Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by jimbofisher1 » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:09 PM UTC

baxtr wrote: post #43

lkrubner wrote: post #4

It’s interesting how much momentum there is in these processes. After several decades of big wage gains, during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the nominal increases could not be stopped, even as the economy weakened in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then all the wage cuts had to done through inflation. Nowadays there is no inflation, and no momentum to restart wage increases. This part of the article says it right: “””The u…

Which is somewhat great because if they don’t pay well startups can exploit opportunities that open up as a consequence. However, my experience lately from Germany is that large companies are becoming more and more popular for developers. This was also reflected in a recent HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17286939

It seems like a very poor financial decision to turn down 300k from Google to make 150k + fairy dust money from a Startup. Even if the 300k is lower than what Google ought to be paying.

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

#302

Post by annabellish » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #258

annabellish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people? Yes, absolutely. Most people aren't paid enough to cover their needs + enough of their wants to keep them happy, never mind savings. We have a very different perspective to the average worker in tech, where we're usually paid well above our needs + many wants.

Don't buy that. I think it's the media. There are so many reality TV shows and the participants are living in nice houses, driving nice cars. Even movies are fucking unrealistic, you can watch a movie about someone earning minimum wage, yet they live in NYC, in a massive apartment with high ceiling or drive a nice car. The rubbish on TV, both fiction and nonfiction are so far from reality. Yet most consumers desire f…

Fancy phones and watches are, given the current state of most carriers, not actually _that_ much more significant an expense than a cheaper device month to month.

You can "buy" that explanation or not, but there's a lot of research and evidence backing up the idea that a huge fraction of the western world lives essentially paycheck to paycheck, and it's not because all of them are less financially savvy than you or I, who just happen to get paid well above average too.

A good TV and nice phone are not usually the kind of expenses that drive people into having no savings. If I go grab an example from t-mobile...

A brand new, shiny iphone x for somebody with good credit is gonna run us $30/m. That's kinda pricy, so let's go a few generations back and get a refurbished iphone 6s plus - they won't let me go to older generations. That'll cost $22/m. So sure, yes, that cost adds up - but $8/m extra in savings is not going to be the difference between somebody living paycheck to paycheck or suddenly being flush with savings.

Never mind reality TV - _actual_ reality is that a large percentage of the population of basically every first world, western, developed country is paid at such a level that any raise is just going to go directly back into the economy because they aren't paid enough for savings to be a high enough priority to happen. This isn't financial illiteracy - both of us put a _lot_ before savings, it just happens that once we've done that we still have a bunch left over. Lots of people don't.

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

#303

Post by yjftsjthsd-h » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:10 PM UTC

taneq wrote: post #51

pnut wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying there isn't usable advice in that book, which I have read, but in full disclosure, the book's author, Robert Kiyosaki, fictionalised most of the anecdotes contained within it. Additionally, he operates a real estate "investing" school that advocates and instructs semi-legal, morally questionable predatory practices. It is openly modelled after Trump University, Trump being Kiyosaki's business mentor an…

> Additionally, he operates a real estate "investing" school that advocates and instructs semi-legal, morally questionable predatory practices. Yeah, it's 90% trivial platitudes about "buy low, sell high" and "invest your money wisely", and then a few pages about how he actually made his money (if that part is true, anyway): Haunt foreclosure auctions to flip the houses. Skeezy.

So he says to buy low and sell high, and he made his money by buying real estate cheap and then selling it higher? I have absolutely no background on the guy, but that doesn't sound "skeezy" or even inconsistent; what am I missing?

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

#304

Post by magduf » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:11 PM UTC

throwaway494949 wrote: post #244

artmageddon wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

$72K is about $50K post tax (including one month of paid vacation). $72K is also a lower bound: I often see positions for ~95K-100K. And if you work as a contractor, ~$160K. The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns. And if you have a mortgage, you can deduct 30% of interest payments.

>The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns

That doesn't sound like much help for a single expatriate coming to Sweden for software work. They're going to want to live in a city where there's lots of other people (including other expats) to network with, date, etc.

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

#305

Post by magduf » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:12 PM UTC

sametmax wrote: post #197

qaq wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought it was pretty tough on immigration side of things?

Depends of the country. If you are french, it's quite easy to work there. If you are Estonian, probably less. There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.

>There are not part of europe, so they do whatever they want.

My map says otherwise... Switzerland is most definitely part of Europe. Maybe not the EU, but that's a different thing.

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

#306

Post by pjmorris » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:14 PM UTC

sdhgaiojfsa wrote: post #268

Applejinx wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it. Saving capital so as to be wholly self-sufficient outside the functioning of a society is not in any sense a societal benefit. It's sort of the 'eat your own dogfood' issue: let's say you don't think retirement on Social Security is bearable, and you're alarmed by public hea…

> Yes you should. Bob supported a host of vacation-related workers and kept the economy moving. You sucked money out of the economy and sat on it. Eh. I'd rather say that Bob diverted labor toward supporting his luxury consumption, whereas I made capital available for increased production (of cars, houses, food, etc.). The truth is somewhere in between. I think your read on this is a little too simplistic.

It seems to me that the burger Bob bought (and the check the restaurant wrote to its supplier for the ground beef, and the check the supplier wrote the farmer for the cow) is a direct payment into the food production system, while 'making capital available' may or may not land anywhere near the real economy. What's the sophisticated view here?

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

#307

Post by jimbofisher1 » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:16 PM UTC

scroot wrote: post #237

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.

Coops, I'm not familiar with any in the IT space, care to share?

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

#308

Post by annabellish » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:17 PM UTC

jdhn wrote: post #19

annabellish wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most people? Yes, absolutely. Most people aren't paid enough to cover their needs + enough of their wants to keep them happy, never mind savings. We have a very different perspective to the average worker in tech, where we're usually paid well above our needs + many wants.

I guess my experience differs. Before I moved into the tech world I worked at a law firm for peanuts. When I got a $1/hr raise I went out, bought a bottle of whiskey to celebrate, and then didn't increase my spending at all. Any money I got from that raise went right to my savings account.

When you say "peanuts", do you mean "peanuts relative to what we get paid in tech" or "peanuts relative to the actual average wage"? For reference, the overall average wage is in the range of $6-800/week.

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

#309

Post by tmaly » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:18 PM UTC

Wages are not the only issue here. If you look at inflation, the price of food and energy has increased massively since 1999. I know economists like to exclude these figures in their computation of inflation, but they sure do put a dent in the regular workers wallet. I can remember paying 99 cents a gallon for fuel in the late 90's. Now its $3.49 a gallon. I can think back even farther to the 1980s when you could get a meal for $3 at a fast food chain. Now your shelling out $8 - $10 for the same meal.

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

#310

Post by jimbofisher1 » Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 3:19 PM UTC

Talyen42 wrote: post #6

jdhn wrote: post #5

"That money won’t disappear, of course—it will go into the pockets of workers, and then find its way back into the coffers of corporate America via higher sales." Do people really go out and spend money immediately if they get raises? Personally, if I get a raise, I may treat myself to something nice, but then I immediately go back to my old spending habits so I have more money to save.

The average person spends almost exactly as much as they make as income rises. It's a hedonic treadmill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

Not that I disagree with the idea but do you have evidence that the average person is actually increasing spending every time they get a raise?