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Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#461

Post by iodfuse »

fallenspec wrote: post #89
BossingAround wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OP's statement leads straight to "they're out to get me," which is absolutely not helpful, and it's absolutely an indicator of a difficult hire. If I'm interviewing someone and the person is demonstrating a victim narrative, that is a huge red flag. Similarly, the inability to see shades of gray (e.g. "using MySQL is always utterly stupid, you should never use it in favor of Postgres") which OP demonstrates with thei…

> OP's statement leads straight to "they're out to get me," which is absolutely not helpful, and it's absolutely an indicator of a difficult hire. Not at all. If you've been out of work for a year and seeing your savings (if you have any) dwindle and vent on what is an internet comment sections, doesn't indicate how you are in person at all. > If I'm interviewing someone and the person is demonstrating a victim narra…

>there are many great scientists that believe very deeply in Religion. Which as a non-believer I would think would be at odds with one another.

And you would be right, we definitely shouldn't trust religious people to do science, of all things.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#462

Post by fallenspec »

iodfuse wrote: post #461
fallenspec wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> OP's statement leads straight to "they're out to get me," which is absolutely not helpful, and it's absolutely an indicator of a difficult hire. Not at all. If you've been out of work for a year and seeing your savings (if you have any) dwindle and vent on what is an internet comment sections, doesn't indicate how you are in person at all. > If I'm interviewing someone and the person is demonstrating a victim narra…

>there are many great scientists that believe very deeply in Religion. Which as a non-believer I would think would be at odds with one another. And you would be right, we definitely shouldn't trust religious people to do science, of all things.

The fact was that I wasn't right. They were doing decent work and their beliefs didn't affect their work.

A lot of non-believers (in the past I would have include myself in that list) seem to believe because they don't believe in a higher being that they are somehow more "rational". Nothing could be further from the truth. It took me a long time to realise that I wasn't being more rational than the faithful and I dogmatic about things that were simply quasi-religious. It took a lot of introspection and several times I had moments where my ideology hit reality hard and I spent several days dealing with cognitive dissonance and having to accept I was just wrong.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#463

Post by [deleted] »

UncleMeat wrote: post #167
lucb1e wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I want to know about the times you lead a team in building a house from start to finish. What if that's not something I can do? If I'm really good at tech, am really good in terms of writing code fast, correct, and readable, but management just isn't for me? Would you not hire me for a software position, also not at a lower salary or with a junior label or something?

It isn’t unreasonable to want to hire people that will be able to grow into senior positions. If you are demonstrating that you’ll never do that, this is a red flag for hiring.

[deleted]

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#464

Post by RhysU »

antoniuschan99 wrote: post #367
rantwasp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans haven’t literally evolved that much in 200 years. You’re being generous. I would say we haven’t evolved in thousands of years. I mean sure, the tech is better but we’re the same self absorbed, careless bipeds we’ve always been.

I took a course on Plato’s republic back in school. Our class conclusion was that nothing has changed in the last 2000 years in terms of society/issues since that book was written!

"Progress" is a Western myth. Perhaps "progress" is The Western Myth. Things simply change.

TIL from my Classical Archaeology professor.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#465

Post by Waterluvian »

lucb1e wrote: post #103
Waterluvian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you’re not trying to interview right here and now, but listing tools doesn’t move the needle. That’s not what employability in tech is measured by. I’m trying to hire for a number of software positions and that’s a common issue I see in resumes. I don’t want to hear that you’re a wizard with a hammer. I want to know about the times you lead a team in building a house from start to finish.

> I want to know about the times you lead a team in building a house from start to finish. What if that's not something I can do? If I'm really good at tech, am really good in terms of writing code fast, correct, and readable, but management just isn't for me? Would you not hire me for a software position, also not at a lower salary or with a junior label or something?

Careful not to conflate this with management.

Even individual engineers will get tasked with solving problems, start to finish. And even if not, you were part of a team that did it. Talk about the process of how you contributed to some meaningful unit of work.

I don’t care about what tools you know. I can teach everyone how to program. Everyone. Programming is really not hard.

I can’t teach everyone how to be an adept problem solver or how to work in a team (in any role) to actually ship things reasonably bug free and on time. I can’t teach everyone how to work in harmony with others. I can’t teach everyone how to gracefully handle all the business realities that throw wrenches into software purity.

To add a bit: what I’m trying frantically to figure out in the hiring process is if you’re an asshole or not. I can’t fix that. If you don’t know some language or tool, that doesn’t even register as a problem to me. But if you seem stubborn and too opinionated, especially on trivial things, I don’t care if you’re a programming wizard.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#466

Post by lovich »

RobertKerans wrote: post #247
nradov wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people with commercial driving licenses who aren't currently working as truck drivers. They could be recruited if employers raised wages. And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science. I get why you've said this, but I'm not sure this kind of flippant remark is helpful -- what exactly isn't rocket science? Is it the actual act of training a truck driver? Is it the act of writing down the things needed to get more truck drivers? Actual process is non-trivial, expensive ( you need to persuade people to leave their f…

> Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

Isn’t the whole idea behind the benefit a free/freeish market provides that it is the most efficient system for allocating resources?

Mind you efficient != resilient

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#467

Post by beerandt »

SonOfKyuss wrote: post #143
beerandt wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>absolutely undermines your credibility as an individual capable of critical thinking Nothing says "critical thinking" like believing everything you're told by government and msm.

It’s more about believing unfounded conspiracy theories over mountains of evidence regardless of the source.

Not all lies are conspiracy theories. And not all conspiracy theories are lies.

It wasn't too long ago that mentioning a lab leak got you the boot.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#468

Post by jason0597 »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #376
ipnon wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working at startups has been my solution to this wide problem. No startup will turn away a domain expert in a field they need help with. A corporation over a certain size seems to glean all they need to know about me as soon as they see my bald head. Any social organization over a certain size seems to be allergic to people with much experience, I think because they cannot mold them into drones.

> No startup will turn away a domain expert in a field they need help with. This has not been my experience. Part of it may be that I don't really do the whole "self-promotion" thing so well. I'm pretty good at what I do. I have worked with many, many people that are much better than I am, so I don't let it get to my head. But whenever I mention what I'm good at, it's met with snorts of disbelief. That's crazy. I am…

I believe that such a long history of experience is seen with awe and respected much much more and compensate much better in traditional engineering fields (chemical etc.) rather than in tech. I could be wrong though.

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#469

Post by syshum »

scolby33 wrote: post #378
throwawayboise wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDK about everywhere but I'm not seeing anyone still paying minimum wage. McDonalds is paying $12.50/hr for day, $15/hr for night work. That's $30k/year FTE for a job that you can learn in a week and that requires zero prior experience or education. And they are still begging.

Just this week in Pittsburgh, I saw an official corporate poster up in a McDonald's advertising a "competitive starting wage" with an 8.5″x11″ sheet taped to it reading "STARTING RATE UP TO 10$/HR." I doubt they'll have much luck at ≤$10/hour. Sure, it's more than the minimum ($7.25/hour), but the "up to" weasel words don't give me confidence.

"McDonald's" is a bit of a mixed bag, like most of the Fast Food Places. McDonald's owned stores are paying a minimum of $13 with the plan to go to $15 in the next few years, this was announced awhile back

The problem is McDonald's Corporate only owns 5% of McDonald's locations, the rest are franchise locations, thus a "McDonald's" crew member at a non-company store is not working for McDonald's but the Franchisee.. This is where you get the lower wages..

This allows McDonald's to get headlines about offering a "$15 min wage" while 95% of wearing an McDonald's uniform do not work for McDonald's thus do not get this wage

Re: Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

#470

Post by syshum »

6gvONxR4sf7o wrote: post #363
vladvasiliu wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep hearing owners whine and bemoan their lack of workers. What I have never heard of, not once, is an owner making less profit to pay their workers better to get the loyalty and hard work they want but refuse to pay for. I agree with you, but do those places actually make a lot of profit? Over here they seem to be pretty fragile operations, so I don't think there's that much they can shave off their profit and…

It tells me we need a higher minimum wage. No individual can raise prices without losing competitiveness, but clearly higher prices would fix some of these serious issues. A higher minimum wage would prevent the “they’ll just go next door” issue.

you do understand how inflation works right? If all prices raise then the purchasing power of the person on Min Wage stays the same thus their situation did not actually improve any.

Further Inflation has the common effect of hurting the lower and middle classes the worst and increasing wealth disparity. There is multiple ways this occurs but one thing that is trending of late is that as the wage floor is raising you are not seeing the same levels of raise in other area's of income until you get into the top 10% or higher of wage earners. Today we are seeing inflation outstrip wages in many skilled labor categories.

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