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Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

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Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#251

Post by bill_joy_fanboy »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #235
bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're arguing with me, but this statement... > Everybody wants to maximize their money received and minimize their money and work expended to whatever degree possible. ...is exactly in agreement with what I said above. The ideal business is one where you take in money and have no expenditures. E.g., If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. I would also accept…

>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they…

> I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something.

Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't making any more real estate, but they're always making more people.

I said above to another commenter: I would also like to be a landlord one day. I'm sure I'd be a decent one. But, I won't be pretending like I'm doing anything productive... I'm just extracting money from the fact that my name is on a deed. Nothing more, nothing less.

It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it. I won't be kidding myself, though, that I'm somehow a productive or noble small business man.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#252

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

bill_joy_fanboy wrote: post #251
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you're a landlord, you want super high rent and no expenditures on maintenance or improvements. No, I'm in the landlord business, and they do not want this. They want mildly-high rent that covers overhead plus a healthy (maybe even a little fat) overhead. They want to do maintenance, because apparently the biggest paydays come 10 years down the line when they sell to some other investor... and if it's a slum they…

> I don't want money for free. I want to be able to earn it, and earn well. I want to feel like I've accomplished something. Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live. It's not creative, it's not original, and it's only possible because they aren't makin…

>Well, if that's true then I wouldn't bother being a landlord. Being a landlord just means your name is on the title of a building such that it allows you to extract money from people who need a place to live.

And, I expect, as a point of fact... you haven't bothered to be a landlord.

>It's just how our economy is set up, and, like everyone, I plan to try and take advantage of it.

That's how you perceive it. But the reality of it is that while many are hustling, few are prospering, few enough even that reasonable people might wonder if the few successful ones are the result of luck more than having figured out the get-rich-quick thing that everyone's been trying to figure out for millennia. Good luck, I suppose.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#253

Post by novok »

BestHeadHunter wrote: post #242
novok wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the…

Are you suggesting that being in a life or death situation as a pilot is less stressful than taking a test or writing a software program over time?

No, that optimizing and interviewing for performance under pressure is not needed for most software engineers, while it makes sense for fighter pilots. It's is definitely more stressful.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#254

Post by FireBeyond »

WalterBright wrote: post #245
novok wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because flying a war jet under pressure and landing it in the desert is the same as writing software over 5 months in an office. /s Test anxiety is real. Anxiety disorders are real in general, not to mention ADHD, autism and more where these disabilities can interact in bad ways in interviews. It does not mean that people with these issues are bad engineers. If your instrument is inaccurate, it does not mean the…

I'll repeat that the cure for test anxiety is preparation, preparation, preparation. Avoiding it, like your engineer employee, won't be helpful. Keep going to interviews, and the performance anxiety will also dissipate. The first few times I did public speaking, I'd freeze up and squeak. I speak regularly now, and it's not a problem anymore. (Again, I attended Caltech. Most of us were nerds, and many Aspergers. I hav…

When I worked as a firefighter/paramedic, one of the axioms was that you don't train until you get it right, you train until you don't get it wrong. That, at 3am, sleep-deprived, it's so ingrained in you what to do, you can do it automatically, leaving your mental capacity for the variables of the situation, not the bare minimum of "what do I do next?"

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#255

Post by dwd »

wqaatwt wrote: post #215
WalterBright wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We tax things we want people to do all the time. True. But why not think about ditching those taxes, and replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do? There's a double benefit - tax revenue is raised, and people do less of those things undesirable to society. For example, "sin" taxes. For other examples, taxing pollution. Taxing the conversion of forest land to a parking lot. And so on.

> replace them with taxing things we don't want people to do Because your tax revenue will collapse if people actually stop doing those things?

Tobacco tax in Australia is an interesting example. A lot of people may have stopped initially but there was a more gradual decrease over time as the tax increases annually by CPI + 5%.

The problem is not everyone will stop and they now face is that at 70% of the price it's encouraging a black market for illegal tobacco with associated crime and a decline in tax revenue.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#256

Post by wqaatwt »

WalterBright wrote: post #244
wqaatwt wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well yes, but if you reduce pollution by 50% then you need to double the tax and so on and so forth. If it’s not something that’s enforced globally you will either end up destroying certain industries and or having massive inefficiencies. My point is that sin taxes might be a good way to discourage certain behaviors but not as good as a consistent revenue source. Also there is a risk of perverse incentives like what…

> but if you reduce pollution by 50% What a terrible outcome! LOL

Well yeah.. that’s my point.

If the tax works you have to keep continuously increasing it every year. At some point that becomes detrimental (I mean there are good reasons why we don’t ban the usage of fossil fuels entirely..)

So it’s not a reliable source of revenue

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#257

Post by hyperpape »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #246
hyperpape wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case, the relevant comparison is 85,000 net new H1B visas to the total of job postings, since the parent post seemed to be saying 80% of job postings are ghost postings from companies seeking H1B visas. Needless to say, that doesn't make any sense.

No. Neither of us said 80% are H1-B. We were agreeing that 80% aren't actually obtainable jobs, but neither of us attempted to determine what percent is from what cause.

> The majority of the time, it is a company looking to sponsor an H1B for a role

You're right that I shouldn't have said 80%, but this still implies almost half of all job postings are ghost jobs from companies trying to hire H1-B visa workers.

It's still an insane claim.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#258

Post by SR2Z »

legacynl wrote: post #230
gruez wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>i'm so glad that companies don't have feelings tho. Nobody is concerned about companies being sad, they're concerned about making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely. >when the only leeches i've seen in the business world were the companies that require labor to make money and then pay back a less than equitable amount to the people doing work. define "equitable".

> making the labor market in an give jurisdiction hostile enough that companies opt out entirely. At some point you'd have to realize that continuing to give companies what they want out fear of them leaving, will only incentivize companies to be scummier and scummier. Second of all, how would you imagine companies opting out of a jurisdiction? Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummi…

> Wouldn't that create an enormous hole in the market for other less-scummier companies to jump in, albeit at perhaps lower margins?

A certain amount of margin is required for the company to even try to do business. Unfortunately, when the "let's turn the screws on this company" discourse starts getting Old Testament, people stop considering that.

If you want a good real life example of this, look at CA insurance companies. The state limited the rates they could charge to the point where many of them simply stopped signing up new customers and started dropping old ones.

There were no new insurers to take their place because it wasn't profitable for them either.

Companies ALWAYS pretend that this will be the result of regulation, but that doesn't change the fact that they're sometimes right.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#259

Post by sib »

em-bee wrote: post #152
sib wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue. Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a nega…

if they passed the written requirements you should have interviewed them. if not, why didn't you and why would you then be claiming that you can't find anyone? if you did interview them and they failed, then you have all the proof you need.

>>>> if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue.

>>> Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove a negative.

>> if they passed the written requirements you should have interviewed them.

That is the point of my anecdote; we did interview them. And yet, we did not hire them, for a variety of reasons. For example, they may not have passed the interview. Or a reference check may have raised concerns. Or we may have hired another candidate whom we also interviewed and who did better.

Your implication, that they should have an easy and presumptively correct right to sue (and win) unless we can "demonstrate ... that the candidate was not qualified," is extremely expensive. It can easily cost 10's or 100's of thousands of dollars to defend a lawsuit.

Re: Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs

#260

Post by em-bee »

sib wrote: post #259
em-bee wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if they passed the written requirements you should have interviewed them. if not, why didn't you and why would you then be claiming that you can't find anyone? if you did interview them and they failed, then you have all the proof you need.

>>>> if you fail to find a candidate then you will easily be able to demonstrate that the candidate suing you for violating the law was not qualified and therefore has no reason to sue. >>> Umm, no? There are plenty of times when I've had roles posted that we interviewed candidates who met the written requirements (e.g., degrees, years of experience, etc) but did not pass our interview loops. It's very hard to prove…

we seem to be talking past each other. i never meant to imply that someone should win a lawsuit if you have documented why you rejected them. they should only win if you passed over their resume without interviewing them despite having a resume that is qualified and you don't have any good reason for passing over that resume AND if the position is still open and you don't have any other candidates that are better qualified that you are still interviewing. all of those conditions need to be met.

i am only talking about the case where a company is collecting resumes but never interviewing anyone. or rejecting everyone they interview but skipping over qualified candidates they could interview but don't without a good reason.

i haven't even thought about the case where candidates pass an interview but the position still does not get filled despite that. that's probably also something to think about, but while you seem to keep talking about candidates you interviewed, until now i have only been talking about candidates you did not interview.

and again, all of this is only relevant if you are not actually filling the position, despite having found qualified candidates.

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