Companies spend on technology, not workers | Hacker News Reader

Companies spend on technology, not workers

nytimes.com

15 pointsyummyfajitas25 comments

Culling the résumés takes three days. Then he must make time to interview applicants, and spend $150 for each drug test.

I can think of a way that this company could save $150 per interviewed applicant. Can anyone else spot it?

What does recreational drug use outside of work have to do with plastics manufacture? Do the plastics feel different if the engineer had a joint two weeks earlier?

I think he's hiring (or not hiring) operators and technicians and the fact that there's a safety training program involved hints at some danger in the workplace. In that position I would also prefer someone with a clean drug test although I would still worry that they show up stoned on their first day and get their arm into the extruder or whatever.

I've never touched anything stronger than weed, and I haven't even been near that in a long time - but if an employer (new or current) asked me to take a drug test, unless they had a justifiable reason for believing I specifically was on drugs, then I'd refuse on principle.

An individual's principles are just the same as a company's policies. You might feel better about yourself refusing a drug test but you might miss out on an otherwise good job. It may not be a problem for a small company but a larger company that has to hire lots of manual labor, where drugs and alcohol are definitely a problem, cannot treat you differently so they have to insist on the drug test.

Current employers insisting on a drug test is definitely more problematic, though, if there's no reason to suspect a problem it seems unreasonable to insist.

In that case, why not ban any candidates who had a beer in the last two weeks as well? I wouldn't want someone to turn up drunk at work either.

There are lots of forces on a business that can mandate drug policies, especially when working with heavy equipment. Insurance companies can require it, as can federal and state regulations.

Yes, they feel invisible because they weren't made because the guy had an accident because he shows up to work high and operates heavy machinery and gets hospitalized and the company's insurance rates go up.

No, they spend on both, keeping in mind the benefits they'll get from each.

Why do people expect companies to throw money around just because someone needs a job? It's not a company's mission to create jobs. It's to make money. Sometimes that means creating jobs, but that's a side-effect, not a primary goal.

You're correct, but we do need to evaluate what society's role is in dealing with this recent bust. The fact that we can suddenly be as productive as 3 years ago but with 7 million fewer jobs says quite a number of things, but the fact remains that 7 million people who were previously productive contributing members of society suddenly aren't, mostly through no direct fault of their own. What, if anything, should we be doing for these people? Retraining? Handouts?

...the fact remains that 7 million people who were previously productive contributing members of society suddenly aren't...

I don't see how this is a fact. It's one interpretation of the facts we see (productivity is up, employment is not).

Another interpretation of the facts is that 7 million people were on payroll but were not productive, and employer/producers have now corrected this mistake.

The idea that only the 7 million unproductive people where cut is absurd. Over the last few years several companies have failed and even their most productive workers where temporarily out of a job. It's a real issue that being productive and finding a job are not all that related skills.

Many of the companies that failed were unproductive. For example, any company building or selling houses we don't need is unproductive.

It is ridiculous that 7 million unproductive people were cut. In actuality, it was more like 70 million people, productive and not, who were cut. This is only marginally more people than in normal times.

(Data gathered by eyeballing the graph here: http://modeledbehavior.com/2011/06/05/strolling-through-the-... )

The idea is that among those 70 million people (probably a bit less, if some people were fired twice), most of the productive ones found jobs. The remainder were not rehired.

Great interpretation.

Of the 7 million, how many were 'productive' for companies that simply couldn't weather the storm?

Companies that are still around are reporting greater productivity, but it's a bit of a survivorship bias in these numbers, and to interpret them as "all those people were just dead weight" is too extreme.

Sure, some of them probably were, but entire industries simply shift away. We basically don't have travel agents any more. Decades ago it was a career. Today it's a minor niche. Does that mean that in 1980, travel agents were unproductive dead weight? Certainly not.

Technology advances and a big financial shakedown have given us the one-two punch, and I'm not sure we'll ever quite get back to where we were just a few years ago.

I was listening to Rush Limbaugh the other day bitch about the May US 'job creation' figures - only 50k or so. He was bitching that he knows how to "get this country right again". It boiled down to "lower taxes on corporations, and reduce regulations".

1. I know plenty of small businesses, and I don't know anyone who's thinking "dang, if only taxes were lower, I'd go right out and hire a bunch of people". Generally, they're just nervous about the short term economy, and would prefer some cash on hand if taxes were reduced.

2. Sure, I'm for lower regulations. It seems like it might help the guy in the article if there were fewer safety regulations that didn't require $7k in training per employee. Fair enough. But I don't see this as something that's preventing people from hiring as much as not being able to find qualified workers, or being willing to invest in the training for those workers. Many are trapped by underwater mortgages, so more employers are forced to deal with the workforce immediately surrounding them.

More on Rush for a moment. Yes, capitalism is great, etc. But with the changes in tech we've been seeing the past couple decades, 'successful' companies require fewer people.

I'm going out on a limb here and will say that a company's market cap is an indicator of the value they provide the market. Ford's market cap is $54B, and they employ 164,000. Apple's market cap is $300B, and they employ 49,000. Google is $166B and they employ 26,000. Value created and delivered is far greater, and as more companies "tech up", lowered taxes and regulations will just not be a path to higher employment.

Yes, the economy may get "back on track", but fewer people will be riding those rails.

He said it was $7k/yr FLAT FEE. That means it doesn't change no matter how many people he hires. In fact, the regulations are set up so that he should hire as many people as possible to get the most use out of his $7k.

market cap / payroll population

Ford = 350k Apple = 6.122M Google = 6.385M

You used the word "productive" twice in your posting, once in the economic sense, once in the sense that most people feel "productive" when they go to work every day. Therein lays the problem - so many pre-recession jobs were simply unnecessary.

The US now has to come to terms with structural unemployment, which is something European nations have been struggling with for decades.

"so many pre-recession jobs were simply unnecessary."

Well, they can be looked at as unneccessary now, but at the time they weren't considered to be (otherwise they wouldn't have existed then, as they currently don't now).

It's not as if employers just suddenly "wised up" 3 years ago and said "hey, I don't need any of you - you've been 100% unproductive the past several years, so I will simply lay you off now". Employers are acting as much in their self-interest now as they did 3, 5 and 10 years ago.

In an ideal world what you say is true. Unfortunately, employers don't necessarily know what's the "wise" thing to do. Take the housing boom: from a contractor's point of view it was good business to build many times more houses than the historical aggregate demand. In reality those houses were completely unnecessary: short term gain, long term damage.

Same story for the dot-com (and probably the current) bubble. Employers are notoriously bad at accurately forecasting how many jobs they can actually sustain. And in a downturn it's easy to squeeze more productivity out of fewer employees because it's easier to retain overworked employees.

I think people are picking and choosing what time perspective to use (not necessarily you, but I've heard this sort of thing before).

We can look at job situations 5 years ago and say they were unnecessary, although at the time it wasn't judged to be.

Then we look at now and say the unemployed currently are dead weight. If we weren't good judges of the situation 5 years ago, why are we any better (collectively) now?

Did you even read the article?

Some do neither, too. Or at best, not enough of either.

With equipment prices dropping, and tax incentives to subsidize capital investments, these trends seem likely to continue.

Sounds like skewed incentives.

Behind every piece of technology is a human.

> “You don’t have to train machines,” Mr. Mishek observes.

This is such an overgeneralized comment. What specific business processes are these "machines" replacing? Where's the ROI comparison?

I'm taking this article with a grain of salt.

You get rich in a gold rush selling shovels.

I've heard it described as the 'pick and pan' strategy

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