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Comment by ocroso | Hacker News Reader

I disagree with this entire article. Every company I've worked for in the tech industry has had incredible difficulty finding talent/people to fill the roles we had. Also, there are more software companies than Google and Facebook. Also, I don't see salaries dropping anywhere for these jobs, I see them going up. Sure, help desk is the new car mechanic, but that happens in every industry. Now, you probably want to be a developer or DevOps guy to make what help desk made in the 90's. The real issue seems to be exploding cost of living making earning more feel like earning less. And I believe companies that are willing to allow remote work are helping combat that by giving workers the freedom to move somewhere cheaper.

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It is a scam. They're not looking to fill in those positions. They just open those positions up, under no obligation to hire, then report to their gov censor that they have created x amount of jobs without the intent of filling those positions.

When they have to fill in the positions, they complain about the lack of "talent and skill" in filling the roles and then push for h1bs to fill with cheaper Indian and Chinese workers.

Every once in a while they'll fill it with a techbro "hip to the game". The entire thing is a complete hoax.

>They just open those positions up, under no obligation to hire, then report to their gov censor that they have created x amount of jobs without the intent of filling those positions.

Are solicited but unfilled jobs counted in "job creation" statistics? I did not know this.

I agree but I also disagree. We have a fair amount of difficulty finding talent to fill our tech roles when they come available. However, much of my job is to automate away other people's jobs. I've literally taken more than handful of good paying / medium skilled jobs out of the market with my software.

If the trend continues, and it is, more and more of these jobs will go away. There is, in my opinion, a limit -- you can't run a company with nobody. But historically my company hired large amounts of people to do jobs that have now been obsolete for decades because of technology.

Usually they omit adding "at the rates we are willing to pay" after saying something like "We can't find enough qualified candidates"

A software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to and doesn't provide the same mix of high skilled and low skilled labor. That's the problem that many areas of the country are dealing with: that the economic boom is becoming a lot more concentrated than it used to, which only increases income inequality.

> A software company employs infinitely less people than a manufacturing plant used to

"Infinitely less"? Would that be zero or -infinity? Either way, this is obviously wrong.

(I realize this was not your actual point, so I didn't downvote you)

Back when I worked for a large telco my division(SE ie the heir to the part of the GPO that built colossus) had over 60K FTE most of which where managerial and professional.

If they find it that difficult to hire people with the skills they need, why don't they teach people the skills, or if they can't do it in-house, pay someone else to?

Er, the article was about jobs in all the other sectors, not in technology. Technology is what is replacing all the other jobs; of course jobs in tech are rising. That doesn't mean the total number of jobs across all sectors is doing anything other than declining.

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