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

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

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it. Eh. I'd rather say that Bob diverted labor toward supporting his luxury consumption, whereas I made capital available for increased production (of cars, houses, food, etc.). The truth is somewhere in between. I think your read on this is a little too simplistic.

It seems to me that the burger Bob bought (and the check the restaurant wrote to its supplier for the ground beef, and the check the supplier wrote the farmer for the cow) is a direct payment into the food production system, while 'making capital available' may or may not land anywhere near the real economy. What's the sophisticated view here?

There's an enormous amount of complexity here. For one thing, it's not like there is an infinite amount of beef available at a fixed price. Bob's eating that burger probably on the margin increases the supply of beef, but it also on the margin increases the cost. Now everyone else has to pay 0.0000001c more for their hamburgers.

Or what if Bob bought a filet mignon instead of a hamburger. Maybe farmers will now be (on the margin), breeding cows that produce less hamburger but more steak. This could increase the price of food that poor people eat. If Bob buys a Tesla, maybe Bob helps expand the supply of Teslas, but now buying a Corolla is slightly more expensive, because there are slightly fewer economies of scales in sedans. (This is actually happening, BTW, as Americans buy larger cars.) I also spoke of Bob taking a vacation. He spent a thousand dollars on plane tickets, which has serious deleterious environmental effects, and for the most part represents a purchase of oil, not labor services. Oil workers wages may have gone up a bit, but most of the money just went into the pocket of whoever owns the oil.

These are just some examples of possible things that could happen. Without empirical testing, we could not know what the exact impacts of any given decision are, and realistically, we do not have the resources to track the impacts of each decision through the economy.

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

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the scrum has 20 people, something is really wrong.

Sometimes you get stuck on multiple scrums, back-to-back. Separate projects, but the same plans and activities each.

Then that's not agile.

Agile means small teams focused on one project communicating constantly with the client in a feedback loop.

If any of these elements is missing, you are not doing agile, you are doing the same thing most companies do, but with some agile pieces and labels attached to it.

It's like saying you are on a keto diet, but you eat ice cream, or that you are for democracy as long as the press is controlled by the state.

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

#313
Labor ‘shortages’ are simply an excuse to import cheap labor. There exist talent that will take a discount on pay for the fringe benefit of immigrating. This in effect is a community subsidy to the company. This is one reason why lobbying is a hugely profitable enterprise. Eventually the community becomes too taxed and social problems occur and we get populist uprisings. I consider this both an unfortunate and an entirely predictable outcome.

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

#314
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$72K is about $50K post tax (including one month of paid vacation). $72K is also a lower bound: I often see positions for ~95K-100K. And if you work as a contractor, ~$160K. The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns. And if you have a mortgage, you can deduct 30% of interest payments.

>The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns That doesn't sound like much help for a single expatriate coming to Sweden for software work. They're going to want to live in a city where there's lots of other people (including other expats) to network with, date, etc.

True. A common starting salary in Stockholm is $50K ($37K), with that you can afford a nice and central apartment (~$20K without a mortgage, otherwise [potentially much, of course] lower).

Note that you don't rent apartments, you buy them. It makes a comparison harder.

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

#315
post #169

Expecting public companies to do anything except optimize for shareholder value, is pure folly. We can debate morality all day, but there's a more practical reason for this: shareholders hold all the power over management. Regardless of how unhappy you as a customer/employee are, you do not have the direct power to fire the directors/executives. You only have the indirect power of pressuring the shareholders, and hop…

It isn't that simple. A company that does "good things" for their employees can in turn reap results from those "good things". Better employees, or employees that stay long enough to have experience both have a value that returns back to shareholders.

Of course how much so spend on those "good things" is an optimization problem.

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

#316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hey, wait, let's not forget the daily standup rituals of agile scrum behavior modification. Every day, justify your existence. Every day, beat that same dead horse. Every day, grab your coffee, sound off, and then listen to 20 other people bark at the empty air under their nose to show their devotion to a product that has the slimmest utility, and is coated in slippery, greasy dark patterns intended to screw the…

If the scrum has 20 people, something is really wrong.

Seconded.

I have also experienced it in person. The customer, which was their only customer, and works with many similar contractor businesses, made noises that they want their contractors to "be more agile". So a lot of them just cargo-culted something and said, "we're more agile now!"

My previous employer declared a daily stand-up meeting--with mandatory attendance at 8:45 AM, the flexible hours be damned--crammed the entire team (minus customer support) of ~20 people around the walls of the manager's corner office, and proceeded to waste 45 minutes every morning, as everyone listened to everyone else justify their existence to the boss. Needless to say, I was already looking for other jobs, and doubled down on the application rate after that.

At my current employer, we just changed the day and time of our weekly status meeting, moved it to the conference table in the server lab, where the testers in adjoining offices can theoretically hear it and elect to participate, and said, "we're more agile now!"

The customer has absolutely no in-house ability to evaluate the effectiveness of external software development teams, so they just have to take their contractors' at their word.

I think you can probably guess who the customer is.

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

#317
post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most health insurances will give you benefits for staying healthy (e.g. visiting the gym or a nutritionist). Visiting the dentist at least once a year will also give you a benefit. There might be other stuff I can't think of right now. So income isn't the sole metric which determines the pay.

Please tell me how I can reduce my TK payment by showing them my gym membership, and I will be very grateful. No sarcasm here. Also, as far as I know there is no benefit in going to the dentist, except as "We pay one dental check-up and one clean-up for year, more than that comes out of your pocket". That is at least what I was told when I went to the dentist.

Some public insurances tried giving benefits for going to a gym or having reduced membership fees at partners but this has been shut down by the regulator.

You might be interested in their bonus programme: https://www.tk.de/techniker/service/gesundheit-und-medizin/p... Some public insurers have a more extensive one or special, reduced tariffs under some conditions (Wahltarif).

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

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, hey, wait, let's not forget the daily standup rituals of agile scrum behavior modification. Every day, justify your existence. Every day, beat that same dead horse. Every day, grab your coffee, sound off, and then listen to 20 other people bark at the empty air under their nose to show their devotion to a product that has the slimmest utility, and is coated in slippery, greasy dark patterns intended to screw the…

If the scrum has 20 people, something is really wrong.

It's wrong even if it has 2.

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

#319
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

Not that I disagree with the idea but do you have evidence that the average person is actually increasing spending every time they get a raise?

An individual employee may do almost anything. But most of them won't decrease spending when given a raise. Some may spend exactly the same as before. The rest will spend more. Do those who spend more outnumber those who spend less? I have no data, but I would be astonished if those who spent less outweighed those who spent more.

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

#320
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked around in a couple of european countries and I can confirm that the freelance rates for software development today are the same or typically less than in 2001. The software developer golden age was in the mid-nineties here in Europe, and then the rates and salaries have stagnated (but not the inflation). Also, the contractual conditions are getting worse. We are now many times offered contracts with a ter…

Amend the contract before you sign it.

I started doing this later, but it can get complicated. If they have two freelancers that have passed the interview, and one is asking for contract amendments while the other is not, we can see what would happen.

But in general, if you insist that they add a termination clause of 15 days on your side, they usually do it although only after some insistence and negotiation, which if you have several interviews ongoing and are waiting for other responses might puts us in a precarious position.

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