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Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

nytimes.com

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Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#101

Post by enko »

wazoox wrote: post #79
enko wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am not going to discuss the utility of the HR department, the issue here is that they are human beings whom no one has the right to reduce as being mere eye-candy this attitude, to me, is unbelievable. Of course they are human beings. What else would they be? If you're going to make a claim about HR, make it on its merits. I have said they're nothing but a bunch of good looking girls. They have zero understanding…

I've been interviewed at a few large tech companies in the past 15 years, and the HR guys were... well, guys. And not remarkably good looking. I'm afraid that your opinion is just that, your opinion. And it's a sexist one with that.

> your opinion is just that, your opinion

And I never claimed otherwise. But I really resent your accusation of sexism, since I believe I am extremely fair to both sexes.

It is a plain fact that the attitude towards HR departments here is mostly negative. It is another plain fact that those departments are mostly female. If these facts are sexist, then reality is sexist.

Oh, and the all-male "IT department" is also richly deserving of criticism, though not by me since I jumped that ship long ago. I look forward to your devout claims of sexism when such a criticism does occur, however.

It boils down to this: if you put the wrong people in charge of very important stuff, then (long term) you are fucked.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#102

Post by lincolnq »

enko wrote: post #101
wazoox wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been interviewed at a few large tech companies in the past 15 years, and the HR guys were... well, guys. And not remarkably good looking. I'm afraid that your opinion is just that, your opinion. And it's a sexist one with that.

> your opinion is just that, your opinion And I never claimed otherwise. But I really resent your accusation of sexism, since I believe I am extremely fair to both sexes. It is a plain fact that the attitude towards HR departments here is mostly negative. It is another plain fact that those departments are mostly female. If these facts are sexist, then reality is sexist. Oh, and the all-male "IT department" is also r…

OK, I'll bite. Your social error, leading to claims of sexism, was linking bad HR people and women.

I believe you when you say that's what you've observed. But, whether you like it or not, it's not okay (in public, at least) to make statements which link gender, race, etc., with competence.

No fair, you (or some other reader) might say. I'm just reporting my observations. But I claim that you have a responsibility to do more than simply report your observations, and it's because people are stupid. When we read "A and B go together," we humans immediately and instinctively (system 1) draw causal conclusions about A and B. It doesn't matter if it's anecdotal evidence; it doesn't matter that correlation does not equal causation. Not for System 1, anyway. And those causal conclusions lead to making bad subconscious assumptions, and later lead to actual sexism down the road. All because of comments like yours -- "A and B go together".

So don't do it. Suppress your urge to report your observations when they could lead to others making sexist/racist assumptions in the future. Bad HR department? Say "bad HR department" and leave the part about gender out.

(I would say that this only applies to speaking/writing in public. In private, you know who your audience is, and what conclusions they will draw from your words, so you can afford to be freer.)

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#103

Post by pebb »

qq66 wrote: post #59
qq66 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen several job ads requiring "5+ years experience with Technology X" where Technology X is not yet 5 years old.

kenrikm, you have been hellbanned -- your posts are not visible but you're not informed of this. I hope you see this. I'm seriously considering leaving the HN community because of the frequency with which I see good contributors hellbanned.

Yeah, this is one of the most censored place around. It says a lot about the VC culture.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#104

Post by lifeisstillgood »

angersock wrote: post #94
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #54

This is fairly speculative, but I have been thinking this paradox over for a while. A high demand for scarce highly skilled workers must drive salaries up in competition. Unless the skills are not actually high skilled, but obscure skills . I predict that "high skilled manufacturing" is a morass of proprietary solutions to highly specific process needs - that is, the metal fabrication plant alluded to at 10USD per ho…

Both you and gvb seem to perhaps lack first-hand experience of machine shops. It's not just "repairing code"... Oftentimes, small job shops will be taking a dimensioned drawing and write their own G code to actually generate the objects. This will probably involve some back-and-forth with the machine stepping through the part manufacture, and must be done carefully to guarantee that both the machining is done efficie…

I am struggling with the economics behind this - we seem to have discovered an entire industry that sits in a eddy of economic thought - the value added by an operator has a very low ceiling, so they cannot negotiate much, plus the operators themselves have non-interchangeable skill sets - so the number of jobs they are actually qualified for is very low, especially in a given locale. Hence 10 USD an hour.

In short, the manager of a Mcdonalds can move to a local KFC or Wendys with very little effort. An operator of machinetools X has no chance just picking it up on tools Y.

What I think we are seeing is the result of automation destroying jobs - as ChuckMcM says up page. And if so I am interested suddenly in rereading the Communist Manifesto - because in 20 years, we cannot continue having money flow to the owners of the means of production as defined now - if almost all production is automated, what happens then?

I am too tired to do much more than realise there is an interesting path of thought leading away from here - one I suspect having been trodden by many other thinkers before me. Any travel guides welcome.

edit: too vitriolic

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#105

Post by erikb »

I read about this so often, that I can't think anymore that the problem really is the low pay for high skilled jobs. There must be a reason why in so many countries for so many years nobody increases their hourly rates and hopes to get well educated people for the current rates.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#106

Post by waterlesscloud »

moultano wrote: post #50
codewright wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a lot of encounters with YC founders, most of them negative. This anecdote well encapsulates the impression I had of a lot of them. I'd really like to meet the better of the crop, because I can't imagine PG and Jessica (she's usually the expert on character and personality in YC interviews) are intentionally picking petty people. I'm not the only person in the startup industry who's had this impression eithe…

I can imagine that for a company with a runway measured in months, immediate skills might be more important than for a well established company.

In that case what's the cost of having the position completely unfilled for a month or two?

Seems like it would be so drastically high that hiring a MVC (Minimal Viable Candidate) might be the right choice.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#107

Post by indiecore »

goostavos wrote: post #95
Soarez wrote: post #53

If an Entrepreneur can't pay for the resources needed to build/ensure a product/service at their market prices, he should and eventually will, close business. There is nothing wrong with that. That is the economical system in the works. If no one is willing to pay for his product/service at the price he needs to charge, it is because either people do not need it, or they can get it cheaper somewhere else. In business…

What does that mean for us though, the "skilled workers" when everything is being shipped overseas? A friend of mine who works as a systems engineer for Verizon said their dumping 30% of their US staff and shipping it to overseas. This seems to be the pattern (anecdotally) as of late for a lot of large companies. When there's someone with comparable skills on the other side of the world who will do your job for a fra…

>what's to stop a race to the bottom?

Absolutely nothing, welcome to one of the big problems of capitalism.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#108

Post by rhizome »

robryan wrote: post #25
evv wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. This article makes it sound like manufacturers somehow aren't restricted to the supply and demand of their labor. If laborers are leaving manufacturers for better pay at fast food companies, workers need higher pay. Its not that complicated. If the company can't afford higher wages, maybe the demand for this skilled labor isn't what we think it is. If these skills are actually in high demand, they will pay t…

It is the same thing with propping up the auto industry. If a company can't afford higher wages and it isn't economically rational for people to invest their time in an area then maybe the only rational thing to do is for that manufacturing to head offshore.

Which is basically an artificial pushdown of car prices.

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#109

Post by kabdib »

enko wrote: post #32
zmmmmm wrote: post #3

I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or only fraudulent people apply, they reject them all and claim a skills shortage. The problem seems to be a basic misconception about how transferable software skills are. An excellent programmer with no experience in Python will be out performing a poor Python program…

I think a core problem is "HR" departments with absolutely no understanding of the positions they are supposed to be hiring for, even for technology companies where technology is supposed to be a core competency. The only thing stopping me from calling out HR departments in general as a sign of organisational cancer, since I am yet to encounter one that pulls even a tenth of its weight, is that they tend to be compri…

++ on "HR doesn't understand the tech"

I had a phone interview once where the person on the other side was (the hiring side) was trying to suss out my skills.

"Do you know real-time object-oriented programming?" they asked.

"Well, I know object-oriented programming, and I've done a lot of real time stuff, so: Sure."

"No, I think you're trying to fool me. Please answer truthfully, do you know _real-time object-oriented programming_?"

"Yes."

"I don't believe you."

Things went downhill from there. The interviewer clearly had no idea what they were actually asking, and it was impossible to express any competence other than to repeat buzzwords.

Bottom-line is: That company missed out on a great employee. They utterly blew it.

[Yeah, I know you only have my word for this. Suffice to say that I have enough objective evidence from subsequent projects and employment that I know I'm not Dunning-Krugering myself.]

Re: Skills Don’t Pay the Bills

#110

Post by keryor »

tokenadult wrote: post #62

From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the shortage of skilled workers. 'If th…

are you the same tokenadult from the CC forums?
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