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

latimes.com

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

#231

Post by hamilyon2 »

Well, I guess, this may be good. If a lot of dollars seek few resources, and resources pool does not increase much, you get unbounded price increase.

Which is not good. Developer have to do something productive for economy. Their wages should be bound to value they produce. If they are consistently paid more then they are producing, whole sector is heading into collapse.

In healthy job market, job ads are going to attract employee with salary based on value that employee is going to produce. Failure to attract her does not mean someone is irrational or wages are low. It just means there is a lot of low-value work for developers in this world. Someone will notice that and maybe innovate those jobs away or something.

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

#232

Post by throwaway494949 »

expertentipp wrote: post #209
throwaway494949 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. I work as a…

Darkness, cold, property market - no thanks.

The first two ones aren't much worse than London (actually -- it seems Stockholm gets more sun on average per year: http://svemet.org/stocompare.htm). The property market isn't a problem if you make this much; also, the buildings tend to be well-kept.

But yes, dark and slushy winters.

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

#233

Post by toomanyrichies »

mabbo wrote: post #97
geezerjay wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's so true. Employers in general complain that they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs, and that's suppose to be the employee's problem. To make matters far worse, the industry in general pays lip service to on-the-job training and some employers also avoid junior/inexperienced developers, because they don't want to train anyone. And don't get me started on the absolute cancer that are HR/outsourcin…

> they can't buy filet mignon for the price of hot dogs I'm going to use this analogy in the future. "You want filet mignon, but you're only willing to pay for hotdogs- and you're blaming the meat".

That is a good analogy. Another one I've heard is "If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys."

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

#234

Post by artmageddon »

throwaway494949 wrote: post #80
sametmax wrote: post #11

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…

If you're a senior software engineer, come to Sweden. You'll at least get 6000 usd/month as an employee. Management usually has a background in tech, you get lots of vacation, parental leave, etc. You're not expected to stay longer than 5 pm and working from home is common. There are many interesting jobs in finance, telecom, automotive, entertainment, medicine, defence, and there are plenty of startups. I work as a…

Does $72K go far in Sweden? I would assume not due to taxes...? I'm in a position of ignorance so I'm just looking to get a better idea of what it's like there :)

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

#235

Post by izacus »

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?

Not for a EU citizen with a signed job contract.

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

#236

Post by swebs »

wolfgke wrote: post #215
JTbane wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 100% agree. It's all about the money. Is it really worth to invest so much money into "marketing" and "lobbying" the skill shortage instead of simply increasing the salaries to make the job more attractive? Just wondering...

Yes, lobbying has an incredibly high return on investment.

>After examining million records, including data on campaign contributions, lobbying expenditures, federal budget allocations and spending, we found that, on average, for every dollar spent on influencing politics, the nation’s most politically active corporations received $760 from the government.

https://sunlightfoundation.com/2014/11/17/fixed-fortunes-big...

>In a recent study, researchers Raquel Alexander and Susan Scholz calculated the total amount the corporations saved from the lower tax rate. They compared the taxes saved to the amount the firms spent lobbying for the law. Their research showed the return on lobbying for those multinational corporations was 22,000 percent. That means for every dollar spent on lobbying, the companies got $220 in tax benefits.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/01/06/144737864/forg...

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

#237

Post by scroot »

whack wrote: 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…

Time to also reconsider different kinds of corporations, specifically those that are wholly owned and operated by the people who work for them.

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

#238

Post by gaius »

wolfgke wrote: post #215
JTbane wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> 100% agree. It's all about the money. Is it really worth to invest so much money into "marketing" and "lobbying" the skill shortage instead of simply increasing the salaries to make the job more attractive? Just wondering...

Is it really worth to invest so much money into "marketing" and "lobbying" the skill shortage instead of simply increasing the salaries to make the job more attractive?

Well it keeps the money in the Management caste rather than any of it going to the Worker caste.

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

#239

Post by toyg »

petercooper wrote: post #224
toyg wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Above 70k, you are supposed to start your own business and optimize your expenses through that. Despite recent squeezes on related practices, it's still much better. Not doing it, is basically a gift to the taxman.

Agreed, though I think it's even more a disincentive to pay yourself more than 100K, even if you're mostly on dividends, once you've already seen ~20% come off for corporation tax. For third parties unfamiliar with the setup, to pay yourself those dividends that take you from £100k to £110k, you need to take £12500 of biz profit, then £2500 goes to corporation tax, then £6000 to the taxman in personal taxes, leaving…

But that's the thing, you don't pay yourself in cash - you move most of your expenses to the company (cars, houses, investments, pension payments etc), so that money is only touched by corp tax. You take out the bare minimum that you cannot reasonably claim as business expense, squeezing your taxable income all the way down. When you reach a point where that's not possible, either you are making way more than 150k or you have a poor accountant.

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

#240

Post by unclebucknasty »

quotidium wrote: post #216
sametmax wrote: post #11

And if you think it's bad, it's even worse in Europe. Taking the French example: I'm an freelancer, but I used to have a contract with an American company. They gave me 3x the salary most of my French colleagues would get, while keeping the exact same social advantages (they paid me through a French branch). However, to them, the salary was twice lower than what they would have paid for the same guy in the Valley. No…

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…

I've definitely seen agile implementations that are burnout hamster wheels.
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