Employers will do almost anything to find workers except pay them more

The newspaper business is struggling as is. Every time a publication is blocked in Europe people complain. Ads were the answer for most online publications, but showing targeted ads now pose a legal risk.

I don't know about their business ops, but I'd suspect they've done the math and decided it isn't worth the effort to change their platform so people can read for free in Europe.

If someone else might own the copyright to it, don't submit it. Outline is for reading pages that:

* you own the rights to,

* is in the public domain,

* constitutes fair use, or

* you have consent of the copyright holder.

Nah, you see the pattern in pretty much every first world country.

1. Government makes law protecting citizens saying companies must hire local unless as a last resort

2. Big tech companies post job listings with unreasonable qualification requirements, while offering wages so low that few people would accept

3. Nobody applies/accepts offers from those companies

4. Companies start whining to the government about how they can't find workers (at these wages) and that we need to increase the amount of visas from India/Bangladesh/wherever.

5. Government falls for it hook, line, and sinker. More cheap foreign labor is approved.

6. The market value for all programmers in the region drops.

Repeat steps 1 through 6 until the average programmer salary hits minimum wage. If local citizens resist at any point, just accuse them of being racist.

Cue some months later I see in a magazine a interview with them, and complaining they can't find someone for that job.

So I applied again, they apologized profusely, blamed old HR company. Sent me to talk to new one.

New HR company approves me, then multinational refuse me explicitly because corporate policy is that this particular job must be done by someone experienced.

Thing is: they wanted a local, and they were the first company here offering that job... So good luck finding a experienced person when you are the first one offering that job in first place.

No wonder they complain on media...

All we can do is wait for the contract to finish and then not renew it. Its perfectly legal, a lawyer told me.

But in general, if you insist that they add a termination clause of 15 days on your side, they usually do it although only after some insistence and negotiation, which if you have several interviews ongoing and are waiting for other responses might puts us in a precarious position.

Or 20% less today than in 1996, in gross terms? The problem is, now most freelancers are forced to create their own service companies (of one person), so the contract is between two companies and not between a company and an employee.

And in those cases, the rules are not the same, AFIK. I did ask a lawyer to get the contract reviewed in 2013 for a mission that I was baited into taking and then there is literally almost no programming involved and I wanted out.

The lawyer examined the service contract and told me that by the terms of the contract, I would have to either serve the service contract or reimburse the company for what they would lose. Maybe another lawyer would say something different, or things changed since 2013.

I’m even seeing that in IT. Back in the day you could start out as tech support, or an operator (as I did - long story) and be given a chance to program and move up. Now even those jobs are outsourced. It’s just as easy to hire someone from a foreign country to admin your AWS hosted instances as it is to hire someone locally.

It's an escalating problem in Eastern Europe in general. Our politicians are way too greedy. They lost all perspective. They try being a bit more insolent since the last year, they sit and wait -- no revolts, no fires, no pitchforks. So hey, these people don't mind! Let's get EVEN MORE money from them! Sadly it's how it has been going ever since the fall of the Soviet Union. Many elderly people say: "It was not all sunshine and rainbows back then either but at least the people had everything necessary to live respectful lives". They do have a point.

Thank the gods for internet and for me being a programmer ever since teenager. Otherwise I would probably live off social benefits as well.

It's very easy to demean people for being lazy or unmotivated or non-ambitious. But the reality is, the best career advancement ~85% of the people around here can hope for is an awful job with 2-3 hours of commuting in total for the day, for an income that exceeds the bare minimum needs with 5-10%. So it's pretty normal many decide not to bother, or to turn to petty crime.

Even a commune where workers "decide on their own", has bosses. They are just not called bosses. See any of the '70 and '80 communes.

Pretty much all the software engineering jobs have worked at have given me quite a bit of autonomy. At least within software engineering organizations the purpose of a manager should be to make sure workers have the necessary resources and coordination, but they shouldn't be telling workers what to do.

I know someone that got hired at a company to answer the phone for technical questions from users. When she started they didn't have a phone hooked up yet so she asked for github access and started writing software. They never bothered hooking up a phone at her desk and she just wrote software for the next 2 years. The software she wrote was valuable to the company and was mostly self-directed. I don't think stories like this are that uncommon in the software engineering world.

Edit1: Fixed typo, thanks PaulRobinson

Edit2: Added Anecdote

If they offer you a $800 wage, when your unemployment is $400, your effective earning rate for the work you are doing is just $400/mo. Cost-benefit analysis isn't in favor of working. The employers either have to offer something on top of the starting wage (like clear path to advancement), or raise the wage. Otherwise it's a fairly logical choice for people to stay home and draw unemployment.

Ever read about Sun Hydraulics?

"At Sun, we have no job titles, no hierarchy, no formal job descriptions, no departments, no budgets, no direct sales channel, no close supervision, and only some work instructions."

https://www.wallstreetdaily.com/2016/09/15/sun-hydraulics-sh...

> That's kind of the norm at any job. I'm curious what alternative you propose, a commune where workers decide on their own what they'll be working on?

Did you ever work in the hotel industry as a low-level worker ?

At the scale of publically held companies, your bossy evilness is virtue signalling that tells the market that you are viable in the era of Uber and Amazon. Right now, as things stand, wrecking things and your own employees is expected and you will get no support and no investment from breaking ranks. That's just how it is.

In my field, I ended up just flipping the table and switching to Patreon so I could dump free competitive product and better serve my own userbase. My income got literally decimated by this decision but has rebounded to about a third or half of what it would have been, but I'm totally exempt from having to behave like a vulture: it suits my market positioning quite well, though if I was a really serious threat to the market leaders in my sector, I'm pretty sure they would come up with a way to sabotage me. That's also why I MIT license: I can funnel good stuff to poor musicians if I also let already-rich people steal it in exchange for only publicity. The alternate is they steal it anyway but with no publicity, or simply try to wreck my operation so there's less competition.

The narrative of the evil capitalist overlord persists for good reason: in the absence of a working society it's down to power and power alone, and only winning and getting the most capital allows you to continue to win and get more capital. It's a feedback loop and there's no reason 'salaries would improve' barring outside interference, which is less likely by the year.

Go ahead and do your thought experiment, but it doesn't map to the real world of 2018. To survive you've got to think more disruptively: your axioms here are pretty naive. For instance, what is actually important: your clients being happy, or your clients paying more money?

Not many people have €5M to build their own hotel, particularly those who are unemployed. Furthermore, not everyone can overcome all the barriers to entry, or have the know-how to keep a hotel operating.

Work harder. Make more money if you want to do your own thing. Surely there are professionals in Greece making good money working as employees for others. What are they doing that the lazy uneducated worker is not?

Do more of that and less complaining that you're making 500 euro a month.

I think they may even force you in to unpaid/extremely low paid work if you cant get something yourself.

The subsidy is ~32€ per day, which is the same as the minimum basic unemployment benefit.

Parts of these "youngsters" are probably off doing something related to self-development and fulfilling which might provide benefits for society later on.

In this case they (seemingly) aren't getting any more money from working extra, compared to not working either, since their social benefits are stripped away if they start working. If this was basic income, they would be left with something extra at the end.

In this case there's no incentive to work?

I think society would be a better place if people were paid based on the value they delivered, and not coerced into work based on the need to subsist. When employers/owners have to absorb long-term costs, they make changes.

People who work on pipes or other buried things used to often get killed or injured by collapses of mud or stone. Worker's compensation costs forced employers to put reinforced steel safety devices in the holes to mitigate.

Yeah, let's compensate them for being insured and at the worst case scenario lose 500 euros a month every now and then when a shadier employee comes around and leaves quickly. Poor them. Whatever will they do, 1 million euros a year can barely get your ends meet!

Not to say that there isn't companies making terrible offers in London, but I don't know people working for them.

Same company, same upper-upper-upper management, but VASTLY different pay scales. Its nuts to think about, especially when I can rent a full 3 bed/3 bath house with basement and garage for about 2 times less than a 1 bedroom flat in London.

But yes, dark and slushy winters.

The national median wage is ~$35K ($27K post tax) afaik, and people live good lives on that, albeit in smaller towns.

And if you have a mortgage, you can deduct 30% of interest payments.

After this client I'll apply to job offers more aggressively, see if that helps. Honestly, I just want to work from home most days instead of wasting my time in traffic.

I agree on business/management not comprehending the complexity of IT, it's one thing we need to try to do a better job of, at least to some degree. But I have turned down / terminated jobs because clients are unwilling to even try to understand what we do and simply want to stay stuck in their pre-computer/pre-internet way of thinking and working. IT is here to help your business move forward, but if you are unwilling (which includes paying the right people correct wages) there is nothing I can do for you.

People use these fancy features for free by companies having billions of budget and income... then they want the same features from you, also for free:)

I have also experienced it in person. The customer, which was their only customer, and works with many similar contractor businesses, made noises that they want their contractors to "be more agile". So a lot of them just cargo-culted something and said, "we're more agile now!"

My previous employer declared a daily stand-up meeting--with mandatory attendance at 8:45 AM, the flexible hours be damned--crammed the entire team (minus customer support) of ~20 people around the walls of the manager's corner office, and proceeded to waste 45 minutes every morning, as everyone listened to everyone else justify their existence to the boss. Needless to say, I was already looking for other jobs, and doubled down on the application rate after that.

At my current employer, we just changed the day and time of our weekly status meeting, moved it to the conference table in the server lab, where the testers in adjoining offices can theoretically hear it and elect to participate, and said, "we're more agile now!"

The customer has absolutely no in-house ability to evaluate the effectiveness of external software development teams, so they just have to take their contractors' at their word.

I think you can probably guess who the customer is.

Maybe, show me your math proving that number is correct.

I can't speak for the US, but in Canada the housing component of the CPI has utterly no connection to actual observed costs of owning or renting, at the national level as well as the municipal level.

You don't have to take this as a fact (I can't really prove it if the government doesn't share their data or calculations, can I), but moreso something to think about in the formation of your world view.

I'm of two minds on this. Wealth and income are not the same. You get wealth by not consuming all of your income, and instead by investing it. Of course, if you have just enough income to survive, then you cannot accumulate wealth. But most people (in the US) are not in that boat. One of the phenomena that continuously fascinates me are the differences in wealth accumulation between people in the same income brackets. Sometimes there are good reasons for it (e.g. medical issues), but my sense is that in the vast majority of cases, there is simply a difference between the elective consumption levels of different households.

http://www.visualcapitalist.com/relationship-income-and-weal...

For example, I have a sibling whose wealth is in the 98th percentile for his age bracket. However, his income has never been above the 60th percentile, and has often been lower. This is an example of how a certain attitude about consumption can have a strong impact on wealth accumulation.

I definitely think that the rich (broadly defined -- both via high income or high wealth) need to be contributing more back to society than we are. But, as a saver, I'm biased towards targeting high-income more than high-wealth.

It's actually kind of awesome. They bump up my Canadian salary to match their USD official salary any time the exchange rate goes bonkers. So the more Trump does Trump, the more I'm paid.

Compared to what you do every single day at work, it's not really much trouble at all.

Remote work is not for everyone, and you have to be self-motivated and disciplined. It can be a lot harder to get work-life separation.

Other than that it's no different than looking for any other kind of job, you want a strong resume and to practice the coding interview and assignments.

But stay away from companies that have a Canadian presence, they often have a Canadian HR department that sets Canadian level salary guides. If you do interview with a company like that, be clear up front that you're looking for a US level salary, not a Canadian one.

We did talk about wage stickiness, and this is related.

Additionally, he operates a real estate "investing" school that advocates and instructs semi-legal, morally questionable predatory practices.

It is openly modelled after Trump University, Trump being Kiyosaki's business mentor and aspirational avatar. They have authored at least one book together.

Drop natural population growth toward zero. Import one million low skill, very low income persons per year.

Welcome to the non-merit, non-point based immigration system treadmill of never getting anywhere because you perpetually flood your system with cheap replacement labor.

Tens of millions of Americans moved from the middle class into the top two economic tiers since 1970. And we replaced them with vast amounts of low cost imported labor. If you keep doing that, you will not see meaningful wage growth at the median, you'll only see it in the top tiers.

Most other developed nations are once again correct: the US should move to a common sense points based immigration system. We could merely exactly copy Canada on immigration, and that would dramatically improve the conditions for workers at or below the median.

You can "buy" that explanation or not, but there's a lot of research and evidence backing up the idea that a huge fraction of the western world lives essentially paycheck to paycheck, and it's not because all of them are less financially savvy than you or I, who just happen to get paid well above average too.

A good TV and nice phone are not usually the kind of expenses that drive people into having no savings. If I go grab an example from t-mobile...

A brand new, shiny iphone x for somebody with good credit is gonna run us $30/m. That's kinda pricy, so let's go a few generations back and get a refurbished iphone 6s plus - they won't let me go to older generations. That'll cost $22/m. So sure, yes, that cost adds up - but $8/m extra in savings is not going to be the difference between somebody living paycheck to paycheck or suddenly being flush with savings.

Never mind reality TV - _actual_ reality is that a large percentage of the population of basically every first world, western, developed country is paid at such a level that any raise is just going to go directly back into the economy because they aren't paid enough for savings to be a high enough priority to happen. This isn't financial illiteracy - both of us put a _lot_ before savings, it just happens that once we've done that we still have a bunch left over. Lots of people don't.

I have a 17 year old and basically have ended up remote working just to be around him and his sister. For me, that's definitely a thing that I feel like was a great deal for both our lives. Also, now I'm just turning 40 and he's graduating high school, I've started traveling and working that that's also quite fulfilling.

I feel sad for those folks to- it's not a judgment thing, I just know how much I got from being around my kids and how much I personally would have lost out on.

But they say, "We are engaged on the issue and committed to looking at options that support our full range of digital offerings to the EU market." Surely a company wouldn't lie on the Internet?

> To be fair, they're probably blocking also US readers occasionally or permanently in Europe. They could be annoyed by that.

I am. I'm a registered voter in LA county living in the EU, so I consider it pretty important to stay informed of LA, California and US issues, and the LA Times used to be an important information source for me.

The broader issue is that shareholders have deluded themselves into thinking that they are the end-all-be-all of a company when in fact their contribution is limited.