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

381–390 of 400 posts

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

#381

Post by skookum »

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.

There is no clarification to be made. There is no way to reduce taxes on RSUs by holding onto them longer. When $100 of RSUs vest, you get taxed on $100 of income. You can either keep the stock or immediately sell it with no further tax event related to that initial $100 whichever of the two options you choose. If you keep the stock, it is equivalent to having bought $100 of stock at that instant. Psychology aside, the hold versus sell-on-vest decision should be predicated entirely on whether you would have bought that amount of stock with your own cash at its vest price.

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

#382

Post by kartickv »

notyourday wrote: post #39
kartickv wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. A…

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.

There's a range of salaries for a given level of competence. I found one candidate earning ₹4 lac a year who was way more competent than another earning ₹14 lac a year. That's a 3x variation. So, no harm keeping it open for a while to see if it can be filled.

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

#383

Post by kartickv »

learc83 wrote: post #110
icebraining wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does that follow? You seem to be assuming a lot. If they're peripheral, optional tasks, like an extra service you could upsell to your clients for a small margin, it may not provide enough income for a market-level salary.

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.

Unless you're currently making $50K, in which case why would you turn down a 100% raise?

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

#384

Post by Eridrus »

humanrebar wrote: post #272
coredog64 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> ...most people would expect that there's not a decrease in their salary over time. So why don't companies give more aggressive bonuses then? It would help with retention if nothing else.

Unless you have a good track record of awarding bonuses people are skeptical that you will actually pay bonuses.

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

#385

Post by kartickv »

It's possible for there to be a shortage of people AND millions of unemployed people if they're unskilled.

That's certainly the case in India, where the majority of "software engineers" can't tell me the maximum value an 8-bit integer can have, or claim that an object's instance variables can continue to exist after the object gets deallocated. One clown even wrote an if statement with two else clauses, the second one "just in case the first doesn't execute".

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/education/story/engineering-emp...

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

#386

Post by skookum »

eikenberry wrote: post #312
jcadam wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps somewhere in between. While $250k sounds high for a pure code-slinger, I'm willing to believe a few companies (Google, Microsoft, et. al.) choose to pay a small number of their top devs that kind of money. On the other hand, competition for dev jobs in general is so fierce (as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin) that I can't imagine it would be difficult to fill those same posi…

> On the other hand, competition for dev jobs in general is so fierce (as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin) This is so much the exact opposite of everything I've experienced that I have a hard time believing it. Finding good developers is near impossible, we regularly interview people for months before finding someone halfway decent. And the last time I looked for work I had several…

I agree fully. It may look like there's fierce competition to someone who has failed repeatedly, but here's what it looks like from the inside: In my experience at three of the big tech companies, we extend offers to everyone who meets the bar. It's never a case of "we have 3 strong candidates, so which one do we choose?". If we have 3 strong candidates at the same time, we attempt to hire all 3 - attempt meaning in competition with other potential employers. If we have 3 weak candidates, we don't settle for the best of the current options - we hire 0 and we wait for more candidates. If you're not getting hired at AmaMicroGoogBook it's not because there's a surplus of great SDEs and some other candidates edged you out for a limited number of seats - it's because you simply didn't make the hiring bar.

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

#387

Post by learc83 »

kartickv wrote: post #383
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.

Unless you're currently making $50K, in which case why would you turn down a 100% raise?

If your choice is only between your current $50k job and the $100k job then of course.

For most people looking at a $100k a year job, that's not the case.

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

#388

Post by greglindahl »

mrep wrote: post #380
stale2002 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And now to bring things full circle, if tech salaries are very high, doesn't this ALSO imply a shortage of programmers, as demand is far outstripping supply?

Shortages are irrespective of the severity of price. Shortages imply their is enough demand that normally price would increase to match supply at a given price point but cannot due to outside forces such as price controls. What you and a bunch of other people confuse as a shortage is just basic market dynamics. Price is high but costs are also high (not a lot of people are willing and capable of being programmers). C…

That is a terrible example. Above a certain wage, jobs disappear because there is not enough value created to pay a higher wage. That's quite different from a consumer buying a luxury good.

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

#389

Post by mrep »

greglindahl wrote: post #388
mrep wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shortages are irrespective of the severity of price. Shortages imply their is enough demand that normally price would increase to match supply at a given price point but cannot due to outside forces such as price controls. What you and a bunch of other people confuse as a shortage is just basic market dynamics. Price is high but costs are also high (not a lot of people are willing and capable of being programmers). C…

That is a terrible example. Above a certain wage, jobs disappear because there is not enough value created to pay a higher wage. That's quite different from a consumer buying a luxury good.

> Above a certain wage, jobs disappear because there is not enough value created to pay a higher wage.

Exactly my point! Economists don't call situations where costs (wages for developers) exceed what the market will pay (value created) "shortages".

Whether a good is "luxury" or not makes no difference.

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

#390

Post by QuercusMax »

skookum wrote: post #386
eikenberry wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, competition for dev jobs in general is so fierce (as in the supply of great devs outstrips the demand by a large margin) This is so much the exact opposite of everything I've experienced that I have a hard time believing it. Finding good developers is near impossible, we regularly interview people for months before finding someone halfway decent. And the last time I looked for work I had several…

I agree fully. It may look like there's fierce competition to someone who has failed repeatedly, but here's what it looks like from the inside: In my experience at three of the big tech companies, we extend offers to everyone who meets the bar. It's never a case of "we have 3 strong candidates, so which one do we choose?". If we have 3 strong candidates at the same time, we attempt to hire all 3 - attempt meaning in…

Absolutely true. Of those I've interviewed at Alphabet, only about 1 in 7 has gotten an offer. You'd be surprised how many people do really terribly in onsite interviews. Phone screens are even worse.

Where I used to work in the Midwest, we tried to have a similar hiring bar, but just couldn't get as many people. The best we hired were as good as anyone I've worked with in SV, but the worst... well, I won't get into that.

Post reply on HN