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Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

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Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#21

Post by asimovfan »

freedomben wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #2

That Ford CEO is stupid. There's no "shortage" of workers. Corporations are expecting other people to train their employees past entry level and pay these people with midlevel experience like badly paid unskilled laborers. Nobody is investing years of their time and large sums of money to get trained up for a shitty job? SURPRISE SURPRISE If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and trai…

I don't disagree, but I do think the modern culture of company hopping is contributing to this. As a leader entrusted to make good decisions for the company, you must consider this reality. At a previous company we hired a lot of junior engineers with the idea that our relatively high pay and reasonably good work would help us build a strong generation of seniors a few years down the road. What we mostly found was th…

"modern culture of company hopping".. don't you mean simply going to another workplace for better wages? when you say "ridiculously stupid HR practices" don't you mean not paying them as much? do you really think it's a "cultural" thing to change jobs?

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#22

Post by constantcrying »

It is ridiculous to have American workers and Chinese workers doing essentially the same job, at the same quality, while their salaries differ enormously.

American (and European) automotive companies will never be able to compete long term in any market which allows competition between Chinese and American (or European) cars.

The labor of an auto worker is not worth that much and only by banning competition can American auto manufacturing survive short term.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#23

Post by tamimio »

colechristensen wrote: post #2

That Ford CEO is stupid. There's no "shortage" of workers. Corporations are expecting other people to train their employees past entry level and pay these people with midlevel experience like badly paid unskilled laborers. Nobody is investing years of their time and large sums of money to get trained up for a shitty job? SURPRISE SURPRISE If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and trai…

> If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and train them to be an expert while on the job, the problem is you, not everybody else.

Exactly this, I have seen the issue too in mid or senior levels, not just fresh, because even if you're senior, most likely your expertise is on a very specific topic, not necessarily the job specific one, could be something very close to it. It's like learning on the job either through training or self-taught is an alien topic to them. I remember one time I had an interview for a job that needed some knowledge on navigating a Linux environment, and I have personally been using Linux at work or personally since ~2004 or so, only to find out during the interview the expectations were Linus Torvalds rock star level in developing kernels, for a pay of ~90k, and the job itself isn't even about Linux, it was some automation/robotics so the OS is just your environment, haha!

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#24

Post by baby_souffle »

nerdsniper wrote: post #11
techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

99% of the time, I agree with you. But hypothetically, what would you call a situation where 20 companies would all be willing to pay salaries of $1 million/year to fill 10,000 open positions that required 5 years of training, but there are only 5,000 people who have that training? Would that be a "labor shortage"? It seems your solution works for companies willing to pay more to poach from other companies, but might…

> At some point, the salaries are indeed "high enough" but the skills still just aren't available to hire.

But the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out, no?

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#25

Post by nerdsniper »

freedomben wrote: post #15
colechristensen wrote: post #2

That Ford CEO is stupid. There's no "shortage" of workers. Corporations are expecting other people to train their employees past entry level and pay these people with midlevel experience like badly paid unskilled laborers. Nobody is investing years of their time and large sums of money to get trained up for a shitty job? SURPRISE SURPRISE If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and trai…

I don't disagree, but I do think the modern culture of company hopping is contributing to this. As a leader entrusted to make good decisions for the company, you must consider this reality. At a previous company we hired a lot of junior engineers with the idea that our relatively high pay and reasonably good work would help us build a strong generation of seniors a few years down the road. What we mostly found was th…

What's the structural solution to this? Offer golden handcuffs to stay for x years?

- "We'll train you, and if you stay the full 8 years you get a $500,000 bonus"?

- "Here's a $200,000 signing bonus, which you have to pay back if you leave before 8 years"

I'd be hesitant to rely on these as a candidate, because I'd have to assume I'd get fired at year 6-7 or something so that the company could save money.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#26

Post by mindslight »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #12
techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

your old stand-by doesn't make any sense "there is no such thing as a labour shortage" is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation. This is the basis of every economics supply & demand graph, where explicitly refer to the misalignment as a surplus or shortage.

Yes, this is a kind of insidious framings that Economics makes. By choosing which is the X vs the Y axis, it creates an implied causality [0]. An alternative way of looking at the same situation is that employers are not willing to pay enough for labor.

By framing it as a shortage of labor rather than a shorting of those looking to pay for labor, the employers hope to encourage more labor to flood the market [1] and lower prices further. This is a continuation of how we've gotten to the current predicament with most jobs being de-skilled commodities that don't pay enough to support their workers.

[0] another insidious framing is that by assuming instantaneous response, this downplays the importance of causality. But in the real world markets are not supercomputational.

[1] both private individuals choosing an educational path, and by government policy

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#27

Post by throw__away7391 »

colechristensen wrote: post #2

That Ford CEO is stupid. There's no "shortage" of workers. Corporations are expecting other people to train their employees past entry level and pay these people with midlevel experience like badly paid unskilled laborers. Nobody is investing years of their time and large sums of money to get trained up for a shitty job? SURPRISE SURPRISE If you won't take an average person with no knowledge of your industry and trai…

Every junior I've brought in over the past 7 years or so with the expectation of training them has immediately left after I've invested not only money but also significant amounts of more experienced developers time to bring them up to speed before I managed to recoup anything useful for that investment. I can already hear people say pay more, but that isn't up to me and besides that if we're going that route why not just hire the experienced person in the first place?

Of course increasingly it's hard even to train at all, I'm getting absolute garbage AI slop from our most junior developers and they don't seem to be learning any more. I sit and try to explain why their solution to some task won't work and they are not engaged with the actual solution they are implementing at all. I've tried to get them to engage more with the AI as a learning and exploration tool, but I'm not having much luck, they're completely focused on inputing the task, really at the mercy of the direction of the tools.

I really hope AI comes through for us in the end because it seems we're at the end-game for human learning.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#28

Post by freedomben »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #12
techdmn wrote: post #7

Seems like a good time to mention my old stand-by: There is no such thing as a labor shortage. There may very well be a shortage of qualified people willing to work under the conditions and for the compensation a company would like to provide. When stated that way you can see that there are several levers to pull, the most obvious being compensation.

your old stand-by doesn't make any sense "there is no such thing as a labour shortage" is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation. This is the basis of every economics supply & demand graph, where explicitly refer to the misalignment as a surplus or shortage.

Can you clarify what you mean by "given compensation", because:

> is totally represented by a shortage of qualified people for the given compensation.

Sounds like "I want to pay X, there's not enough willing to work for X, therefore there is a labor shortage." I know plenty of people who only want to pay $30 an hour for web development work. It might feel like a labor shortage to these people since they can't find many people willing to work for that wage, but in reality where the price they've chosen lands on the supply/demand curve there is almost no supply, but if they increased the wage, amazingly supply goes up too. If 30 seems high enough, imagine $5 an hour instead of $30. The actual number doesn't matter, it's where it falls on the spectrum that is relevant for this example.

If by "given compensation" you meant "market rate" then I think we're largely in agreement.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#29

Post by jkestner »

nickdothutton wrote: post #10
ratelimitsteve wrote: post #5

For this to be the CEO of Ford in particular is interesting because this is part of their founding narrative. Whether it holds up to historical scrutiny isn't something I can answer but the lore is that Henry Ford purposely paid more than market for his laborers with the idea that he'd get his pick and then those workers would then buy Fords with that money because they knew they were the best cars built by the best…

Wasn't there some law suit from Chrysler, who tried to _stop_ him doing that? Presumably because it would give workers too much wage setting power in the market?

It was the Dodge brothers back when they were minority owners of Ford, and it was the case that poisoned us with “fiduciary duty to the shareholder”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.

Re: Ford CEO on his ‘epiphany’ after talking to factory workers in 2023

#30

Post by ZephyrBlu »

nerdsniper wrote: post #3

> Ford’s signature element in its new labor agreement was to get full wages to entry-level workers. But beyond that, he began looking at the labor shortage in trade work, starting with technicians.“Old-timers in our plants were saying, ‘It’s no longer a career, Mr. Farley. Working at Ford is no longer a career.’” He warned that millions of well-paid jobs are going unfilled because they require specialized skills. Put…

Pretty crazy improvement, seems like he's putting his money where his mouth is
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