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America has a truck driver shortage

washingtonpost.com

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Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#171

Post by rgbrenner »

FooHentai wrote: post #165
rgbrenner wrote: post #4

If you're an employer and you cant find employees, the answer is virtually always to increase total compensation. Theres no reason $80k is the top end of the pay range for any job. The economy does not price jobs based on prestige, education level, or some other signal... that's a judgement made by certain people about what they think a job is worth.. not the market. The opinions of people about the worth of a job ar…

>If you're an employer and you cant find employees, the answer is virtually always to increase total compensation. Most cases I would guess this is true until you hit the point that the pay is enough to live comfortably. Then it changes. My partner was recently approached for a position offering compensation more than 200% of their current for the same work. However,the hiring process is exposing red flags hinting at…

Yes, thanks. This is why I wrote "total compensation" instead of wages. There are many forms of compensation: health insurance and other benefits; how nice the working environment is; how nice your boss is; the reputation of the firm (for example, the value of having google on your resume vs an unknown company); etc.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#173

Post by [deleted] »

shados wrote: post #164
rgbrenner wrote: post #4

If you're an employer and you cant find employees, the answer is virtually always to increase total compensation. Theres no reason $80k is the top end of the pay range for any job. The economy does not price jobs based on prestige, education level, or some other signal... that's a judgement made by certain people about what they think a job is worth.. not the market. The opinions of people about the worth of a job ar…

Depends on the profit margin in a field. Some industries have razor thin margins. Unless your competitors do the same as you do (and in some industries, your competitors are in other countries with different standards of living), you don't have a whole lot of choice. Software/SaaS is able to give ever increasing wages because of near infinite supply of investor money and/or insane profit margins (which won't last). S…

[deleted]

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#174

Post by devonkim »

djajshgsjja wrote: post #166
StudentStuff wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the nature of truck driving, the headline has been $100k/yr job without the need of a degree for years, but in actuality, only those who work very hard & cheat the books get close to that. Are you willing to drive while sleepy, break regs when the customer is demanding you drive longer to deliver their products (due to traffic delaying you or similar)? Its a really screwed up industry.

Just curious, how does cheating the books work for a driver?

The only one I’m familiar with is that you drive more than you report and that lets you take on more jobs. You’re not supposed to drive more than (for example) 14 hours / day for safety reasons but most drivers that pull six figures tend to have violated these laws fundamentally.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#176

Post by not_kurt_godel »

whatshisface wrote: post #141
haloux wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar story here. My brother drives the I-40 route from West Texas to Arizona. He had a short stint doing City of Industry to Stockton. Hated every second of driving through LA, Grapevine and anywhere north of Bakersfield. Food choices are pretty much the same considering you can't venture far off the interstate and its rare that there's anything good _right_ off the five.

Maybe this is a startup opportunity, take food from local restaurants and rendezvous it in bulk at truck stops.

That's interesting idea, but it'd be very challenging to scale. Most rural towns have far fewer restaurants compared to cities, and of those restaurants, a significant portion serve food that's not sufficiently different/better from gas station food to justify paying a premium for it. It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility to create an app that lets truckers queue up an order ahead of time - but even if you did, you're ultimately catering to a dying market/industry that'll inevitably disappear sooner rather than later.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#177

Post by lopmotr »

PedroBatista wrote: post #139
adrianN wrote: post #9

Becoming a truck driver currently doesn't seem a wise choice when self-driving trucks are on the horizon.

No robot or AI can deal with the dispatchers, lumpers and 95% of the loading/unloading sites. Ever! Humans can barely handle it.

AI has superhuman abilities at specific tasks and sub-human at others, so just because it's hard for a human doesn't say much about how AI could cope. What is it about those aspects of the job that you think makes it impossible for AI?

For perspective, 20 years ago, what would have been your opinion about bipedal robots walking on rough terrain, self driving cars, and classifying objects in realtime from a video stream? Would you have said "Yea, those things might happen, but certainly not parking a truck." What other tasks do you currently think might be possible with AI in future but we haven't achieved yet? Tasks of similar difficulty to the parts of truck driving you mentioned.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#179

Post by InfernalLogic »

MisterTea wrote: post #163
corodra wrote: post #88

At a rough point in my life, I was a truck driver for CR England and Knight Transportation for a few days short of 7 months. You don’t start at 80,000 a year. That’s such a lie. You make about 600 a week to start, roughly, depending if you get enough miles. You don’t get the good routes, staying in well populated areas like the i5 corridor, at first. You stay in the middle of no where Arizona, North Dakota, etc. You…

The guys I meet who are pulling in good money are all union vocational workers. We're talking dump trucks, cement mixers, sometimes roll off (dumpsters/skips), and the holy Grail: heavy haul. I know a guy in New Jersey who works for a well known hauling and rigging company. Makes 130k/yr. Small shop of a dozen guys, no one makes under a 100k, and home just about every night. But good luck getting into those shops. Cr…

I'm making way more money now as a dev contractor... but I do miss a lot of things about my 9-month stint in the IBEW. There were definitely dirt bags in the union, but there were more guys who had a real interest in taking care of their union brothers. That, and coming home tired with dirty hands felt way better than finally deciding to shut my computer off and go hang out with my family.

Re: America has a truck driver shortage

#180

Post by lopmotr »

PedroBatista wrote: post #161
FLUX-YOU wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? AI only being useful on highways is still useful -- if not still far off. Off-ramp the AI trucks into a huge ass parking lot where a human does the last mile(s).

Fair point, but most of the time that last mile is a very long mile ( double digits ) and includes many hours of waiting to get loaded/unloaded which can also be just a few minutes and once they're done they want you out of their property ASAP. Driving on the highway is not the only significant part of the job, far from it and I suspect some people are very enamoured by their dreams/greed mixed with the holy tech, ju…

> Efficiency gains on the existing tech + infrastructure will always win over revolutionary new tech.

That's just a gross exaggeration. Trains and cars were already new tech compared to horses, nuclear power vs coal power, diesel vs steam, steamships vs sailing ships, transistors vs vacuum tubes. Come on, history is full of revolutionary new tech surpassing incrementally improved old tech. It's unlikely that we're now at the end of the history of technology.

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