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Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

arxiv.org

511–520 of 598 posts

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For non-workers the benefits outweigh the disadvantages, while for workers the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. If your income is from owning capital or from real estate value increase or from government benefits, then anything that can reduce the price of things you want to buy is a benefit. This is a large part of the population. If your income is from working and producing goods and services, then getting paid…

Workers aren't monolithic. I'll be the first to admit that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits for specific workers. NAFTA sucked for autoworkers. H1B visas suck for IT and software workers. I think other types of workers benefit more than the portrait you paint, and not just the capital owners. Unless you are a utilitarian (I'm not), I agree there is a valid debate on how much policy should disadvantage a small…

Sure, I benefit that a washing machine costs $600 instead of $6000. That benefit is small in comparison with if my yearly income would be double. In almost all possible scenarios, higher wages are better than cheaper goods. You cannot improve your economic situation by purchasing cheap consumer goods, but you can do it with higher income.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#512
post #226
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes it worth the extra trouble? I guess the "green cards" really work cheap?

We interview without knowing sponsorship status. If someone requires sponsorship that happens after we decide they were the best interviewee I wish it wasn’t this way but in the vast majority of interviews, the sponsor required person is the best one

Well.... DUH!

You're comparing the vast swathes of mediocre talent to the best from the rest of the world. Of course the top talent from elsewhere is going to beat the average talent from the US.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation. The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation. A long time ago…

I've been programming since the early 90's, and back then pretty much all my coworkers were other US citizens. I started to notice a shift toward the mid 90's and then, by the late 90's, they were practically all Indians on H1B visas. Nobody from Russia, China, El Salvador, Brazil, Japan, Botswana, Ethiopia or even Bangladesh or Pakistan - virtually every programmer I met was an Indian citizen in the US on an H1B vis…

1. India has ~130 million English speakers, second only to United States.

2. IIT.

3. Culture matters, both on the recruitment side and demand side. Indian outsourcing built a pipeline decades ago so it's now a well understood career path in India.

4. Non-technical positions tend to require greater social competencies in the hiring/customer culture. US programmers already complain about the cultural tendencies of their Indian colleagues. The social and political aspects of other careers are less amenable to dropping in a rando with limited understanding of the culture.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will than probably change with the new American government and its anti-immigration stance. Less h1b, less ghost jobs.

Trumps has talked multiple times about “stapling green cards to diplomas”. His rhetoric on illegal immigration is going to result in illegals who have committed a felony being deported and that’s it (just like every other neocon). Making America better for Americans won’t happen until both sides realize neither party is looking out for the interests of American people and uses social issues etc to keep us divided.

As someone who went though the legal means when he was in the office last time, he will primarily hurt the legal immigration... because that is the easiest thing for them to do - grind USCIS to a halt.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I value a good manager, a fun team, an actual PTO policy I can use, and cool projects to work with at about $40,000 a year. Salary is valuable but it is not the only valuable thing.

If you can't live off of $40,000 a year, you are not taking that job. I'm not saying there aren't people already independently wealthy and "working" for fun but those are an infinitesimal exception.

I think they mean that they will take a job with those benefits for 40k less than a job without. I assume generally they are looking at positions that pay substantially more than that.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, this isn't clear to me. Are the interviewees citizens? So you're interviewing citizens to prove that there aren't any who can fill your jobs but even when they clearly could fill the job you don't hire them? Seems like the requirement of proving "there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job" is going to be near impossible for the government to enforce

It is. Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens. Worst case (and most common) H1Bs are more exploitable labor compared to citizens. H1Bs etc just suppress citizens wages and increase profits of capital holders. There’s a very very tiny % that actually aren’t replaceable domestically.

> Best case scenario H1Bs allow companies to avoid training citizens.

Best for who? Companies should train their workforce. Or get kicked out of the market, meaning that they should get kicked out of the nation.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#517
post #19

On the hiring side of this, we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. Each day there are 5-10 automated resume submissions to our job portal for a single position, and we're a fairly small company. Perhaps hiring managers are both being (more) selective and becoming overloaded with the amount of AI/recruiter-sanitized resumes coming in as well.

>we receive a _ton_ of resumes that have no experience in the technologies we're hiring for. No one wants to train employees anymore.

You're right... Companies should pay mid 6 figures, as well as downtime for training.

Short answer is that most corporations don't have a job in training people.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#518
post #450
post #14

I have to put out a ghost job req and interview every person applying within reason for every green card a direct report is applying for. I have to show there are or aren’t any residents or citizens that can fill the job The main problem is: even if the interviewee knocks it out of the park, is an amazing engineer, I still am not interested in firing my OPT/h1b team member who can still legally work for 2-3 years. So…

Are you claiming the government requires you to lie to applicants to the "ghost" job? Do you have evidence for that claim? How did you hire the H1-B in The first place if you have direct direct personal evidence that citizen labor is available?

From the discussion in the rest of the thread, this test isn't required for hiring someone in a H1B in the first place, but it is required to upgrade it to a green card.

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, h1b hiring practices have been shady at best for atleast a decade. For everyone that just doesn’t want to fire a coworker there is someone taking advantage of cheap labor that is easier to control under the threat of deportation. The h1b program is supposed to be for people at the top of their field so they can skip the normal visa line, but it is commonly used to save money through exploitation. A long time ago…

I've been programming since the early 90's, and back then pretty much all my coworkers were other US citizens. I started to notice a shift toward the mid 90's and then, by the late 90's, they were practically all Indians on H1B visas. Nobody from Russia, China, El Salvador, Brazil, Japan, Botswana, Ethiopia or even Bangladesh or Pakistan - virtually every programmer I met was an Indian citizen in the US on an H1B vis…

Computer programming is easily verifiable, the code works or it doesnt. so you dont need good english, and your education doesnt really matter since either you write working code or you dont. its also a massive cost on businesses. theres like a thousand reasons

Re: Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

#520
post #197

Ghost jobs are certainly problematic, but I’ve been getting actual interviews where the technical bar feels too high. There’s extraordinarily little trust in previous job experience and interviews assess for test taking anxiety rather than actual skill[0]. [0]: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

Thank you for sharing this article. The study illustrates something I have tried to explain to people but haven’t found the right words for. As someone with (diagnosed) severe social anxiety, I would rather get a tooth drilled than do a technical interview. That hasn’t been great for my career, as you can imagine. I desperately wish I could just take a written test or something.
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