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U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

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Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#341

Post by humanrebar »

aianus wrote: post #316
humanrebar wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about if it costs a 100$ per loaf of bread? If bread cost that much, we'd start eating more rice, pasta, and potatoes. We'd change our meal plan. Likewise, if the employees you need to hire to execute on your business plan are too expensive, you need to adjust your business plan. Maybe hire different kinds of employees, maybe pursue higher margin opportunities, maybe cut your losses and try something else.

> If bread cost that much, we'd start eating more rice, pasta, and potatoes. Or maybe we'd import bread from other countries where it goes for $5/loaf? Nah, let's just protect our virtuous $100/loaf domestic industry at all costs and blame the greedy consumers for being selfish and cheap ;) s/consumers/employers s/loaf/programmer-hour

I was under the assumption that the $100 price included the prices of imports.

At some point the analogy breaks down, since importing people isn't the same thing as importing things. The points were that these kinds of pricing shifts can and have happened before, reactions can be varied, and reactions usually affect things on the demand (i.e., employer) side of the equation.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#342

Post by humanrebar »

flachsechs wrote: post #274
humanrebar wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 There are tons of products that don't have a listed prices, just a "call our sales representatives". Heck, the job listings don't list salary expectations, even when they're cold calling you .

"call our sales representatives" means they'll tell you if you call. i'm guessing you never call, because you don't actually want to talk to anyone, which is exactly what they're trying to do: filter you out.

> they'll tell you if you call

...or they expect you to haggle. Or the price depends on who you are. Or the price depends on how close they are to getting their sales bonus.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#343

Post by etblg »

vacri wrote: post #326
dsr_ wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"here in Florida (a fairly low cost area)" Let's say you work in downtown Tampa and live 30-40 minutes away. You can get a 4 bedroom 2500 sq ft house for $350K. That's about 3 years salary for you. Now let's say you get a job at Facebook and want to find a similar house, about 30-40 minutes away. I think it will cost you upwards of $2M. You need to be making $670K or more to make housing the same fraction of your liv…

> to make housing the same fraction of your living expenses And when housing is the same fraction, the disposable income after that fraction is removed is far, far higher. As Bill Gates says, once you can afford the $30 burger, there's nowhere to get an even more expensive burger.

Bill Gates needs to update his quote, I don't think $30 is where burger-technology has topped out these days

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#344

Post by sidlls »

HeroOfAges wrote: post #238
Danihan wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why companies can't just hire a bunch of more "questionable" applicants at a lower rate, say $45k - $60k or so for junior devs in most cities. No need to spend much effort on the interview process, just make sure they can solve a couple standardized problems, and then "hire" them as contractors for a 90-day trial. Put them onto teams and throw them in the deep end, then get rid of all the ones who can't s…

Quite a few companies are doing exactly what you describe to fill dev positions. The real cost comes when the systems designed and built by those junior devs are so brittle it becomes very time consuming and expensive to add new features. Most of the time, however, those systems built by the junior devs are so buggy there's no time to build new features in any case because everyone is too busy dealing with issues in…

It isn't just junior devs. It's also senior ones with a sophisticated grasp of CS trivia and little expertise outside of it.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#345

Post by vturner »

TuringNYC wrote: post #333
tunetine wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because doctors have unlimited demand and are considered more highly skilled?

Doctors are a somewhat different case, at least in the US, because medical boards (per specialty) control supply by limiting the number of new doctors being trained (via annual limits on Residency seats.) It is more of a cartel in that respect. Imagine if we only trained 100 Java engineers a year and the existing Java engineers themselves decided on how many they train per year...that would be the analogy.

Totally off topic, but isn't it bizarre how our politicians nor anyone else in the overseeing agencies/industries can seem to understand why "healthcare" is so expensive...until we actually open up the market for entry of new physicians there will be no solution. Yet I never hear this in popular media.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#346

Post by imtringued »

stale2002 wrote: post #211
tunetine wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, and I'm not sure why. Maybe because doctors have unlimited demand and are considered more highly skilled?

How about 100$ bread? Is that a shortage? People literally starving to death, because they can't pay for food? But supply is meeting demand at that point, right?

Remember: The price of the good rises until it becomes profitable to produce more of the good or substitute the good with something else.

An economic shortage refers to a market failure and not a lack of resources and is only possible because of external factors like price controls, zoning laws, etc.

>There are almost always willing buyers at a lower-than-market-clearing price; the narrower technical definition doesn't consider failure to serve this demand as a "shortage", even if it would be described that way in a social or political context (which the simple model of supply and demand does not attempt to encompass).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shortage

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#347

Post by ianmcgowan »

flachsechs wrote: post #199
cynicalkane wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I know it's considered bad negotiation 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 try…

It's not crazy if you don't have a good idea of your market value. It's not "don't tell anyone what you want to be paid", it's "make the other side go first, just in case I'm wildly undervalued and the range is higher than I can imagine".

And I've been part of many enterprise software purchases where getting to a cost depends a lot on budget and perceived depth of pockets. Final prices are usually 50% of the first price you can drag out of the vendor, but I've seen up to 90% discounts.

You're right on both counts, as long as the market values are relatively well known to all parties. When it's murky, you're better off letting the other side go first. Sounds like you're very in touch with your own personal market value, so it's not an issue for you.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#348

Post by lj3 »

xenadu02 wrote: post #268
stale2002 wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If bread costs 100$ per loaf, and people are literally starving to death in the streets because they can't pay for food, is this just the "market clearing rate" for bread where supply is meeting demand, or is there a shortage of bread?

You could have a point if it cost $10 million to hire a senior competent software engineer. It does not. You could have a point if bread cost $75 to produce. It does not. Many of the companies complaining about a shortage of people are posting record profits. Workers are receiving the smallest share of the pie in many decades. In many cases this really is just stingy employers complaining because they want to keep mo…

> The solution is much higher taxes on the ultra-rich

I was with you up until this part. This has been tried for decades and it clearly doesn't work. What we need now are tax breaks specifically for small businesses. We want people to be able to work for themselves or work for somebody more willing to share more of the profits with their workers. More businesses willing to pay market rate means more employment, more competition and more pressure on the companies who like to underpay.

Neither idea (tax breaks for SMB, more taxes for rich) are going to happen anytime soon. Nobody with deep enough pockets to lobby for it would want either idea to become law.

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#349

Post by tristor »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #170
WalterSear wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until the entity with more power starts bending the rules of them game in their favour.

I always find this an interesting argument; while company foo has more power than a random job seeker, they certainly don't have more power than all the other companies seeking that employee. In order for companies to wield their supposed salary-depressing power there would have to be massive collusion. For an example of how (in)effective that is, look how much salaries increased while Apple Google et al were colludi…

There has been exactly this type of collusion in the past and I would argue it's still ongoing, just better covered up. http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

Re: U.S. Employers Struggle to Match Workers with Open Jobs

#350

Post by EliRivers »

Danihan wrote: post #210
lloyd-christmas wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's something I wrote on a different discussion about hiring: Imagine I cost my company $50 an hour in salary, and earn them $150 an hour (revenue of 3-5x salary is ballpark for most companies, we'll go for the low end for some perspective). As a senior dev, I have to sit in all the interviews of people potentially joining my team. Imagine we have 10 people that make it through the HR round. I have to participate…

I don't get why companies can't just hire a bunch of more "questionable" applicants at a lower rate, say $45k - $60k or so for junior devs in most cities. No need to spend much effort on the interview process, just make sure they can solve a couple standardized problems, and then "hire" them as contractors for a 90-day trial. Put them onto teams and throw them in the deep end, then get rid of all the ones who can't s…

I don't know how it is in your business, but if I was given a new batch of team members every 90 days in the expectation that 75% of them would be gone in three months, I would also be gone in three months.
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