Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more • Hacker News Board

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#191

Post by JTbane » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

swebs wrote: post #147

wolfgke wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All tech companies in Finland are like "We can't find enough competent coders!" and newspapers are publishing that as is. To me, if a tech company claims in a newspaper that it cannot find competent coders, to me it says that they are uncapable of detecting talent. Which means "we have a really incompetent human ressource team". This is clearly not something that I would like journalists to print if I were a compan…

>To me, if a tech company claims in a newspaper that it cannot find competent coders, to me it says that they are uncapable of detecting talent. Nah, you see the pattern in pretty much every first world country. 1. Government makes law protecting citizens saying companies must hire local unless as a last resort 2. Big tech companies post job listings with unreasonable qualification requirements, while offering wages…

100% agree. It's all about the money.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#192

Post by niyikiza » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:50 PM UTC

HenryBemis wrote: post #14

Talyen42 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The average person spends almost exactly as much as they make as income rises. It's a hedonic treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

For anyone who hasn’t already, I would strongly suggest that you read/listen the “Rich Dad, Poor Dad”. It speaks of the “Rat Race”, where once you increase your income by a fraction, you almost immediately and subconsciously adjust your needs to absorb that increase. I think this is one of the books that everyone over the age of 15-17 should read as it gives a crash-course on the fine art of making money. This book,…

Any good books or articles on minimalism you'd recommend?

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#193

Post by habaryu » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

At the end of the article, there's a link to a Cardiff Garcia's post showing how the workers shortage headlines are repeated over and over. https://threader.app/thread/1014944737978175488

It'd be funny to change some of them and show the problem as being caused by the companies. Instead of "Great job openings, no candidates" it could be "Great skilled workforce, no employers". https://money.cnn.com/2009/11/03/news/economy/jobs_sit_open/...

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#194

Post by qaq » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:51 PM UTC

na85 wrote: post #127

jermaustin1 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do contract webdev work for a multi-national in the middle of nowhere in Connecticut. The london office posted a job that is exactly what I do but is paid 5 times less. At the Edinburgh office, 7 times less. Same company, same upper-upper-upper management, but VASTLY different pay scales. Its nuts to think about, especially when I can rent a full 3 bed/3 bath house with basement and garage for about 2 times less th…

Part of that cost of rental is location. London is a world class city, highly desirable by millions of people as a place to live. Connecticut isn't.

The post was not about London vs Connecticut but about pay-scale relative to the cost of living.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#195

Post by rtkwe » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

CamTin wrote: post #98

vfc1 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can terminate your freelance contract with a one week notice, but on the other hand, we can't terminate the contract on our side under any circumstances. All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

Surely they can't make you work, right? That's called slavery.

They can't actually force you to work but the contract can definitely have really bad early termination clauses for the contractor which make it extremely expensive to break the contract.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#196

Post by lioeters » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

rglullis wrote: post #141

jhasse wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but that money isn't used for the benefits of "people who don't give a flying toss" - you'll get a value out of it (health insurance). Furthermore you'd also need to take into account all the costs you can set off against tax liability.

Paying health insurance is apart from the income tax. So in this particular case your income tax money is not getting you anything in return, healthcare-wise. Worst in case of health insurance, the amount you pay is dependent on your income, not your actual actuarial risk. This means that, indeed, the healthy people working are subsidizing the costs of the ones "who don't give a flying toss". And don't get me started…

I consider "health insurance" to be somewhat of a scam, just less so in Europe than the U.S. I feel like I'm forced to pay into a black hole with no accountability.

Don't know anything about Künstlersozialkasse - "artist social fund". Is that like a tax to (supposedly) support cultural activities..?

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#197

Post by sametmax » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

qaq wrote: post #188

misja111 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better yet, come to Switzerland and earn > 10K usd/ month; and on top of that, you pay only a fraction of the Swedish taxes.

I thought it was pretty tough on immigration side of things?

Depends of the country. If you are french, it's quite easy to work there. If you are Estonian, probably less.

There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#198

Post by sdhgaiojfsa » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

pjmorris wrote: post #166

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most shareholders (holders of the wealth represented by companies) are members of the wealthy class? :P You don't say. I'm of two minds on this. Wealth and income are not the same. You get wealth by not consuming all of your income, and instead by investing it. Of course, if you have just enough income to survive, then you cannot accumulate wealth. But most people (in the US) are not in that boat. One of the phenomen…

> I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly, wouldn't it make sense to tax wealth rather than income? As a general principle of incentives, you want to tax the thing you want less of.

> If the goal is to spread wealth more evenly . . .

If the only goal was to spread wealth more evenly, then what we should do is simple appropriate all wealth beyond (num_wealth / num_people), and give it to all the people who don't have that much wealth. Then it would all be even stevens. :)

But there is not just one goal. Another important goal is to still have a functioning economy after applying your policy choices. All tax policy must at a minimum consider efficiency as well, from a purely pragmatic standpoint. Otherwise you end up in a situation where you have destroyed your economy by eliminating important incentives.

There is are also moral arguments about what is "right" (for those who believe in such a concept). If Bob and I both did work worth $10k, but Bob used the money to have a fancy vacation and I saved the money against future needs, should I be taxed more? Maybe! It depends on your moral outlook, and also your beliefs about how spending and investing affect the economy -- both are needed to some degree or another.

Historically, wealth taxes have been tried. They are generally not very popular, and do not raise very much money. They have a tendency of hitting middle and upper middle class retirees, as well as high income people. They also can't be very large in magnitude without seriously degrading investment returns (and thus incentive to invest). They also tend to target a group of people who are a "flight risk." Unlike income, which is often not possible to relocate out of a given nation, wealth is easily transported across national lines to jurisdictions without a wealth tax. Read about France's wealth tax on Wikipedia for more information on this.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#199

Post by rtkwe » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

CamTin wrote: post #159

vfc1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, its pretty close to slavery. Theoretically, they could sue you if you don't work, although what happens in practice is that if the freelance is really fed up and talks to the end customer saying they want out (which the hiring company does not want you to do), they want to avoid problems with the customer and they will replace you with someone else after a few months. What they really don't want to do is to…

What if you just don't show up for work? They fire you, right? Do you have to pay some big cash penalty? Or is the hesitance just that you can't get a reference for your next gig?

That would be a breach of contract and would activate whatever penalties the company had written into the contract.

Re: Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

#200

Post by scarface74 » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 1:53 PM UTC

mkohlmyr wrote: post #54

muse900 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My example comes from Greece where I reside for the past 9 months. People owning touristic buisnesses on the islands are moaning about how much they need more staff and can't find any, and they are arguing why younger people tend to not work and just receive benefits instead of going to work. The argument here that they won't understand though is that, 1st they are paying very low. They are all willing to pay the min…

I wonder if it's quite as simple as being reducible to salary as a single (or majority) variable. I tend to think people are willing to work a poorly paid job if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel (career advancement, primarily). (As a casual outside observer, and with all due respect) My bet would be that a pervasive sense of pointlessness or helplessness in society is an equal partner along with…

And it doesn’t help that large companies use to hire jobs that are low skilled directly and at least there was an opportunity for advancement. But now with most of those jobs being contracted out, there is no chance for advancement.

I’m even seeing that in IT. Back in the day you could start out as tech support, or an operator (as I did - long story) and be given a chance to program and move up. Now even those jobs are outsourced. It’s just as easy to hire someone from a foreign country to admin your AWS hosted instances as it is to hire someone locally.