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Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

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Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#91
post #85
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, "make themselves qualified" to be good electrical engineers or even software engineers takes on the order of 10-15 years. If tomorrow every electrical engineer salary went 10 times higher, supply would still take 10 years to improve.

Then the employers better get busy raising salaries now, right? This situation has been created by the employers. They've held salaries down, they've refused to give raises at all (which is why everyone changes jobs every few years, so they can get back to "market rate" instead of their salary being stuck at whatever they were hired at + minuscule cost-of-living raises), and they've had massive layoffs constantly. It…

I agree with you despite the level of skill its still requires alot of continual learning and mobility. However, it takes alot longer to become a doctor than a software dev, as in more required schooling.

Here are a few other things to consider about comparing software to doctor/medicine industry

1. The rate of change of which human biology changes is alot smaller than the rate of which technology changes, and this is a pretty obvious thing to know going in to either of these industries, so complaining about the continual learning curve I don't have much sympathy for here.

2. Doctors experience their fair share of misery as well

a. Doctors are one of the professions most in shortage in the U.S. as well as almost every other country, despite this acceptance rates into med school is insanely competetive, way moreso than a large tech company, and worse, to even apply to med school requires schooling from an official college, in an environment where college tuition has increased 500% relative to inflation in the past decade.

That means the majority of people paying 500% more to get enough school to apply to med school don't even have the opportunity to pursue their profession of choice, and experience competitiveness at an entirely different level, and are left with lots of college debt and forced to find an alternate profession.

For those who do make it, its another 10 years of school, and often not even the option to choose which genre of medicine you can go into.

99% of Doctors are happy to finally be a doctor and work anywhere, and most people who wanted to be doctors never got accepted into med school.

With software engineering, while alot of devs went to college, its not required by any means, and you can realistically learn for free never go to college and be a software dev.

Additionally, if you dont get into the top whatever elite tech firms and have bragworthy employment, you can get a job as a software engiener making a min $60k at literally almost any city in the United States, and most industrialized places in the world, it just may not be the job you want, but usually there is a large healthy range of software employment between working a low end sys admin job at a healthcare firm for $90k without having to ever increase learning skills, or working for the top 5 tech firms.

Maybe a more accurate comparison is Doctors who went to ivy leagues and have paid off their debt, and their quality of life compared to the amount of work a software engineer at amazon has to do to coninually stay at cutting edge, but your kind of mildly glazing over the 15+ years of academia and hundreds of thousands of dollarsd of tuition doctors invested before they had stable lives, after inching into the acceptance of a med school where the acceptance rate is multiple times lower than those who actually interview and get turned away from top 5 tech firms.

Youre also glazing over the level of responsibility, in 99% of cases, when a software engineer makes a mistake, someones life may not be a stake. The ability for a software dev to have impact and have their work be exposed and touch and improve is higher than a doctor, but the consequences of a doctor making one mistake is almost infinitely higher than a software engineer.

In addition, you practice under a liscense, and can be sued for malpractice. If you make a mistake as a software engineer, you may get fired, but not always and will be employable elsewhere.

You cannot rebase a github push origin master a heart transplant, or a shot, or helping giving birth to new life. If you mess up, you can't ever practice medicine again.

In addition, doctors usually have to start their own practices, so they have to be their own entrepreneurs very often much like lawyers. While software engineers can do this for free with no school or liscensing and no risk of malpractice if its in the hot field of social apps for example, you can easily work for other companies your whole life.

I just don't see the comparison between the two, or the sense of entitlement you have that being an employee at Amazon offers the stable benefits a doctor has after 20 years of schooling and paying off loans and establishing an independently run office.

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#92
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, "make themselves qualified" to be good electrical engineers or even software engineers takes on the order of 10-15 years. If tomorrow every electrical engineer salary went 10 times higher, supply would still take 10 years to improve.

Electrical Engineer true. Software Dev though? I just googledo nline 30 seconds ago and theres free courses titled "Free online course to learn Tensorflow" "same for Elastic Search" "intro to VR" "Intro to Python" "App dev" etc...these are all free and accessible to the same people who work at coffee shops and browse twitter and facebook..... So would it take 10 years for these people to learn the skills? I think the…

Hm, I'm a software engineer with nearly 10 years of experience but to get a job not in web development I estimate it would take at least 6 months of nights and weekends on a skill area such as machine learning, data science, distributed systems, data engineering, etc to be qualified in the eyes of employers.

It's quite difficult to demonstrate qualifications to employers, I specialize in type theory and devote my nights and weekends to that. I've been doing this for a year but still have been rejected for every single typed programming job in NYC. I admit I am mentally slow, but I am willing to put in the work.

My point is you are trivializing the effort. Often we are competing against people with better minds/bodies, better home environments, better support networks, etc. The advantages build on each other. Yeah we fucked up in high school or earlier because we just didn't know. I suppose it is fair that we will pay the price the rest of our lives. Oh well.

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#93
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, remember that not all "high skill" jobs are coding/SW. We just aren't graduating enough skilled welders, CNC machinists, metrologists, mechanics. These jobs DO count as skilled, and are in short supply.

Its true. I worked in the semiconductor industry where they retrain coal plant workers and up the pay to grab techs from navy subamarines to get them working in high tech manufsctoring plants. They dish out money to relocate them, buy out their mortages to help relocate, send them to training/tech school, and the many techs who worked under me on my team made $170k + a year being one of maybe a handful of people in t…

I find your post fascinating! Can you give us a list of specific skills that were most critical to the jobs of these people you managed?

I have a 16 year old son who already has 4 years experience with combat robotics team, 2 years experience with VEX robotics competition and will attend community college his final 2 years of high school. He will most likely graduate with a 2 year Associates degree at the same time as he graduates from high school.

On the practical side he is somewhere between beginner and intermediate in skill with SolidWorks, has done a bit of CNC machining, a little welding and electrical wiring. And, they get a good amount of experience troubleshooting and repairing under time pressure during competitions.

I am always on the lookout for career paths forward for my kids. Would love to hear a bit more about the skills and work of this team.

Thanks

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#94
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, "make themselves qualified" to be good electrical engineers or even software engineers takes on the order of 10-15 years. If tomorrow every electrical engineer salary went 10 times higher, supply would still take 10 years to improve.

Electrical Engineer true. Software Dev though? I just googledo nline 30 seconds ago and theres free courses titled "Free online course to learn Tensorflow" "same for Elastic Search" "intro to VR" "Intro to Python" "App dev" etc...these are all free and accessible to the same people who work at coffee shops and browse twitter and facebook..... So would it take 10 years for these people to learn the skills? I think the…

Like most people pushing the "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" mantra, you're vastly underestimating the cost of education, particularly of adult re-education.

Yes, the answer is, it takes at minimum several years for a person working in the food industry to be anywhere reasonably close to being called competent in software engineering, because it requires you to change your entire way of thinking about problems.

In many cases it's flat out impossible, given that those people work full time. If your work is not in the same field, performing the mental shift to learning something in-depth in an unrelated field is extremely cognitively costly.

Another thing to keep in mind, many people working low wage jobs have families to take care of, which means even less time devoted to learning. In those cases, yes, it could probably take a decade for them to learn.

And considering how fast-paced tech is, it's likely their knowledge will be outdated by the time they would actually finish the self-learning process.

> Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.

You're right, it's a good start. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue of how costly the education process is on behalf of the learner. These companies "disrupt" by reducing transaction costs, but the cost of the good itself remains prohibitively high.

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you were given 25 million dollars you would automagically make obscene amounts of money with no effort? History shows otherwise with a very high rate of bankruptcies from lottery winners.

Yes, one could put it in an S&P index fund and by all historical trends, they would make an average of 2 million per year (8%) without doing anything. That is an obscene amount of money. Or if you're more conservative, you could put it in bonds and still be making many times the average salary, still without doing anything. (And lottery participants are highly likely to be less well informed about managing money, sin…

You're not factoring in market timing and drawdowns. Average is great if you're living 10 lives at 10 different moments in history, but we only get one.

Put 25 million in the S&P 500 (qqq) in March of 2000 and draw 2 million a year on it. You are out of money inside of 4 years.

There is no 100% safe place to stick that much money and live off of it. The world is too dynamic and it takes real skill and work to make money work for you.

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#96

Real wages are rising (in fact one of the better periods since the 1980's): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q It's a complex topic but a click-bait-y title. It's basically looking at nominal wage growth and comparing it to periods where we had higher inflation. It's poor journalism (potentially intentionally misleading?) to not focus on real wages.

I'm a complete layman, but I've heard an economist say something different about real wage rising. Doing some searches, I think making that conclusion might also be misleading. Here's some of the stuff I found out:

- There was a recession in 1980s , so it's shouldn't be used as comparison point

- If you look at inflation adjusted historic data: http://web.stanford.edu/class/polisci120a/immigration/Median... - in 2000 adjusted, there hasn't been any increase since 1970s. Since 1970s it's been ~40k in 2000's dollar. Using this: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ shows - ~40k in 2000 is 56.8k in today's money. Looking at real wages for in recent times https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N - the last (2015) data shows: 56.5k So, it looks like real wages hasn't grown at all in recent history.

Note that I went looking for info to match what I've heard an economist say on youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-uRhZ_p-BM4Pei6Xlr_A... (episode 4 is most relevant to current topic)

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#97
post #80
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree that there is a ruling class, and that they extract an obscene amount of rent just because they can. I also happen to think they create a ton of value. I just don't believe that justifies them making us 'human capital'.

> I also happen to think they create a ton of value. That others couldn't? You don't need to be ruling or vampire to create value. Just to be innovative.

"The people who rule create a lot of value"

not

"We need exploitative rulers in order to create that value"

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#98
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really because you can have constant unemployment as the situation becomes worse. Or a rise in unemployment while the situation improves. At best it allows you to compare snapshots in identical situations over very short time periods assuming nothing significant is going on.

It's a perfectly good statistic for economists, because they know those limitations. There are lots of other measures for wages, labor participation, etc, and 'unemployment' does capture useful info about the ease of finding a job after you leave a previous one. It's just abused in the public sphere as a whole-story statistic.

It is perfectly good statistic for POLITICIANS because 4.4% uneployment rate does sound much better that 22.1% reported by ShadowStats. Former is typical for rich (e.g. G-7) countries, latter would make US look like 3rd world country in that regard.

You might be right that it does capture info about how hard it is to find a new job as the software developer, or a lawyer, but tells almost nothing about blue collar jobs.

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jazzyk was hinting that - with enough pay, people will do what they can to make themselves qualified. There's also the option of choosing the best people they get and start training them internally to make them qualified.

I get what youre saying logicially and in general I don't disagree with you, but I want to pose a new way of thinking about this that may be unique to times previous and see what people think, because its a forming idea in my head, and I'm not sure its somethign I've settled on yet in general With software engineering specifically, given the amount of people who have access to the internet, lets say like unemployed y…

I've personally experienced working with a junior dev who changed careers into development, had a desire to learn but just couldn't grasp the logical concept of development.

I've also seen self taught developers - mostly "database developers" - who had the aptitude to break problems down logically and get something working but their code was unmaintanable except by them (barely), didn't scale, and required manual intervention for failure cases.

On the other hand, I've known plenty of business analysts who spend most of their time documenting processing and working with customers who could easily move into development. They seem to have a natural aptitude when it comes to breaking problems down logically.

Some people just can't learn to code. Their mind doesn't operate that way. No one would ever say that why don't people learn how to sing or play sports because those can be high paying careers, because most people understand that not everyone has the natural talent to do so. Why does everyone think that anyone can learn how to be a developer?

Re: Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?

#100

Real wages are rising (in fact one of the better periods since the 1980's): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q It's a complex topic but a click-bait-y title. It's basically looking at nominal wage growth and comparing it to periods where we had higher inflation. It's poor journalism (potentially intentionally misleading?) to not focus on real wages.

If you adjust that number using the labor force participation rate, you'll get that the real wages have been stagnant since the 1980s, which is to say they haven't risen at all, especially when you consider the gains in output.
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