Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

361–370 of 400 posts

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

#361

Post by Mc_Big_G »

lj3 wrote: post #348
xenadu02 wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

When was this tried? I'm really interested in data that shows taxing the ultra-rich at the same rate as the middle class (~30%) and "clearly doesn't work"

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

#362

Post by [deleted] »

wheelerwj wrote: post #339
0xBABAD00C wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I've heard of several engineers at the bigger companies who make 7 figures, but basically they are not only engineers working on active projects but are also putting their names on patents.

[deleted]

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

#363

Post by quantumhobbit »

shortoncash wrote: post #264
quantumhobbit wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a pretty small secondary market and was recently advised by someone who knows what he is talking about to never accept less than $200/hr for contract work. That is the going rate around here and accepting less signals that you don't know what you are doing. Perhaps the $100/hr isn't as much as you think it is. More so if you are somewhere expensive like San Francisco or New York.

Can you hint at your market? I'm in a sizable market and my competitors are in the 125-150 range. I think I produce better work, but my first few major projects that lasted a few years are only now winding down and I'm out seeking new work. I'd like to experiment with different pricing strategies with the positive reputation I've accumulated.

I'm in Richmond VA.

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

#364

Post by rifung »

xyzzyz wrote: post #325
rifung wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know a single person at Google who makes less than $180k in total comp, and that includes new grads. I assume this is MTV/SVL/SFO/NYC? I'm sure you can find new grads who make less than that in other offices. At least I make less than that as an L3 in SEA

SEA is in pretty much the same bracket when it comes to compensation. I've heard some rumors that recent new hires have been getting less stock than people in the past. Are you also including bonus (15-20% of salary)?

Sadly, yes =[ Comes out to be ~150k total. Honestly I don't mind I feel I am lucky to work at Google =]

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

#365

Post by CyberDildonics »

vturner wrote: post #345
TuringNYC wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> until we actually open up the market for entry of new physicians there will be no solution

You do realize that tens of thousands of people graduate from med school every year and go on to do 6 years of residency where they make about $15 / hr right? Maybe the reason you don't hear 'popular media' talk about it is that they would look ridiculous.

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

#366

Post by surfmike »

stevenwoo wrote: post #149
surfmike wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 graduated from college 30 years ago and every engineering major at every state university I ever heard of had a coop program.

Yes and it would be great if they were extended to non-engineering majors. Also even in engineering co-ops are far from universal; at my university, not everyone did a co-op and many did only one. There would be a lot of value in people doing multiple co-ops (even 4 or more like Waterloo).

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

#367

Post by jldugger »

icebraining wrote: post #115
learc83 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In most cases, you don't want to take a job that's worth say $100k, but not $150k to an employer. Either the value you're bringing to the company is somewhere less than $50k, or the company is irrationally tied to not paying more than $100k.

So what if the value is less than $50k?

Then there's not a heck of a lot of room for error or raises. In a now deleted reddit thread someone was bitching that $150k for programmers was absurd, and they have all kinds of applicants, so nobody's worth that kind of money.

My rebuttal was pretty simple: major tech companies have profits per employee north of $100k. That's $100k in compensation left on the table, by companies reputed to be among the highest paying out there. In contrast, IBM has profits of $30k per person and is constantly in layoff mode. That's what happens when the value is less than $50k.

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

#368

Post by jldugger »

Nursie wrote: post #46
jdhn wrote: post #22

"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 wi…

Yup, see this all the time in the UK. 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 wh…

Just remind them that both The Office and the IT Crowd were British shows.

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

#369

Post by lj3 »

gozur88 wrote: post #336
ryandrake wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe. And these are people with highly specialized skillsets in addition to their software development skills - pattern recognition, for instance. You're not going to get a job like that because you know Python really well. Asking a software developer "Why aren't…

> I know people who are making mid six figures working for Google-tier companies. But I don't think there are very many of those kinds of people - hundreds, maybe.

This is the thing that annoys me the most about these conversations. Some people take a few outliers and use them as proof that the rest of the bell curve is [ bad at negotiating | incompetent | lazy ]. Drives me nuts. I can name several multimillionaire business owners. Nobody's going around saying your bootstrapped one man startup should be raking in multiple millions of dollars a year or there's something wrong with you.

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

#370

Post by klipt »

kspaans wrote: post #357
School-Cotton wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still don't get how there's any way holding it instead of selling it reduces taxes. If you sell on vest, you pay income tax and 0 capital gains. If you sell after vest, you pay the same amount of income tax, and possibly nonzero capital gains.

Yes, I think the clarification needed was that you can reduce capital gains tax rates but not income tax rates.

But you don't have to hold $company stock to do that. You can sell on vest for 0 capital gains, then buy diversified index funds and hold those long term.
Post reply on HN