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Comment by kartickv | Hacker News Reader

But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.

Besides, I don't know about others, but I've recently put out multiple job ads for one vacancy. Our app, Noctacam, uses computational photography to take great photos at night. I was looking for someone with computational photography knowledge and/or iOS. And/or Android, since we plan to make an Android app in the future. I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended. Someone who doesn't understand the background may say, "Oh, no, tons of positions aren't being filled." In other ways, it may a counting problem, not a real problem.

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If they need to fill this job and it is not worth the higher salary and it cannot be filled at this salary or lower then this job should not exist as a job: the owner of the company, the manager of the company, the HR person of the company can either do that job themselves or that job should be eliminated.

But why? Does having the position open harm anyone?

As long as they don't bitch about being unable to buy a Porsche 911 for $100, they are welcome to advertise it.

It needlessly wastes peoples time.

If employers were required to pay for someone's time for an interview, you would see this fixed right quick. But because an employer can leave an unreasonable job req out there and interview as many candidates as they want, with the only cost being their own time, this continues.

Sorting resumes and conducting interviews is not free.

So, you still need a cost benefit analysis.

Cost of doing business.

Wasting resources for zero gain is never just a cost of doing business.

Yes, not all jobs will be filled quickly. But, unreasonable salary expectations cause needless waste.

In sufficiently large bureaucracies the departmental budget is someone else's money, but meanwhile the departmental middle manager has to prove his need for existence, so why not advertise for a position. You see this often in universities: someone leaves, the duties are distributed amongst those that are still there, a job is advertised and goes unfilled for several terms because none of the applicants are to the taste of the committee.

Here's something I wrote on a different discussion about hiring:

Imagine I cost my company $50 an hour in salary, and earn them $150 an hour (revenue of 3-5x salary is ballpark for most companies, we'll go for the low end for some perspective). As a senior dev, I have to sit in all the interviews of people potentially joining my team. Imagine we have 10 people that make it through the HR round. I have to participate in 10 interviews, and then likely 3 more for the final round.

My cost for round 2 is: 10 people x 2 hours x (150 lost revenue + 50 salary paid) = $4k

My cost for round 3 is: 3 x 8 x (150 + 50) = $4.8k

My company has already dropped $8.8k on my involvement solely in the interview room for your typical entry level position. This doesn't even include my involvement in onboarding, training, pre-interview prep, post-interview review, etc. This is also JUST ME, and a very lowball figure at that. Now factor in the cost of the HR round, recruiters, background checks, the other devs in the interviews with me, etc. It adds up very, very quickly.

The "costs of doing business" can easily be reduced by not interviewing for shits and giggles.

I think the problem is that the company's budget and the hiring managers are different things - both in terms of resources and how people are willing to think about them.

smaller companies avoid interviewing like this out of pure practicality, it's only the larger ones that can afford to waste $100k filling a position.

I don't get why companies can't just hire a bunch of more "questionable" applicants at a lower rate, say $45k - $60k or so for junior devs in most cities.

No need to spend much effort on the interview process, just make sure they can solve a couple standardized problems, and then "hire" them as contractors for a 90-day trial.

Put them onto teams and throw them in the deep end, then get rid of all the ones who can't swim, which will probably be like 75%. But you'll also find quite a few unexpected gems that way.

I mean, that's exactly what we did in Call Center management and it worked great. Hired people at $10 / hour for the first 90 days, then a $2 raise up to $12. We did have super high attrition for brand new employees (since we didn't technically do a contracting period,) but who really cares.

We just kept on filtering and eventually had dozens of shockingly intelligent and competent call center employees for like, $13 / hour. (This was in the Midwest.)

Quite a few companies are doing exactly what you describe to fill dev positions. The real cost comes when the systems designed and built by those junior devs are so brittle it becomes very time consuming and expensive to add new features. Most of the time, however, those systems built by the junior devs are so buggy there's no time to build new features in any case because everyone is too busy dealing with issues in prod.

That's because these companies management loves to develop by committee that comes with agilie, points, IPMs and standups. When a voice of expert is assigned the same weight as the voice of a Joe Random Developer and there are more Joe Random Developers than experts, you end up with garbage fire of systems.

It isn't just junior devs. It's also senior ones with a sophisticated grasp of CS trivia and little expertise outside of it.

I think a lot of firms already do something like that through internship programs.

I don't know how it is in your business, but if I was given a new batch of team members every 90 days in the expectation that 75% of them would be gone in three months, I would also be gone in three months.

yes.

it also adds noise to the information provided by the market, confusing job seekers who may adopt sub-optimal strategies

e.g. in reaction to a real job posting, the potential applicant may erroneously think "this listing is bullshit. i won't waste my time applying."

There's a range of salaries for a given level of competence. I found one candidate earning ₹4 lac a year who was way more competent than another earning ₹14 lac a year. That's a 3x variation. So, no harm keeping it open for a while to see if it can be filled.

> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary?

As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?

The task that they are hiring for does not generate enough revenue to be worth at price X. The business may not stop from operating if these tasks are not done, or not done on a priority basis.

But, in the standard perfect markets interpretation, that would mean that the task shouldn’t be done. Right?

If there are no takers, then the task should not be done, yes. What a lot if people seem to imply is that these jobs should not be advertised in the first place, which I disagree with.

Advertising is not free. Having a few unfilled jobs is natural but it's wasteful to have significant market disconnects.

That said, a lot of 'jobs' are simply H1B fodder or resume bait etc.

Unless they people causing them waste incur costs greater then they benefits, it won't change. Hiring has gone digital, reducing costs, so of course garbage job postings have increased.

So... the business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running well, or at least not as well as its owners would want it to be running?

Should workers be doing charity work now?

No, you are free not to accept inadequate pay, just as the companies are free not to accept excessive pay. It's a marketplace, just think in terms of bids and asks.

It's a marketplace until the business starts using a nonexistent "shortage" to lobby government to add more visa slots and create programs to funnel more students into the jobs it wants to pay less for.

It's also a marketplace where one side has much more information and negotiating power than the other.

Of course you are free to do whatever you want, it's the entitlement that pisses me off. Somehow, employees charging "too much" is not ok and totally not the companies' fault, whereas offering too little is great management. Then they wonder why there are six million jobs that they can't fill.

>As in, their business doesn't even generate enough revenue to afford hiring the kind of people who can keep it running?

Even businesses which generate enough revenue to be able to afford higher salaries don't want to pay more for labor. They want to pay less for more.

And workers seek higher salaries. Through both entities acting in their self-interest, the market discovers an equilibrium.

Until the entity with more power starts bending the rules of them game in their favour.

Until the class which does all the work decides to get rid of our parasites.

Except they won't/can't. And the parasites are actually working very hard.

They just get inordinately rewarded for their work, because most of their work involves maintaining the status quo, with them on top. It's their families that don't work.

Moreover, so far the only thing revolution has been good for is shuffling the parasites. I strongly suspect there are biological reasons behind our feudal support of strongmen.

Historically, that hasn't been very successful. Purges never seem to be a good solution.

I always find this an interesting argument; while company foo has more power than a random job seeker, they certainly don't have more power than all the other companies seeking that employee. In order for companies to wield their supposed salary-depressing power there would have to be massive collusion. For an example of how (in)effective that is, look how much salaries increased while Apple Google et al were colluding.

I think this is more simple: units of production are less obviously attributable to FTE count or difference in skill in software than in other fields. Therefore, management is less sure how much developer they actually need to purchase.

Companies are certainly beholden to the market: one of the ways the power asymmetry is unfolding is in their successful manipulation of H1 visa legislation.

None of this is all-or-nothing. Companies use their power over the individual applicants as a response to the vagaries of the market. However, the basic logic divide and conquer ing means that they always have more power than individuals selling their services to them.

Even the H1 program pits corporate interests against each other. The biggest companies have to enter the same lottery as WIPRO Jr. DBAs.

There has been exactly this type of collusion in the past and I would argue it's still ongoing, just better covered up. http://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/

If the market clears that's the equilibrium.

If the market is free, eventually it gets sold. In this case, that means legislating artificial surplus in the form of increased H1 visas.

Even then the market clears. The equilibrium under H1 is different than without H1 but there's still an equilibrium.

I'm not sure what your point is: that it is the preferable state of affairs simply because it has found stability?

> I found it convenient to post three job ads, so that I can clearly organise the dozens of applicants based on their skills. Two of them went unfulfilled. Which is exactly as was intended.

I always wondered why 50% of job listings were totally fake. "Selfish hiring practices" being the reason makes a lot more sense than "appearance of growth" that usually gets stated.

It's also pretty common that the job is already basically filled internally or (less commonly at the moment) by H1B but for various legal or procedural reasons there has to be a job posting.

>But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary? You seem to be assuming it's worth doing at any price, as does the article, and that's untrue.

In that case, something's got to give. Either the wage has to go up, or they'll have to accept the fact that they won't find anybody who's willing to work for that wage and the job will remain unfilled.

This is a great point. One can think of a job posting as a bid on the market. Not every bid results in trade. Similarly, not every job posting is a job, like your example demonstrated.

But I don't think that's how job openings are calculated - they're mostly derived by asking employers, not just counting up postings.

How many market bid values are covered until you go through a vetting process so extended that you can realistically only look at a relatively tiny number bids before making a decision?

So what's the job-market-equivalent of a HFT or broker to reconcile the bids and asks?

> But maybe the job isn't economically worth it at the higher salary?

That would means the company is dysfunctional and only desperate people are going to join this wagon.

How does that follow? You seem to be assuming a lot. If they're peripheral, optional tasks, like an extra service you could upsell to your clients for a small margin, it may not provide enough income for a market-level salary.

So you are incapable of hiring. When you don't have the money for a ferrari, you don't buy a toyota because of the lack of available ferraris.

People are not objects, and your analogy is not accurate (or maybe just unclear). People (at least in our industry) are free not to accept jobs with low pay. You are also free to seek clients rather than employers.

In most cases, you don't want to take a job that's worth say $100k, but not $150k to an employer.

Either the value you're bringing to the company is somewhere less than $50k, or the company is irrationally tied to not paying more than $100k.

So what if the value is less than $50k?

You want to work for a company where you cost them $150k in salary and benefits and only add $50k in value? That's a very insecure position to be in, it doesn't leave much room for growth, and it means you have very little leverage overall.

Six months ago, I was making about 1/6 of that working as a software developer, and I wasn't badly paid for the area. I'm pretty sure most of my colleagues would sign up for that in five minutes.

I'm assuming you mean 1/6 of $150k (150k was salary plus benefits, the salary was only 100k).

25k is very badly paid for any area in the US (outside of a few territories) as a software developer. If you're not in the US, then obviously that changes things.

Yeah, not in the US :)

Then there's not a heck of a lot of room for error or raises. In a now deleted reddit thread someone was bitching that $150k for programmers was absurd, and they have all kinds of applicants, so nobody's worth that kind of money.

My rebuttal was pretty simple: major tech companies have profits per employee north of $100k. That's $100k in compensation left on the table, by companies reputed to be among the highest paying out there. In contrast, IBM has profits of $30k per person and is constantly in layoff mode. That's what happens when the value is less than $50k.

Unless you're currently making $50K, in which case why would you turn down a 100% raise?

If your choice is only between your current $50k job and the $100k job then of course.

For most people looking at a $100k a year job, that's not the case.

That's a fair point.

If the job isnt worth the salary, then the business isnt fungible

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