>They can't get enough qualified people...
...for the price they are offering.
There, fixed it for ya :-)
...for the price they are offering.
There, fixed it for ya :-)
The issue is that automation drives efficiency, but large corporations are buying most of the limited supply... which crushes smaller businesses and drives down wages of unskilled labor.
My answer is that we need to invest in adult education and infrastructure. The labor market is struggling to adapt to demand because the cost of acquiring technical skills is prohibitively high for adults, and struggling consumers have undermined domestic manufacturing chains by both being unable to afford the output and unable to fund competitive infrastructure due to low wages.
We need to seek the healthy equilibrium is where most labor has enough demand to personally profit, and enough supply that most businesses can afford to compete.
If there's any definition available for "labor shortage", it is what happens when a middle class increases and wealth disparity decreases.
But anyway, your point about education stands by itself.
On the labor side, getting a $120k+ job out of a 4 year/$14k investment also sounds like a labor shortage.
When machines were created, many clothing companies folded because cotton become more expensive. It was expensive because machines could make clothes cheaper, so people brought more. Is that a shortage?
At any time there's trash on some street that could be picked-up by hand. That's a job in direct competition with yours, yet there's nobody there hand-cleaning the streets. Is that a shortage?
This discussion and the original article is focused on analyzing why wages are falling with unemployment. "Businesses are failing because they are uncompetitive" describes most businesses. The question is: Why are the failing? How does that impact down-stream systems? What up-stream systems could have had an impact? Follow the chain of cause -> effect.
Ineffective labor cross training into high-skill high-demand jobs -> labor shortages -> only large scale operations can afford to bid -> dramatic efficiency gains -> lower asking price of products -> businesses that couldn't bid collapse due to uncompetitiveness in the new market -> surplus less-skilled labor and economic disparity -> less taxes for infrastructure -> less regional competitiveness -> ... so forth, hypothetically.
Which is why I concluded with investing in education (root cause resolution) and competitive regional infrastructure (new growth, avoid another labor glut from overcorrection).
On the other hand, if an external (non free market) force sets the price, then you will have a shortage. Say, for example, that a bushel of wheat in the Roman Empire would go for 10 dinars in a free market. If Octavian passes a law that says that wheat must cost 8 dinars, the result will be a shortage. Now you have way more people willing to pay for the 8 dinar wheat than would be willing to pay for the 10 dinar wheat, and that discrepancy (the difference in available goods) is the shortage.
Price setting (like rent control in NYC) is a common cause of shortage, but there are lots of other causes. Often companies won't jack up prices because gouging has negative externalities (people start to hate you), and this unwillingness technically creates a shortage. In a shortage, you'll see behaviors emerge like queuing (like in the Soviet Union for sneakers) and also the emergence of a black market where goods are sold at the higher price (often with an additional premium attached).
However, I am saying that shortages exist because our market is imperfect. Given the axioms of a perfect market, ours is absurdly inefficient:
* Homogeneous supply of products: No. there are huge disparities in skill and personalities. Evaluating quality is very challenging.
* Perfect Information: No(ish). glassdoor/blind are improving transparency but pricing / performance information is still suppressed.
* Low barriers of entry: No. People cannot enter this market without large personal investments (which many lack).
* Minimal externalities: No, all of my posts here were focused on externalities... especially ones that raise the barrier of entry.
* Zero transaction costs: No, it's expensive to change jobs and businesses expend lots of money searching for quality candidates.
* Rational profit-motivated sellers: No, candidates do not seek to maximize profit. Less profitable offers are accepted based on location, ethics, social status, peer network, business domain, tools, or even just not caring to negotiate.
* Rational buyers: ehhh ... employers have rational intent, but do make unprofitable decisions due to low and inconsistent quality (less of a concern for those that pay the highest rates).
As I described earlier, these imperfections harm related systems and markets. My suggested path back to an ideal market was public education and infrastructure investments.
Well, I was specifically referencing the top 5 biggest tech companies, and the pay may seem low to the people who have been working there fresh out of college but its still relatively high pay compared to most other industries with people of the same academic and skill level but in a different industry.
They interview alot of people and the people don't turn down the jobs because the pay isn't enough, they don't get the jobs because theres not enough qualified people.
So I don't know how your statement is relevant but I don't think they don't get hired and rejected from their interviews because they applied and changed their mind that the pay wasnt high enough....
That being said, given that the skill level sought out is hard to find, and the people with those skill levels are in such high demand with many many options at their fingerprints, including but not limited to never having to work in an office if they don't want to, that there is an argument the pay should be higher for the people that do have this skill level, and work long hours, despite the rest of the world protesting at the inequality of tech valley and not seeming to understand how much of a meritocracy it is RELATIVE to other high earning places like wallstreet and politics, where the old boys club is much more relevant than tech valley (all relative here) (and i dont disagree, people with niche skill who earned it and are needed should be evaluated appropriately) but this is not the situation I was talking about.
I'm talking about the situation where people get turned down from any of these jobs where they even have the luxury to complain a software engineer salary at a top 5 company is too low, because they don't have the expertise to get the job in the first place.
If tomorrow every electrical engineer salary went 10 times higher, supply would still take 10 years to improve.
"Free online course to learn Tensorflow"
"same for Elastic Search"
"intro to VR"
"Intro to Python"
"App dev"
etc...these are all free and accessible to the same people who work at coffee shops and browse twitter and facebook.....
So would it take 10 years for these people to learn the skills?
I think the market signals are being interpreted as intentionally divisive to people who don't have the skills, instead of a need for the population of people who have the skill to increase, and thus they protest the market signals as a response instead of utilizing free and open resources on top of their already paid for internet utilties provided by these relatively highly paid workers, to make it free and easier and more accessible for other people to learn.
Sure learning these skills outside of a part time barista job could take 2-3 years, but even an entry level software position at a just a-okay tech firm who starts them out at say $50k/yr with no benefits, is still higher than working minimum wage, by a large degree.
I'm not sure everyone who is experiencing a disadvantage from the pay difference wants to increase their skill level, or learn new skills.
There are plenty of people who do and work long hours and cant, but there are also plenty of young people who do not, and choose not to and make other lifestyle decisions, which is fine with me, as long as they don't throw rocks at me because I chose to do my math homework in highschool when they chose to go out and drink every school night. Sometimes peoples life choices do have an impact, and its not always the responisibiltiy of the most successful companinies in the world to calibrate everyone elses life to the minimum starting salary of the most skilled workers on the planet.
I don't know what IS a good solution, but I feel this is an unrealistic expectation. Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.
It's quite difficult to demonstrate qualifications to employers, I specialize in type theory and devote my nights and weekends to that. I've been doing this for a year but still have been rejected for every single typed programming job in NYC. I admit I am mentally slow, but I am willing to put in the work.
My point is you are trivializing the effort. Often we are competing against people with better minds/bodies, better home environments, better support networks, etc. The advantages build on each other. Yeah we fucked up in high school or earlier because we just didn't know. I suppose it is fair that we will pay the price the rest of our lives. Oh well.
I'm not saying its fair. I'm saying I think the biggest tech companies now never had the intention of opressing poor people and we have as a society found ourselves, as we always seem to do in quite a complex situation where its not easy to find one person or company we can point the finger to and say "its all your fault"
In regards to you conflation that not screwing up in highschool requires having better minds bodies and home environments, I grew up on welfare, in a trailor park, was the first person in my family to graduate highschool, and I juts liked to learn, but I constantly get shot down by people who drank and threw things at teachers and ignored me that not only do I not deserve the life I worked for, but my personal choices are an explicity effort to oppress them, and my success in life is a continual punishment to them for their own choices.
You don't need to be rich to decide you want to be different than your surroundings, but yes often people assume my level of success is because I must have come from a good family, and I couldn't possibly understand the hell of growing up in a backwoods south Georgia trailor park where noone went anywhere.
I agree, once choices are made, its hard to undue them. I have friends with this story: You got drunk in highschool one night, your girlfriend decides to keep the baby. You both barely passed highschool. Life is going to be a struggle to make it work because you made some bad choices, and If I had the power to not have these people live their lives for the next 10 yrs recovering from their mistakes, I would change it in a heartbeat.
All I know is I chose to take less risky choices and maybe thats because of my personality and I'm calibrated differently or maybe not. Who knows, but I think the attitude of people blaming and demonizing successful people is destructive to the very people who are experiencing socioeconomic inequality.
I've definitely distanced myself from people who demonized me when otherwise I would have remained friends, and I offered to pay for my little brother to go to college after I graduated, he was a senior in highschool at the time but he said he "just didnt want to work as hard as me"
I tried as hard as I could to convince him otherwise because hes a smart kid, but he cares more about fitting in and fitting in at his age in his environment means not trying, and being in a garage band, and dating girls who don't do anything with their lives.
I love my little brother with all my heart, and I have the ability to financially support him todo whatever he wants to do, but he chooses not to.
When and if he comes around and ten years asking for help, and I hope he never has to because he does well on his own, I will help. Will it be easier for him by then? no.
How much control do I have over this? I don't know.
Noone knows the answer but I see our society degrading into fingerpointing and the haves and the have notes.
But from experience I've never met more supportive good hearted people than I have in college and in places of higher education, and its hard for me having been on both sides to make my hometown friends feel better about their assumptions that all my "new friends" are evil and wake up every morning with a newly devised plan about how to squeeze more pennies out of their paychecks.
I experience alot of what my exboyfriend use to call the racist thing. He noticed after 3 years of dating me, and coming from a rich upscale family in the Barkshires, that he told me he thought it was funny that he noticed his family is more subconsciously without meaning to be racist than I am. He meant that while his family was very liberal good hearted, voted for Bernie, grow gardens and spend their time teaching at disadvantaged school and being frugal with their money he said they had never lived in the ghetto like me, so when I had some choice words for some girl who was trying to beat me up, it wasnt because she was black, it was because she was trying to beat me up, and in fact I had many black friends at my school, and his town had 1 black person at his school.
His family was the kind of family who would make a minority feel out of place by trying too hard to make them not feel out of place, and I just judged people based on who they were, as people, and often being exposed to many different kinds, I find good and bad people to be rich and poor, and don't discriminate effort and character to be confound to income levels.
This was something he noticed and learned about his own family by living with me in comparison. Alot of people are at an impossible disadvantage and thats absolutely true. Alot of people are self destructive without meaning to be.
but alot of people are assholes, and jerks, and I'm not giving them a free pass because they are rich and can give me a good job anymore than I'm giving someone a free pass because they grew up in the same damn town as I did.
And its annoying to be lectured by people who grew up in constant privilege about my elitism regarding situations theyve never been in before.
I belive in equality, you know real like equality. As in, guys can be manipulative jerks but damn women can be too, and alot of women don't like me because I choose not to defend the choices of every woman on the planet because I'm a woman. I believe in equality that you can be an asshole and your income doesnt always determine that (but it can). I dont assume the character or motivations about a person based on their income level, and it's a little scary to me that in politics we are trending to that kind of subconscious assoication, and its even more disconcerting coming from recent ivy league grads working at google who grew up in rich suburbia connecticut, who think that if people in places like my hometown, had an extra $100 dollar in their weekly paycheck, the path for equality and a better life would be clear for them and everything would get better. I know its more complicated than that.
I don't think you "deserve" anything you. You dont deserve what you want or desire, you deserve what you do, and often times we all make mistakes including me. Mistakes don't bother me as much as how people respond to mistakes, and choose to use it as an opportunity for growth and I appreciate your dedication, but alot of people are not dedicated.
(The whole concept of growing up in the ghetto and having a harder time to achieve what society finds valuable is less familiar from my perspective, living in Scandinavia where welfare makes this less pronounced).
Yes, the answer is, it takes at minimum several years for a person working in the food industry to be anywhere reasonably close to being called competent in software engineering, because it requires you to change your entire way of thinking about problems.
In many cases it's flat out impossible, given that those people work full time. If your work is not in the same field, performing the mental shift to learning something in-depth in an unrelated field is extremely cognitively costly.
Another thing to keep in mind, many people working low wage jobs have families to take care of, which means even less time devoted to learning. In those cases, yes, it could probably take a decade for them to learn.
And considering how fast-paced tech is, it's likely their knowledge will be outdated by the time they would actually finish the self-learning process.
> Regardless, these companies are making an effort to do this anyways as they are in need of this skills and creating venues to take people from 0 to 1 with never having known anything about software or math.
You're right, it's a good start. But it doesn't solve the underlying issue of how costly the education process is on behalf of the learner. These companies "disrupt" by reducing transaction costs, but the cost of the good itself remains prohibitively high.
Almost two years' experience in embedded firmware is not enough qualification to write embedded firmware? Because I wrote bare-metal firmware, and you want someone who's used your dev-board or your embedded Linux before? Come on.
Employers are currently very exacting.
I received similar feedback from recruiters, saying that once you've been in industry a couple of years, employers view you as specialized to exactly what you've done before. Apparently it got hard to even sell my resume for non-embedded roles.
This situation has been created by the employers. They've held salaries down, they've refused to give raises at all (which is why everyone changes jobs every few years, so they can get back to "market rate" instead of their salary being stuck at whatever they were hired at + minuscule cost-of-living raises), and they've had massive layoffs constantly. It's all added together to paint engineering and tech as a highly unstable career path, with high starting pay but lousy job security and the need to move to a few tech hubs, and nowhere else, so that you can take advantage of the frenzy and do well. Other careers with high educational requirements, like medicine, are not like this. Doctors don't change employers every 18 months like Silicon Valley engineers do.
Here are a few other things to consider about comparing software to doctor/medicine industry
1. The rate of change of which human biology changes is alot smaller than the rate of which technology changes, and this is a pretty obvious thing to know going in to either of these industries, so complaining about the continual learning curve I don't have much sympathy for here.
2. Doctors experience their fair share of misery as well
a. Doctors are one of the professions most in shortage in the U.S. as well as almost every other country, despite this acceptance rates into med school is insanely competetive, way moreso than a large tech company, and worse, to even apply to med school requires schooling from an official college, in an environment where college tuition has increased 500% relative to inflation in the past decade.
That means the majority of people paying 500% more to get enough school to apply to med school don't even have the opportunity to pursue their profession of choice, and experience competitiveness at an entirely different level, and are left with lots of college debt and forced to find an alternate profession.
For those who do make it, its another 10 years of school, and often not even the option to choose which genre of medicine you can go into.
99% of Doctors are happy to finally be a doctor and work anywhere, and most people who wanted to be doctors never got accepted into med school.
With software engineering, while alot of devs went to college, its not required by any means, and you can realistically learn for free never go to college and be a software dev.
Additionally, if you dont get into the top whatever elite tech firms and have bragworthy employment, you can get a job as a software engiener making a min $60k at literally almost any city in the United States, and most industrialized places in the world, it just may not be the job you want, but usually there is a large healthy range of software employment between working a low end sys admin job at a healthcare firm for $90k without having to ever increase learning skills, or working for the top 5 tech firms.
Maybe a more accurate comparison is Doctors who went to ivy leagues and have paid off their debt, and their quality of life compared to the amount of work a software engineer at amazon has to do to coninually stay at cutting edge, but your kind of mildly glazing over the 15+ years of academia and hundreds of thousands of dollarsd of tuition doctors invested before they had stable lives, after inching into the acceptance of a med school where the acceptance rate is multiple times lower than those who actually interview and get turned away from top 5 tech firms.
Youre also glazing over the level of responsibility, in 99% of cases, when a software engineer makes a mistake, someones life may not be a stake. The ability for a software dev to have impact and have their work be exposed and touch and improve is higher than a doctor, but the consequences of a doctor making one mistake is almost infinitely higher than a software engineer.
In addition, you practice under a liscense, and can be sued for malpractice. If you make a mistake as a software engineer, you may get fired, but not always and will be employable elsewhere.
You cannot rebase a github push origin master a heart transplant, or a shot, or helping giving birth to new life. If you mess up, you can't ever practice medicine again.
In addition, doctors usually have to start their own practices, so they have to be their own entrepreneurs very often much like lawyers. While software engineers can do this for free with no school or liscensing and no risk of malpractice if its in the hot field of social apps for example, you can easily work for other companies your whole life.
I just don't see the comparison between the two, or the sense of entitlement you have that being an employee at Amazon offers the stable benefits a doctor has after 20 years of schooling and paying off loans and establishing an independently run office.
With software engineering specifically, given the amount of people who have access to the internet, lets say like unemployed young men in theirs 20s working in the food industry or something, working part time and play video games for 40 hrs a week. If you have access to an xbox, then you have access to free online courses to learn machine learning, intro to programming, the entire internet where you can openly asked the internet questions and try to figure out a skill thats valuable and in software specifically, have multiple free venues of learning it.
But theres a lot of people who don't do that and don't take advantage of it, but also protest wages in silicon valley. There are people who work at coffee shops 20 hrs a week by choice, and go hiking by choice and had access to the same resources everyone else did, and came even alot from middle class to upper class homes, but don't want to learn high demand skills, and in fact protest them.
in this case, I'd say the pay is not only high enough, but it's so high they dislike the fact that not doing the work to get those high paying jobs is decreasing the quality of their life relative to everyone else around them.
obviously outliers exist, but what is it about software development, that, atleast for the population who can afford internet, and video game consoles, makes it so elite people arent motivated to learn.
I think some people don't want to learn or put in the effort, but also don't want to experience the reduction in quality of life as a result of other people putting in the effort.I think those same people protest more as the wages are increased, as they misinterpret the market signals for need as abusive to their lifestyle in which they choose to not go learn high demand skills.
Could this be valid in some cases?
I've also seen self taught developers - mostly "database developers" - who had the aptitude to break problems down logically and get something working but their code was unmaintanable except by them (barely), didn't scale, and required manual intervention for failure cases.
On the other hand, I've known plenty of business analysts who spend most of their time documenting processing and working with customers who could easily move into development. They seem to have a natural aptitude when it comes to breaking problems down logically.
Some people just can't learn to code. Their mind doesn't operate that way. No one would ever say that why don't people learn how to sing or play sports because those can be high paying careers, because most people understand that not everyone has the natural talent to do so. Why does everyone think that anyone can learn how to be a developer?
Almost anyone can learn how to play sports, or sing, or play instruments. It just takes time and determination. The ones that "make it big" also have luck on their side, but there are plenty of unknown people with equal skill.
Sure, legitimately dumb people will have trouble with knowledge work... but average intelligence is more than enough. The problem is that software is still a relatively new field and we haven't learned how to teach it yet.
I think we're still too focused on implementation details. Language is the medium for expressing ideas, incoherent or poorly developed ideas indicate someone that hasn't learned how to think about the domain yet. When mentoring students or doing code review for new hires, I've found tremendous value in focusing on questions and pointers to software/framework patterns instead of line-level errors. The little stuff matters, but those problems are often driven by higher level complexity.
If you take the neurotypical to autistic spectrum, someone on the NT side will find that work that takes advantages of the NT cognitive style adds to their quality of life, and work that doesn't detracts from it. The same goes for people further on the aspie/autistic side.
Someone with an NT cognitive style might love working in finance or politics or sales but hate working in STEM. The opposite it true for those with an aspie/autistic style.
The last few decades of not the last century since the industrial revolution has seen the rise of well/paying in-demand jobs that appeal those with a cognitive style more on the aspie/autist end of the spectrum. I think a lot of those on the NT end of the spectrum who have typically been in a position of earning power for most of human history are starting to resent the fact that systems are being engineered that automate and devalue skills That those with an NT cognitive style excel at.
It also doesn't help that that the supply of thosewith an NT cognitive style greatly outnumber those with a more aspie/autistic style for reasons of millennia of sexual selection for NT traits.
I think it's quite natural to resent high earners doing a job that you either cannot do or would not enjoy doing.
there are many who are just willing to grouse about their situation and not, how do you change them?
They dish out money to relocate them, buy out their mortages to help relocate, send them to training/tech school, and the many techs who worked under me on my team made $170k + a year being one of maybe a handful of people in the world skilled at working on a specific machine in the fab.
They can't get enough guys (edit: or girls, girls were treated well where I worked and there were definitely women in the fab with wrenches working on tools, did not mean to discriminate but yeh women and men, whoever is willing to learn and do the work, they will hire) to work in these places so they are seeking out workers from retiring generation plants and military.
They all had it really good, actually enjoyed their jobs and got to learn high tech skills but not sit an an office all day and work on really high tech machines, got to work shift hours, night hours and get shift and night differentials and spend their weekends off traveling or doing whatever. They had a lot of fun and good guys to work with.
As for me I was their fresh out of college Shift Engineer/Manager who was salaried at 1/3rd the pay with a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering and being salaried I worked 70+ hrs a week and was on call 24/7, but they got to turn their mind off at the end of the shift, and always ragged me about it, but in a fun loving way. It's actually really humbling to be managing people twice your age making three times as much as you. I learned so much about technology and in general life from these people who had tech jobs in odd places all over the world, and it's good to have a different perspective and get exposed to your industry from the ground up by people who genuinely work hard and know their stuff. I'm glad I got exposed to that industry/life/those people.
Theres definitely alot of room for working men with a factory/tech/military background to have jobs if they are willing to learn new skills.
And ultimately life is a constant set of new experiences so as long as you are willing to learn new skills you can/should in most cases be willing to find something, and right now industries are seeking out and paying people for these skills.
What I noticed among these men who worked here doing well making alot more than me and living a good life is while telling me awesome stories from their travels in the navy or what have you, they had had multiple careers before and never shied away from the opportunity to transfer their skills technical and mechanical and apply it to an ew industry.
Theres lots of guys out there with the same life experience, skill level who arent willing to adapt or learn new industries, and thats not the problem in my opinion of anyone else but that person who feels they dont need to learn new things because they worked in a factory once.
Definitely lots of need in areas more than software dev.
Right now for example, Samsung is hiring like crazy for these kind of tech workers in Austin TX, paying them shift and night shift differentials and starting salaries beginning in the 6 figures range. The more experienced ones get fought over to pick and choose and negociate salaries and paid even more to train new workers, live a really good life.
I have a 16 year old son who already has 4 years experience with combat robotics team, 2 years experience with VEX robotics competition and will attend community college his final 2 years of high school. He will most likely graduate with a 2 year Associates degree at the same time as he graduates from high school.
On the practical side he is somewhere between beginner and intermediate in skill with SolidWorks, has done a bit of CNC machining, a little welding and electrical wiring. And, they get a good amount of experience troubleshooting and repairing under time pressure during competitions.
I am always on the lookout for career paths forward for my kids. Would love to hear a bit more about the skills and work of this team.
Thanks
Of course, most companies don't do anything to train or build talent in-house anymore. If you do increase your skills, it is most likely in spite of your employer, and not because of them.
Imagine a model economy of 10 companies with openings, and one person with the skills to fill them. All 10 companies can fill their openings by sequentially raising their salary offer to that person.
If you don't account for the openings that are created along the way (as the one person sequentially jumps for the higher salary), you'll have a mistaken impression there is no skilled labor shortage. After all, each company hired someone.
then throw in some who hold their skill set to highly with no basis in reality. just because one XXXX language programmer can get a set figure does not mean they warrant it let alone near where they live. I have seen people turn down jobs because they did not like the drive. Damn, you need the job, you do what it takes to keep your family whole!
True. But then question is whether money saved by offering the lower pay is worth the additional productivity brought in by new employee or not. If it is not then it is fair to say there is a shortage of people in Tech industry.