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The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
61–70 of 96 posts
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#62I question his (somewhat oblique) assertion that people in their 30's are too old to train effectively in new skillsets.
Original quote for reference: "but for workers in their 30s, 40s and older, learning new skills is extremely challenging (humans simply don’t learn as well or as quickly as they get older)."
Apparently the author realized his mistake and redacted this from the blog post. Kudos.
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#63The BLS does a TERRIBLE job of managing the unemployment stats. The birth/death model just does not work at cycle changes. For a detailed look at these issues check out Mish's many posts at http://bit.ly/9yjUjN Additionally, there is something going on beyond a flawed model. From zerohedge.com => http://bit.ly/b5AJsz "Readers may be surprised to discover that beginning in April, of 2010, continuing through today, the…
Why did you use bit.ly to shorten those URLs? This isn't Twitter. http://bit.ly/9yjUjN -> http://www.google.com/search?q=site:globaleconomicanalysis.b... http://bit.ly/b5AJsz -> http://www.zerohedge.com/article/charting-statistical-fraud-...
My apologies. Thanks for making my hyperlinks work.
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#64This has a very specific name in economics: structural unemployment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_unemployment
To my surprise, the author made no use of that term.
Worth checking out the Wiki if your interested in reading more on the phenomenon.
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#65I question his (somewhat oblique) assertion that people in their 30's are too old to train effectively in new skillsets.
My Professional & continue education Python course has 30 people in it and I'd say that the average age is mid-30s. My friend and I, at 25 and 23, are the youngest in the class.
(Why are my friend and I so young and are re-training? Well, we got out of college and realized that our English & Biochemistry majors suck.)
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#66It's an opportunity for a business that can somehow put non-highly-skilled people to work and make a profit doing it. But startups don't usually think that way. Everyone wants to work at a place that sets a high bar for hiring.
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
"...it's a problem of approach and mentality in staffing and HR" This seems to go deeper than that - in economics class, they teach that labor is always an easily variable input, that can be changed more or less instantly. Especially after reading about the effect of all "A" people in a company, it seems to me that economics is still stuck in the thought of labor as factory workers or the like - not modern thought wo…
And in physics class they teach that all planes are frictionless. Please don't disparage an entire field of inquiry simply because you either had a crappy econ class, or missed the point of simplifying assumptions.
Hahaha point for you as regards physics.
Econ is always a coarse model. Trends or microexplanations. The "invisible hand" is not a steady one.
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#68I've been thinking about some of this for a while. Someday I'd like to try an experiment where companies ignored College education and up but recruited at the High School level with the intention of taking someone from Intern to Highly Skilled worker. Something like the apprenticeship model from the past. In some ways I think College and Post-Grad education is overkill for some careers and an apprenticeship/intern mo…
I hear you, and you know I agree with you on this point, but the naysayers (mostly employers, it seems) will shoot that down with, "We already know the apprenticeship model works, but we can't afford to implement it in a culture where the average American worker changes jobs every 6, 7, or 8 years. Essentially we'd be training our competitors, and we can't afford that." I myself have benefited greatly from the appren…
Why is apprenticeship so prevalent for that profession, compared to others which seem similar (at least to this outsider)? Is it the amount of hands-on field work? The number of potential students to support a classroom?
Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#69Re: The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire
#70He is 1 step away from saying that the government should be telling people what education to take, and what jobs they'll fill. (Remember Gattaca?) Some industries (not all!) have a shortage of workers. This has -always- been the case. Each generation feels a different pull when they are children, and so has different goals for later in life. We even encourage children to pick a career in Elementary school! By the tim…
That certainly wasn't my intent - I was just brainstorming a list of ways one might fix the shortfall of math/science/engineering professionals. Salaries: Maybe we're still low, but looking at http://gigaom.com/2010/11/10/stat-shot-the-results-of-silico... - we're paying between 10-20% above these figures (generally) for our engineers, so I suspect that's not the case.
First, if you're paying in comparison to those charts, in the SF area you aren't paying anywhere near well enough. Good devs with 5+ years of solid experience go for $100K+.
Second, this exact point has been discussed between you and patio11 before. If you think you're paying excellent wages -- 10% to 15% above market -- and still having trouble hiring, then I'd like to repeat patio11's suggestion that you are mistaken about either the wages of the quality of the job you're offering.