. Too often the MBA types consider it just another form of generic office work, and seek to pay in line with that. Then they wonder why the technical departments they put together are so incompetent...
Technical staff, even those with multiple degrees from Russell Group universities will always be treated as blue-collar by the management class, in the UK. Private or public sector is the same.
I occasionally peruse job listings for other countries (I'm in the US, but sometimes entertain delusions of emigrating). I came to the conclusion pretty quickly that the UK has got to be the absolute worst place in the western world to be a software developer.
I wonder if this is a hangover from the recession. Hiring managers expectations have been anchored to market conditions that simply don't exist anymore but which lasted so long that no one in hiring recognizes the issue.
In my opinion this have nothing to do with circumstances.
Companies that would prefer to pay less (that would be most of them) always say that there are not enough qualified people, they never complain that they have to pay too much.
If there are not enough qualified people the answer is obvious: allow more emigration or educate more people in the field faster.
The real goal is to reduce wages and improve profits.
If there was not enough qualified people wages would keep growing. So, yes, there are not enough qualified people for the wages that we would like, but this is always going to be the case.
In the same vein, employees never say they are overpaid.
It's just unfashionable to say that there is an inherent conflict between labour and capital.
That is NOTHING new. This was going on in 1990. Recruiters wanting you to pad your resume, "Oh you've only used x for 2 months, put it on your skills section!", and employers wanting you to be a DBA, network engineer, security engineer, Unix admin, developer and yet only pay you for one of those jobs.
This has been the norm. There has NEVER been a shortage of qualified American labor. The problem is, just like farm workers in California, everyone refuses to pay what Americans demand. So you get "let's just go hire some Indians at 20 cents on the dollar and have them beholden to us because we control their visa, and make them do all those jobs for one person's salary! Screw Americans! BRILLIANT!"
So there is no shortage of qualified American labor, corporate america just refuses to pay market rate for americans.
during my first real salaried job out of college, a coworker told me that they thought they could have done their work with nothing more than a high school education. that was true about my job as well.
companies have been spoiled with degreed employees who do routine coding and testing. in a lot of cases the degree is unnecessary.
but hiring processes can't break out of this pattern, this groupthink.
Oh I totally agree. I can't even tell you how many times I have had degreed folks or people with certification do the dumbest things that break stuff that someone who didn't go to college but spent age 8-25+ with computers, and hacking, and living technology come up and go, "um that breaks X because of Y".
I've always personally favored self taught over degrees.
I think this is totally right on. Additionally, I'd blame a big part of this problem on organizational refusal to hire and support remote employees. I am mentoring one person right now that could take jobs being offered in my city, but they live elsewhere in the country. Butts-in-seats management style is also part of the problem.
Indeed: here we see that the 'efficiency' of the market or its ability to solve problems as an organic optimzation machine is a myth. The market is a collection of many dictatorial kings of fiefdoms called small and large businesses, and it expresses the collective will of these kings. Theory says if there is a labor shortage that wages should go up, but the owning class does not wish to raise wages, rather they prefer to keep their proportion of the profit for themselves, and when theory conflicts with the will of the powerful, well...
"we still don't see lots of employers being willing to take people in right out of school and train them for jobs"
As a person that's only one year out of school with debts, I couldn't afford to be doing side projects when I was using all my free time to make sure I didn't miss a bill.
The tech sector is the worst at this. The skills we test for are the ones that can be figured out in about a month, and the ones we don't test for are the ones that need to be learned over a lifetime
Google and FB know this, the problem is that its far too inefficient for them to screen for those hard earned skills. The algorithms tests are pretty close to IQ tests that you can study for. For mass hiring of decently intelligent employees, they are actually very effective. Worst comes to worst, you put the bad employee on a PIP or boring project and just hire someone else. Large corporations have definitely thought through this.
In my mind this is screaming for apprenticeship programs like in Germany.[1][2] Companies need a more streamlined process to get employers early in their career so employees have the necessary training and then get promoted within. All the while employees get paid to learn and work.
This one-size-fits-all 4-year college track that every U.S. citizen is being pushed through is failing miserably.
Even for people who go to college, more work experience is a huge plus. Waterloo's coop system (4 months of school, 4 months of internship, repeated) provides a great mix of practical experience and academics. It would be great if all majors could have an experience like that.
I've heard great things about Waterloo's program. Just wanted to give a shout out to Northeastern for its coop system as well. I've learned tons of things on the job that I never would have come across in the classroom. Also, almost every student in every major participates in the program!
Rochester Institute of Technology has a similar program - Co-op experience. All students are required to complete a specific # of semester work experience before obtaining a degree.
I've heard often from employers that they love hiring RIT graduates because of this.
It was somewhat unbelievable how much my jobs working at Gamestop and Walmart helped in college when so many people around me had never worked a job in their life. Time to rethink minimum wage?
I know of an employer that has an apprenticeship program. They hire probably 20 or 30 master graduates in to it every semester. It's used as a holding pen for foreign student graduates on OPT while the company gets them an H1B visa. The apprenticeships require a masters degree but the work doesn't. This essentially guarantees they don't get any applicants that are citizens and also helps avoid the h1b dependent designation.
Insert comment about requiring 5 years of experience in a 3 year old language
HR gating really is the worst thing going in American hiring practices today.
"Do you have multiple years of experience with 99.9% of the skills listed as requirements, which only a handful of people in the country have? Yes, but I see that on our web form that you had to use to submit your resume you didn't check the box next to 'Degree in X', so you're automatically disqualified."
H.R. Interviewer: "Now Mike, may I call you Mike? Pope Julius II is looking for someone to paint the ceiling of the new Sistine chapel. Frankly, I passed on you initially because you didn't have any ceiling painting experience but I've been told to talk to you anyway.
To start, I'd like to ask you to take a test with some Egyptian art history questions..."
I've had a interview like this. It was for a web dev position at a local business, but the interviewer had used a copy/paste algorithms question from Leetcode that reeked of CTCI influence and "Google used it, so it must be good at filtering candidates".
Or in the software world...I see you have essentially built my exact company before and have tons of experience, but what I really need to know before I hire you is...Can you show me how many queens you can put on a chess board in code!
I suspect HR does gating because it works. HR’s goal is to fill the interview pipeline with as many “reasonable” candidates as possible. They can’t spend much time looking at each candidate since there’s so many. But if it sends down an obviously bad candidate, they’ll get yelled at. HR Gating is applying some naive statistical thinking. 80% of our employees have trait X. Therefore by filtering for trait X we increase the odds of sending reasonable candidates down the pipe. Filter by enough traits, and you’ll be sending only “reasonable” candidates through to the next stage. Cheap and rarely obviously wrong.
The problem, of course, is that trait X could be anything. Technology, trivia, personality, Microsoft Excel Whiz, X years of experience, Causation, correlation, it doesn’t matter. “Reasonable” does not mean “fair” or “logical” or “causative.” It’s just a statistical trick.
I suspect that the “CS Trivia Interview” is just a more nuanced version of this. Knowing now to invert a binary tree doesn’t make you a better programmer (no causation). But many good programmers happen to know how to do it (or want the job enough to learn it just to please you). So it’s an easier metric than trying to define what “good engineer” means.
I may be lucky, or I may be ignorant, but thus far not having a degree at all hasn't particularly impaired me.
I think it's interesting that there's nothing equivalent to a professional engineering qualification for software. Worst case, hiring people for a few months to do some software development and being able to say "They developed some software" would be a useful thing to look up rather than conducting the spanish whiteboard inquisition every time.
I think it's interesting that few/none of the "Technical hiring done right" startups I'm aware of deduplicate the process of attesting that a person can accomplish some software development. So far as I can tell, they outsource the process of screening, but they don't provide the same screening to multiple companies.
This is really not an exaggeration. When I was looking for android jobs a few jobs had requirements that only aosp google or amazon kindle people would really have.
Part of this comes from executives being taught to think of employees as expenses rather than assets. "Less money to employees = more money to me." This attitude is part of a larger systemic problem: A great deal of American business is now more about gaming the system than about building products. Take the VC money, build nothing, and cash out. Sell customer data to ad networks and cash out. SEO the hell out of that thing and cash out. Cook the books and cash out. Sell bundles of subprime loans and cash out. Buy your competitor, harvest its assets, kill their product, and cash out. Pump and dump and disappear. "What, you still have seed corn? Eat that shit!"
It's all just bullshit short-term arbitrage. It has nothing to do with adding value, which is what sustainable business is based on. It works well in an environment where such behavior is not punished, and where business executives are rewarded for "maximum profit in minimum time" and penalized for long-term thinking. It's certainly not sustainable, but alas, that's exactly where we are in the U.S.
An underrated comment. It sounds harsh, but It's institutionalized get-rich-quick. A lot of it is the hyper-focus on efficiency. Which gets interpreted as efficiency of time, which turns to "get money back out as quickly as possible". And as people look for faster and faster ways to get money out at some point the only route/scheme that can keep up is "create an illusion of value and sell that."
And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.
"Now, let’s review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That’s a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It’s just a matter of both sides accepting the market price."
But, when the price of other labor sources is cheaper (eg H1-B, interns, your nephew, etc), economics dictates that you should use those instead of the local population.
The solution, imo, is to raise the price of the other sources somehow. That way, the local population is cheaper.
If a company can find "other labor sources" then they really don't have a reason to say "we can't find labor".
Employers are saying "there is a shortage of workers" when what they really mean is "the market price for workers is more than we want to pay" or "we don't want to share more of the profits with the employees (who actually make the product) then we used to". To "fix" this, they want some sort of special treatment that will decrease the cost of employees - like being allowed to employ more indentured servants (H1-B) at below market rate.
Not in the US? I've heard this cited as a reason for very slow recovery in countries like France with strict firing/closure laws, yeah. But in an at-will state in the US, it's not so tough. Sure, firing 20% of your workforce will make the news, but if you're just firing bad employees you can do it on a rolling basis or otherwise avoid the issue.
You don't get to demand a free market out of one side of your mouth and complain about it from the other. When there is less supply and there is more demand prices generally go up.
Readit News
I email, inquiring about the position. "Oh, we gave that to someone we had been interviewing for months, but we'll keep you in mind for the future." Unprofessional disconnects and other encounters like this have taken place several times, in my experience. It turns out I knew the person who did get the job I was all but promised. After talking to them, the company had contacted them three days after its last interview with me, and the successful candidate had been asking for $10,000 dollars less and had less experience than myself. A month later, that candidate emailed me and told me they were let go for "being unable to meet the requirements of the position."
Anecdotal experience like this really makes me skeptical when I hear employers bemoaning that they cannot find employees. Can they really not find employees or good talent, or do they just not want to pay the wages that people are asking for?
You even see it on HN. Someone will come along and talk about how a senior dev at Google can expect $250k a year. You'll get two categories of replies: "I don't believe this at all, Glassdoor proves you are wrong, nobody I know makes that, blah blah" and "bro that is totally normal". $250k is honestly on the average-lowish end for a senior eng at a major SV company in 2017. Much of the industry is not only unaware of reality but refuses to believe in it. This includes real engineers who do real work at real companies and comment actively on Hacker News. $250k for a senior engineer is just completely outside their reality.
On my last job search, my best job offer was about 2x as high as the worst one. The guy who made the worst one--which was about 30-40% below my minimum stated range, depending on how you valued the equity, so he had been stringing me along, but anyway--he started arguing with me about my unrealistic expectations, and wouldn't stop talking until I told him I was going to hang up if he kept trying to talk me down.
I know it's considered bad negotiation, but if I can't figure out the salary range of a job opening, I'll name my requirements up front. Over 50% of the time the conversation ends there. I know at least twice people assumed I was over-highballing as part of some misguided negotiating tactic when I actually was a little conservative.
Other companies have a hard time matching this. Startups try but the common wisdom now is to value those at zero. It seems only public traded companies stock is now considered as having value. And only public SV tech companies give these massive RSU to engineers. Other public companies don't do this. And they are not willing to match the RSU amounts with cash. It's possible this situation will only exist as long as this bull market. When the stock market bear comes, will these tech companies continue the massive RSU? And if not will they replace it with cash?
Some are very well paid/employable/competent, but the vast majority are not. Many people think the job search should be like a normal/Gaussian distribution, most people rambling about the mean. But it's not that for the searcher nor the employer; the employees you want are to be paid on a power law, and the jobs you want are as a common as a power law.
Curiously, this works for populations of cities, star luminosity, start-up success, and many other things.
it's not. the more assertive you are with your compensation requirements, the more likely you are to get paid what you want.
i don't know where this crazy idea of "don't tell anyone what you want to be paid" came from, it sounds like some real amateur hour nonsense that will get you passed up in favor of someone who is more straight forward with the entire process.
imagine trying to buy a product or service, but nobody will tell you how much it costs, but instead tries to subtly hint that you should name your price.
That's the thing. On one side, you have people who at least have a bit of publicly available data to point to (although sure, one could point out flaws in salary.com and glassdoor.com). On the other side, you have random people saying "Bro, you're totally wrong, lots of people make $400k." Even if I didn't have a dog in this race, I know which side I'd believe.
I make exactly half of that here in Florida (a fairly low cost area) as a senior dev and my salary has definitely plateaued (and I haven't had a raise in a few years).
I know I make more than most of my peers and local recruiters scoff when I tell them my current pay (I had to talk my current employer up about $30k just to match my salary at my previous employer to get me to switch -- and they only did so because they were quite obviously desperate).
Btw talking about total comp and not base salary is highly misleading. Yeah sure, by that standard with recent valuations I'm making >250k at a post Series A startup.
Companies simply don't want to pay what they should for the level of talent they want. They are trying to find the edge case that can still get the job done but that they can also underpay so they have more money for the company/execs.
For what it's worth, I quit the sysadmin game and am now pursuing my degree in data science using my GI Bill, which I think will compliment my many years of senior sysadmin knowledge quite well. I'm there to learn, and am very excited about my classes, but I have to admit, a large part of me just wants the degree so I don't suffer the same poor pay not having a degree set me up for, mainly through weakness in the negotiation process.
That would be people eternally stuck in the Green Card queue.
There are people here who'll do the work, do any work, for the right money.
Employers don't want to pay, though. You've seen those charts about productivity graphed against worker pay, and how for the last 40 years, the productivity has gone up while the worker pay has stayed mostly flat?
That's the problem.
And why pay more, when you can sink a tiny fraction of what you would be spending on labor, to fund a congressional campaign and have the laws changed in your favor?
If there's an answer to this besides unionization and better pro-worker laws, I'd love to hear it.
Deleted Comment
Of course most companies are filled with people who don't get micro economics.
You should have another cup of coffee.
In my opinion, this is the key paragraph in the article. I see this all the time when recruiters send me job postings, and they want someone with 5 years of experience for the salary of someone with 2 years of experience.
How about if it costs a 100$ per loaf of bread?
I'd considered that to be a shortage. Even if supply is technically meeting demand.
I think part of the problem is that you can have a lot of "fun" these days for very cheap (video games, YouTube, etc). Maybe it's time for us to reexamine why people don't even want high-paying jobs.
Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.
As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?
I always wondered why 50% of job listings were totally fake. "Selfish hiring practices" being the reason makes a lot more sense than "appearance of growth" that usually gets stated.
In that case, something's got to give. Either the wage has to go up, or they'll have to accept the fact that they won't find anybody who's willing to work for that wage and the job will remain unfilled.
That would means the company is dysfunctional and only desperate people are going to join this wagon.
Businesses complain they can't find the skills they need, but what they mean is they can't the skills they need for a derisory price. Particularly in the UK there seems little appteciation that software is a valuable thing, created by professionals. Too often the MBA types consider it just another form of generic office work, and seek to pay in line with that. Then they wonder why the technical departments they put together are so incompetent...
Companies that would prefer to pay less (that would be most of them) always say that there are not enough qualified people, they never complain that they have to pay too much.
If there are not enough qualified people the answer is obvious: allow more emigration or educate more people in the field faster.
The real goal is to reduce wages and improve profits.
If there was not enough qualified people wages would keep growing. So, yes, there are not enough qualified people for the wages that we would like, but this is always going to be the case.
In the same vein, employees never say they are overpaid.
It's just unfashionable to say that there is an inherent conflict between labour and capital.
This has been the norm. There has NEVER been a shortage of qualified American labor. The problem is, just like farm workers in California, everyone refuses to pay what Americans demand. So you get "let's just go hire some Indians at 20 cents on the dollar and have them beholden to us because we control their visa, and make them do all those jobs for one person's salary! Screw Americans! BRILLIANT!"
So there is no shortage of qualified American labor, corporate america just refuses to pay market rate for americans.
companies have been spoiled with degreed employees who do routine coding and testing. in a lot of cases the degree is unnecessary.
but hiring processes can't break out of this pattern, this groupthink.
I've always personally favored self taught over degrees.
"we still don't see lots of employers being willing to take people in right out of school and train them for jobs"
As a person that's only one year out of school with debts, I couldn't afford to be doing side projects when I was using all my free time to make sure I didn't miss a bill.
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This one-size-fits-all 4-year college track that every U.S. citizen is being pushed through is failing miserably.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/10/why-ger...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apprenticeship#Germany
I've heard often from employers that they love hiring RIT graduates because of this.
HR gating really is the worst thing going in American hiring practices today.
"Do you have multiple years of experience with 99.9% of the skills listed as requirements, which only a handful of people in the country have? Yes, but I see that on our web form that you had to use to submit your resume you didn't check the box next to 'Degree in X', so you're automatically disqualified."
To start, I'd like to ask you to take a test with some Egyptian art history questions..."
The problem, of course, is that trait X could be anything. Technology, trivia, personality, Microsoft Excel Whiz, X years of experience, Causation, correlation, it doesn’t matter. “Reasonable” does not mean “fair” or “logical” or “causative.” It’s just a statistical trick.
I suspect that the “CS Trivia Interview” is just a more nuanced version of this. Knowing now to invert a binary tree doesn’t make you a better programmer (no causation). But many good programmers happen to know how to do it (or want the job enough to learn it just to please you). So it’s an easier metric than trying to define what “good engineer” means.
I think it's interesting that there's nothing equivalent to a professional engineering qualification for software. Worst case, hiring people for a few months to do some software development and being able to say "They developed some software" would be a useful thing to look up rather than conducting the spanish whiteboard inquisition every time.
It's all just bullshit short-term arbitrage. It has nothing to do with adding value, which is what sustainable business is based on. It works well in an environment where such behavior is not punished, and where business executives are rewarded for "maximum profit in minimum time" and penalized for long-term thinking. It's certainly not sustainable, but alas, that's exactly where we are in the U.S.
And all of this is a drain for society, not a net plus. Even though you'll inevitably hear the argument "Creating an illusion of value has societal value. Obviously it does, otherwise people wouldn't pay for it." A which point you're reaching peak irony. And then you begin the inevitable arms race of smarter minds working on better ways to hide the illusions, and smarter minds on the otherside working on better ways to sniff them out. This is pretty mucb equivalent to having your best and brightest optimize better ways to predict horsetrack betting (but at least in that case if an Einstein invents an accurate weather prediction machine that value is transferable to society at large). These minds are bust develiping non-useful, non-transferrable non-useful abilities instead of becoming the next Elon Musk. It's a train wreck in slow motion, but those on the inside are so deep in it they're unable to see it.
"Now, let’s review some microeconomics. In a free market, it is almost axiomatic that the market always clears. That’s a technical term that means that when somebody tries to sell something, if they are willing to accept the market price, they will be able to sell it, and when somebody wants to buy something, if they are willing to pay the market price, they will be able to buy it. It’s just a matter of both sides accepting the market price."
The solution, imo, is to raise the price of the other sources somehow. That way, the local population is cheaper.
Employers are saying "there is a shortage of workers" when what they really mean is "the market price for workers is more than we want to pay" or "we don't want to share more of the profits with the employees (who actually make the product) then we used to". To "fix" this, they want some sort of special treatment that will decrease the cost of employees - like being allowed to employ more indentured servants (H1-B) at below market rate.
There, I solved it for every single one of the "struggling" employers. Money is a proxy for everything.
Although mediocre employees can often become great employees with some training and coaching.
Not in the US? I've heard this cited as a reason for very slow recovery in countries like France with strict firing/closure laws, yeah. But in an at-will state in the US, it's not so tough. Sure, firing 20% of your workforce will make the news, but if you're just firing bad employees you can do it on a rolling basis or otherwise avoid the issue.
Huh?