Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone? | Hacker News Reader

Employee shortages: Where have all the workers gone?

bbc.co.uk

213 pointsgixo495 comments

It is strange that the top known factors for this are not even mentioned in this or other similar news stories. First, closing of schools caused large numbers of women to leave the workforce in order to care for children. Until schools are fully open and day care is available those women will probably not be going back to work. Second, all markets are cultivated things. Employers in the most troubled sectors have recently spent roughly a year and a half telling desperate workers they have nothing for them. Now that there are openings it should be no surprise that workers have moved on and have little interest in transitioning back.

All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on.

It’s funny, I hear a ton about worker productivity and similar worker centric views of production, labor, and wages. But, as any Walmart, warehouse, or even pizza shop worker will tell you - their ability to negotiate wages, change production practices, or make any difference in the workplace amounts to a suggestion box and a 25 cent raise.

> people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on

I disagree... COVID-19 made a lot of people reconsider their priorities. If you only had limited time left with a family member, would you really want to spend your time working a crappy job while struggling to pay rent?

Pretty soon I imagine the government will start doing something like what they did to people who went on strike.. they'll find ways to start punishing people that don't want to work certain jobs anymore and changing careers will rarely be an option.

If only there was a better way to get people to work shitty jobs... like maybe paying them more...

I agree but I think a lot of the problem also is that there were/are many businesses that are not finacially viable and cheap labour has carried them along thus far. Now the tide has gone out they are facing reality.

> would you really want to spend your time working a crappy job while struggling to pay rent?

Nobody ever wanted this, they did this because they had to. There's nothing to reconsider. They would have always preferred doing something else.

> All of this stuff about workers disappearing and people reconsidering their lives is pretty much a sideshow of projected narrative that is detached from what is really going on.

Well said. We’ve been bombarded with news articles and thought pieces about how COVID has forever changed the workforce, how people are refusing to work jobs they don’t like, how people are quitting en masse because their employers won’t allow remote work, and how companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now.

Yet every time I dig for the actual numbers it turns out little has changed on the whole. It’s usually journalists taking isolated stories or small changes in certain statistics and re-casting them as society-wide social movements.

Many of these articles are simple clickbait so the reader can think “Duh, pay more!” But it doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want. People are obviously either getting other jobs somewhere, waiting for enhanced unemployment to end, or waiting for other life circumstances to allow them to return to work.

And like you said, many of these situations are the result of parents having to leave the workforce to care for children while their schools and daycares were closed down. People without kids may not realize how disruptive that was to families that had planned routines and jobs around kids attending schools and daycares. I suspect we’ll see sharper increases in employment when school is back in session and enhanced unemployment ends this fall.

There isn’t some large movement of low-wage people simply refusing to work because without other sources of income. The logic in that narrative just doesn’t make any sense.

This problem is temporary while the economy, market, and extended unemployment benefits transition back to normalcy. Journalists are seizing on the narrow window of change to try to insert more dramatic narratives, but those too will fade.

Right. Why would I seek a job if the unemployment benefits pay me nearly as much to do nothing?

And the employer perspective: Why would I try to compete with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months?

The situation is temporary and has obviously causal factors that are coming to an end soon (unemployment benefits, school out for summer).

Journalists seem to be going out of their way to ignore these and pretend that something else is happening.

The only shitty thing here is, that many companies will fail and close down in the meantime, meaning less jobs openings for people who just lost unemployment benefits.

If there is still demand for their services, other more successful franchises will step in.

That's the creative destruction of capitalism, eliminating net negative value enterprises.

> with unemployment benefits that are ending in a few months?

I don't think so. Zeta variant is coming.

I hadn't heard of this, but the WHO seems to have indicated that this is no longer a variant of interest, let alone a variant of concern.

I believe it was a joke that, as emergency covid policies are extended a couple months as each new variant arises, and since there will be no end of variants for an endemic virus, that means the policies are actually permanent.

Or maybe I misunderstood.

you got it right

Are you sure?

Those states that cut people off unemployment didn’t see a boost in employment rates. Sooo now what?

Because you have self-respect and shouldn't be taking handouts if you're capable of working?

No one capable of working should be taking unemployment, ever.

This is how social safety nets get demonized by politicians, and it works. A factory worker and mother of three who was making car parts from the start of COVID-19 until now and was never laid off and who never had the option of quitting work, fucking hates someone who sits on their ass collecting unemployment playing Xbox games all day. That's the relatively young Hispanic woman who lives down the road from me. I was fortunate; I already work remote so the only thing COVID did for me was restrict my dining choices temporarily here in Texas.

The answer to every problem we seem to face in America always ends up being, "Just throw some fucking money at it!"

I'm sick of it. Many of our problems couldn't be solved if we had literally quadrillions of dollars of cash. Sometimes - many times - it takes a lot of good old fashioned hard work, in the arenas of careful thinking, and then careful doing. Neither of which it seems either political party is particularly interested.

I mostly agree with you.

However, it may not (always) be that simple. The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees, with not enough people applying and even employees who were there before Covid hit leaving.

I don't know how actually true this is, but when they (the media) ask people why they won't go back, the main reason doesn't seem to be a preference for sitting on ass, but rather a realization that given the wages, those jobs were a terrible proposition. They claim instead to be looking at how they can improve their situation, like looking for work in other industries, going back to school, etc. Which I think is a good thing. How many random empty bars does a country really need?

Now maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I hope that that's true and that this will at least increase wages for those jobs.

But I can't help but think that all this soul-searching is helped by government aid and that, sooner or later, when that runs out, the people will have to get back to those jobs and then, whatever rise there might have been, will be swept away.

> The media here in France reports that some industries, in particular restaurants, are having a hard time finding employees

It's the same in the UK. Farmers cannot harvest some crops because the cheap EU labour is no longer present and locals won't do it.

The cases are different though in that the UK situation is clearly mostly a consequence of Brexit. That doesn't apply to France.

Here in California every restaurant/fast food place is hiring. They all list the things they offer (PTO, 401k-no matching what you put in, and that's it). What they don't put on the signs is what they pay (minimum wage every single time), or the hours (always part time, always weekends, mostly if not always nights.

But obviously it's just that no one wants to work, it couldn't possibly be because no one wants part-time (especially because they change your days/hours and wait till the last minute to give you the next week's schedule so you can't plan around it and get another job). It couldn't possibly be because part-time minimum wage day-shifting jobs are literally worthless as these places are finding out.

I keep hearing owners whine and bemoan their lack of workers. What I have never heard of, not once, is an owner making less profit to pay their workers better to get the loyalty and hard work they want but refuse to pay for.

> I keep hearing owners whine and bemoan their lack of workers. What I have never heard of, not once, is an owner making less profit to pay their workers better to get the loyalty and hard work they want but refuse to pay for.

I agree with you, but do those places actually make a lot of profit? Over here they seem to be pretty fragile operations, so I don't think there's that much they can shave off their profit and give to the workers.

I'm wondering whether, maybe, there are simply too many of those restaurants?

The reasoning goes "yeah, but if I raise my prices, people will go next door". Which is probably true for your random restaurant. But then maybe the issue is there's too many of them?

But of course, up until now, this was workable because many people were willing to put up with the bad conditions you've described for a low wage.

It tells me we need a higher minimum wage. No individual can raise prices without losing competitiveness, but clearly higher prices would fix some of these serious issues. A higher minimum wage would prevent the “they’ll just go next door” issue.

It tells me the upper deciles of wealth have been enjoying life on account of the bottom deciles drawing shitty hand.

Less entertainment, vacations, eating out for many who previously enjoyed it will be the result.

You may be right.

But then, the question becomes: what will become of these employees? Less eating out means less restaurant staff. But said staff are people who need to eat. Will they all go on social security?

Maybe, maybe not. But it's a question we should ask, as a society.

> No individual can raise prices without losing competitiveness, but clearly higher prices would fix some of these serious issues. A higher minimum wage would prevent the “they’ll just go next door” issue.

That seems right on the face of it. But then there's another issue: are you sure that the same number of people would continue eating out? Personally, I wouldn't bet on it.

I don't often eat out, mostly because it's not something I particularly enjoy, but also because I find it expensive for what it is. If the prices were to rise, I would eat out even less. I doubt I'm the only one thinking like this.

It's not clear to me that raising the minimum wage, and therefore the price of a restaurant meal, would not have less people go out. And by less people I mean a drop high enough such that the sum of money spent eating out would drop. Which would mean there would be less restaurants which could afford to stay in business.

> It's not clear to me that raising the minimum wage, and therefore the price of a restaurant meal

This study[1] specifically looks at the effect of raising the minimum wage on restaurant prices.

What they found is that increases of 10% to the minimum wage are correlated with only a 0.36% increase of prices, and minimum wage increases may cause some prices to decrease, too:

> Many business leaders fear that any increase in the minimum wage will be passed on to consumers through price increases thereby slowing spending and economic growth, but that may not be the case. New research shows that the pass-through effect on prices is fleeting and much smaller than previously thought.

> By looking at changes in restaurant food pricing during the period of 1978–2015, MacDonald and Nilsson find that prices rose by just 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, which is only about half the size reported in previous studies. They also observe that small minimum wage increases do not lead to higher prices and may actually reduce prices. Furthermore, it is also possible that small minimum wage increases could lead to increased employment in low-wage labor market.

[1] https://www.upjohn.org/research-highlights/does-increasing-m...

That seems pretty hard to believe to me. I suspect they didn’t take into account all the efficiency gains technology has enabled in that time period. Otherwise let’s just increase minimum wage by 100% if it will only raise prices by 3.6%.

4 years ago I ate lunch out 5 days a week, and Dinner 2 pre Covid that dropped to 3 Lunches and 1 Dinner due to increasing prices...

Post Covid I am down to 2 Lunches and Dinner ever other week...

I am considering dropping to 1 lunch as lunches with tip are now climbing to $15-20 where 4 years ago I could easily get out of the door at most places for under $12 with tip for a lunch.

if Lunches go above $20... I cease it completely

you do understand how inflation works right? If all prices raise then the purchasing power of the person on Min Wage stays the same thus their situation did not actually improve any.

Further Inflation has the common effect of hurting the lower and middle classes the worst and increasing wealth disparity. There is multiple ways this occurs but one thing that is trending of late is that as the wage floor is raising you are not seeing the same levels of raise in other area's of income until you get into the top 10% or higher of wage earners. Today we are seeing inflation outstrip wages in many skilled labor categories.

I agree with you, but do those places actually make a lot of profit?

In a lot of cases, they don't make as much as people think they do. Take supermarkets for instance. Many of them are hiring cashiers and shelf stockers right now, and they can't hire anybody because they can't pay enough to make the job attractive. Supermarkets and grocery stories have some of the thinnest profit margins in any business.

Without trying to counteract your points about the pay/work/parttime/etc.... It's worth noting that a large number of restaurant owners make very little money. The margins/profits in that industry are razor thin. So the owner making less wouldn't be helpful, or even an option for many of them.

Then shouldn't they be working more personally? Or shouldn't they no longer be in business? (And yeah, I'm well aware how much many small restaurant owners work. See door number two.)

People around here talk a lot about unsustainable business models. I don't think it's really any better if it's offloading its unsustainability onto its workforce, which is what's being described here.

From where I stand, as somebody whose career can be described (cynically but not incorrectly) as largely rendering people unemployed, there's a tension here that's only going to be resolved through the acknowledgement that there isn't actually a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go", and unsustainably poor work with poverty as the retribution for refusing to participate (as well as the reward for participating) is not a politically stable position.

People need work to keep them occupied. It's built in to our psychology by evolution. We know that idle people cause most of the problems in society. So I do think there is a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go", if by "go" you mean have a peaceful, civilized way of living.

This sounds teleological. I can find plenty of things to do, many probably more personally fulfilling as well as societally beneficial, than flipping burgers would be.

>>>that there isn't actually a need for everyone to work to make the whole thing "go"

So what is the proposal? Pay people to stay home forever? Who determines who gets a free ride paid for by productive people, and who has to be the ones that provide that free ride to others.

be sure to sign me up for the free ride, but I sure as hell do not want to work 50+ hours a week so other people can play Call of Duty all day.... I would rather let other people work and I play Call of Duty

And their lies the rub / problem with socialism... If everyone can have a free ride no one works

Shorter work week, more vacations. Spread the work across more people. Instead of 1 person working 50 hours, have 2 people work 25 hours. Instead of 2 weeks off a year, have 2 months. Oh, and untie healthcare from employment.

That was the idea behind the 35 hour work week in France. Didn't work out as expected: unemployment didn't go down.

More recently, they had removed some tax breaks on overtime, but it turned out that that only hurt the people needing to work overtime; still no effect on unemployment. At least some of the breaks are now back.

I think the broader issue is that most people having to work crazy hours with multiple jobs don't do it because they're workaholics, but because they have to, as in they can't get a single "normal" job that pays well enough for whatever reason. I'm not sure that putting random limits on the number of hours worked will increase the hourly wages.

I think the underlying issue even above that is we've automated away the need for workers, yet people still exist. So let's say our economy only really needs 100 million people to do stuff and there are 150 million people, that's an obvious disparity. What really sucks is automation is cranking up but the next generation will be even bigger than the Millennials, which were much larger than GenX. So in the next few decades we'll have 160 million people and only need 95 million people, etc. This will keep happening until something breaks.

At some point crimes of desperation will become rampant.

I think there’s some merit in what you say, I’m just not sure we would agree on how to define “…large number of restaurant owners…”

This is completely anecdotal, but I know three different restaurant owners and all three of them live very very comfortably. Again, that’s just anecdotal so probably not worth much.

While I don’t think anyone would suggest that a restaurant owner should live in poverty, at the same time I don’t think we would suggest a restaurant worker should be poverty levels of poor to ensure the owner lives the high life.

If a business cant supply both its owner and workers a livable wage, then we should expect the business to go under rather than expect (or demand) the workers descend into poverty.

Counterexample: https://mobile.twitter.com/auren/status/1419149796284145667/...

I see hiring signs with dollar amounts on them all the time.

Taking the handouts is the most rational thing to do. Why would you expect people to do otherwise? Relying on unspoken normative rules is maybe possible in a society with well defined and perpetuated values, but in our current society, utility far outweighs values in decision making.

>Because you have self-respect and shouldn't be taking handouts if you're capable of working?

FWIW, I agree with you. But this is a moral take, not an economist’s. I think most economists would say people act to maximize utility. In the real world I think it’s both but it’s very hard to regulate/incentivize morals

Unemployment is one of the few ways government has ever done anything for me personally as opposed to general social goods. As a net payer into the system for the overwhelming majority of my working life I have absolutely no objection to getting a little of that money back when I hit a rough patch.

Lacking self-respect for refusing to slave away in bullshit jobs that destroy our environment directly or indirectly, make some rich guy even richer or take place in a toxic work environment you mean?

Actually we solved a ton of problems by throwing money at it: poverty dropped significantly.

https://www.urban.org/research/publication/2021-poverty-proj...

I just head this same rap from a blowhard senator who's state is loaded with Covid.

"The self-respect that comes with working." Read this like you are nursing a hangover.

Americans are fed up with lousy jobs that treat them like crap.

Most likely that senator is from a net-taker state like kentucky or arkansas, one that would be bankrupt without california and new york overpaying the fed to subsidize poor republican states.

There is also more affluence in California and the Northeast vs Middle America. Regardless of politics Middle America is not going to be granted the same economic opportunities as coastal regions.

So, why should we subsidize them? I’m Californian and my taxes should go to help my home state, not those who hate me and my home?

Kentucky and the rest of those moocher states should pull themselves up by their boot straps, stand on their own two feet and sink or swim.

Because we live in a Union? The idea is that your state will be helped if the table is ever turned. Not everyone in Kentucky hates California and the people who live there. What you're essentially promoting is reducing the role of federal government, which is the same thing current Kentucky senators want. I'm sorry to be so blunt but to be honest your comment sounds hateful and ignorant.

I don't think it's likely that the Kentuckians would help out if the tables were turned

This is just baseless speculation. Also that's a great reason why the federal government exists.

disagree. in times of peril, the states consider themselves part of the nation.

Why stop at taxes? Let’s talk about water, why should all these states be subsidizing California’s water use? Why aren’t they bootstrapping desalination plants? Quit mooching.

Who said these people aren’t working? I see a lot of people retraining, pivoting, and taking care of others. That’s work. Just because it doesn’t pay doesn’t mean it isn’t work or valuable. Being a stay at home parent doesn’t pay, but it’s clearly valuable.

Employment is a means to an end: basic survival. We do it because we’re forced to by forced scarcity. There may be virtue in work, but there’s no inherent virtue in employment.

This is a bit too reductionist for my liking.

Imagine, as a kind of empathetic thought exercise, that instead of someone taking handouts and playing Xbox all day, they were taking handouts and then doing online coursework to try and learn a new skill to make themselves more employable in the future. Does that still imply a lack of self-respect?

We're all effectively taking handouts to some degree or another just by participating in collective society. It's just a question of how much we're contributing back, and how. I try not to judge people too aggressively in terms of how they are contributing back; they may be doing so in ways that I cannot see.

It might be important to distiguish doing "nothing" from not being on the job market.

It's possible to contribute to society by making art, writing, cooking, spending time with family, caring for others, etc. as well as self-actualizing via exercise, reading, meditation, and so on.

Meditation is very much doing nothing.

Not at all.

Not sure how self-actualizing is contributing to society.

"Self-actualization is the complete realization of one's potential, and the full development of one's abilities and appreciation for life"

From most classical philosophers, to Einstein, Maxwell, Darwin and countless other, their work was nothing else than an act of self-actualization.

And because this is HN, shall I include Torvalds? The FLOSS movement started from volunteers.

I appreciate my life. I don't see how that contributes to society.

self-actualizing doean't pay bills.

One of the UK employers currently moaning about a lack of workers had a policy of only employing people for 16 hours a week since this was the optimum hours a person could work whilst still receiving tax credits and housing benefit.

Around 10 years ago I was in the labour market willing to do pretty much anything and these kinds of jobs accounted for most of what was available.

Since I wasn't 'on benefits' I was at the other end of the equation. What I really wanted was a chance to work my way out of financial trouble - these kind of jobs only offered the opposite of this.

This is a great example of perversive incentives driven by ill-conceived benefit rules.

In some states in the USA a lot of service jobs will cap your work at 31 hours, to get around their own corporate policies of giving benefits to anyone who worked 32 hours or more.

And any company that has done this might see it coming back and biting them even though they would never admit that they brought it on themselves

Probably not. USA is a capitalist-first, worker-5th nation.

One of the stories I often hear, is that people have decided to move house to the countryside, as they are now able to work remotely.

I don't know how true this is: are these people not concerned if their employer decides to reopen offices and require employees to work in the office again when the pandemic inevitably ends?

I imagine a lit of these people have gotten permission and made arrangements with their employers in advance.

That being said, this is not necessarily easy even for large employers, because until now there wasn't a need to clarify if workers were subject to the income, payroll etc. taxes and employee protection, health insurance contracts of their working or resident state. It is totally possible to be a large Fortune 500 company in the US and not be set up to do paperwork in, I don't know, Alaska or Wyoming or Idaho.

I guess that's an issue if you move states. I'm in the UK, and I know someone who moved 8 hours away to a different part of the UK. Would never have even been considered pre-covid, but the evidence that they could work productively from home was there: they'd been doing it for a year already! They're a manager too, so regular collaboration is a given. It's just all online now.

Keep in mind that 11 US states by themselves are larger than the entirety of the UK; Oregon, for example. I don't know if tax is assessed differently for say Scottish rather than English residents, and 32 US states are larger than England.

This is going to be an issue if you move anywhere within a country with a federal system of government. For EU residents I imagine this also gets tricky for people who decide to WFH from other countries.

Yeah, that was kind of my point. There's plenty of room to move within a US state without running into these issues. FWIW I believe the income tax system is the same across the UK. There might be different local taxes in Scotland, but your employer wouldn't need to concern themselves with those.

Scotland has a different legal system than England. It seems unlikely that wouldn’t have an effect on remote work?

No, Scottish income tax is different, so the employer does need to deal with it. (Though I imagine most UK payroll systems have such options.)

As someone navigating this right now - it's a mess. Business is in a no-income-tax state, I moved to 4% state, and it was deemed easiest to be personally responsible for paying quarterly estimates so the business isn't on the hook for paying business taxes to a state it doesn't do any business in. Some states, however, decided now was a good time to declare a single remote worker in their state means that company has a nexus there, and thus owes all corporate taxes to that state.

> One of the stories I often hear, is that people have decided to move house to the countryside, as they are now able to work remotely.

This is the primary trick that journalists use in these stories: They find a couple examples of people doing something, interview them, and then pretend those people are a sample of a much larger movement. They don’t cite statistics or numbers, however easy to find, because putting a number on these movements would make the reader realize they’re nowhere near as large as the author wants you to think.

Using the “people moved to the countryside” example: Did we have a surplus of empty houses in the countryside before the pandemic? As far as I’m aware, we did not have huge numbers of empty houses just waiting for a pandemic for people to fill them up (except maybe Detroit, but I’m pretty sure people didn’t flock to Detroit).

Also, home prices and rents in cities didn’t fall dramatically during this period, which would be expected during an exodus event.

Even the stories about San Francisco population declines have been overblown, with many of the people leaving being quickly replaced by people looking for an opportunity to move in.

Journalists played up the countryside exodus stories because they’re romantic and people like to believe fantasies about people leaving the concrete jungle behind and living idyllic countryside lives, separated from their employers by miles of broadband connectivity. Yet none of the numbers support such supposed exoduses. Obviously a few people did it here and there, but pretending it was a common event and writing dramatic articles is dishonest.

A counterpoint from France: media did report that for the first time in a very long time, home prices did slightly drop in Paris proper, while suburbs and "smaller cities" have seen a bigger rise than usual.

This means there must be more than just a handful of people leaving.

However, I do agree with GP's point about companies ending the WFH arrangements, especially given France's work culture. But then again, I've always found people around here to have a tendency of thinking fairly short-term.

> Using the “people moved to the countryside” example: Did we have a surplus of empty houses in the countryside before the pandemic?

Actually yes. Before the pandemic, in the area I grew up in (Southern Appalachians) it was common for a house sale to take years, because there was indeed a surplus.

Remember ten years ago all the articles about urbanization and the young people leaving the country and suburbs to live in the city? That was real and the more remote places did in fact have a surplus of housing stock

I've personally seen one family move to the absolute boonies from a large metro and they just guessed that the breadwinner would be able to stay remote or find a new remote friendly employer if forced to move back. The latter happens

I'd probably have more anecdotes if I knew more than like five people

Before COVID there were between thirteen and seventeen million empty homes in he US, many due to foreclosure. There were (and likely still are) enough homes to house everyone, including the homeless, only the distribution is skewed so that there are few empty houses where jobs are (cities).

Maybe some people are so desperate to escape cities and endless commutes that they are willing to take the risk. My anecdata is that I spent 17 years with one megacorp because they allowed me to WFH back when there were very few places I could jump ship to and not have to move back to the Bay Area.

The small town I live in has seen a large influx of Bay Area remote workers as well. Again - all anecdata, but it is noticeable.

anecdotally, I think there is a fairly widespread belief that people can move to the country side for X years during covid then switch the property to AirBnB afterwords.

I'd also bet that many individuals are making long-term bets that they can continue working remote even if it means (slightly) less pay.

Judging by my coworkers and my company's Blind: lots of people did this; they're anxious but cautiously optimistic that the company will cave. If it doesn't, they think it's likely enough that they'll find different remote jobs.

In my case; I found a job that was specified as "100% remote, even after COVID" - so I'm not super-concerned about that. Yes, employers lie, and in 1 year or so, they could easily come back and tell me I'm fired because I can't come on-site. (there is also a component of my job which could require me to go on customer site and work there; which I'm willing to do as long as they pay travel expenses).

I get that I'm very lucky to have landed such a gig. I hope many more do. Because when a worker has to bear the personal cost of sitting in traffic for 2+ hrs per day (burning gasoline and polluting the world while doing so), because his boss is uncomfortable with not being able to physically scrutinize his underlings - that's bullshit.

Also, when I hear about people struggling to recruit, it’s often minimum wage jobs on awful conditions.

People don’t want to work for absolute minimum wage on a temporary contract picking fruit? Colour me surprised!

IDK about everywhere but I'm not seeing anyone still paying minimum wage. McDonalds is paying $12.50/hr for day, $15/hr for night work. That's $30k/year FTE for a job that you can learn in a week and that requires zero prior experience or education. And they are still begging.

Bad bosses, unstable schedules / hours, not a career. Probably doesn't have "benefits", which everyone should have for a level playing field (so medicare for all, get value for our taxes).

Also, have you seen inflation lately?

Just this week in Pittsburgh, I saw an official corporate poster up in a McDonald's advertising a "competitive starting wage" with an 8.5″x11″ sheet taped to it reading "STARTING RATE UP TO 10$/HR." I doubt they'll have much luck at ≤$10/hour. Sure, it's more than the minimum ($7.25/hour), but the "up to" weasel words don't give me confidence.

"McDonald's" is a bit of a mixed bag, like most of the Fast Food Places. McDonald's owned stores are paying a minimum of $13 with the plan to go to $15 in the next few years, this was announced awhile back

The problem is McDonald's Corporate only owns 5% of McDonald's locations, the rest are franchise locations, thus a "McDonald's" crew member at a non-company store is not working for McDonald's but the Franchisee.. This is where you get the lower wages..

This allows McDonald's to get headlines about offering a "$15 min wage" while 95% of wearing an McDonald's uniform do not work for McDonald's thus do not get this wage

there's still an issue of consistency. if you can get "regular" hours... say, 6am-11am, M-T-W-Th, for example, you can schedule your life around it.

30 years ago, I managed a Burger King, and even then, they had us send people home if it got really slow, or.. call up people and cancel their shift an hour before, because of bad weather, etc. Someone's already arranged childcare or transportation for their shift, then cancelling it same day is just not a way to work.

I would imagine that a lot of places are still like that today.

$15/hr sounds great, but if it's 20 hrs one week, then 7 the next, then 24, then 4... that's still a bit unstable for a lot of folks. For someone who has no dependents, or has a stable partner... it's probably doable.

One of my dream labor reforms would be something like classifying any shifts that aren't scheduled at least two weeks in advance as overtime. It won't guarantee a steady number of hours but it will definitely help smooth things out and allow better planning.

Will you also commit to buying a Big Mac and Fries between 12:00 and 1:00pm on Tuesday two weeks hence?

Also, I used to manage a McDonalds. Paying a bonus to have people come in on short notice to cover no-shows, sick calls, or unexpected business volume was not uncommon.

That's a nice idea (short-notice bonus). 30 years ago, no one had cell phones, so even trying to get ahold of someone on 'short notice' wasn't really possible. But it would have been a nice gesture to balance out the times we'd send people home early.

That is essentially the law in Norway - the work schedule need to be posted minimum two weeks in advance - and extra shifts should generally be considered overtime. Unfortunately it's probably one of the regulations that are most frequently broken.

Norwegian link: https://www.arbeidstilsynet.no/regelverk/lover/arbeidsmiljol...

So just to be clear if a company is not paying an employee the money they should be it is called wage theft.

So if Norway were having the same issues with employee shortages you could add the reason that maybe the employees are tired of having the company steal from them.

And maybe that's a factor common to other countries

That's the old minimum wage. $15 is the upcoming (catching up to inflation) minimum wage. People (especially people who have experience and education!, which is most people!) are really done working for below living wages.

I can't speak to statistics at large, but anecdotally, my wife was laid off and we needed someone with our son during "home schooling" anyway, so she just continued on to get her degree since many universities have an online option at the moment (which should continue and expand). With the variant, we have this same option next year, though no unemployment and we'll just be a single income while she finishes up her last half year or so.

In our case, it wasn't the "refusing to go back to work to make a better life" narrative that's getting pushed; it's more the, she had to stay home with our son while he's in school, but what does she do while he's in school all day? You only have to be sort of involved. You might as well be productive, but you have trouble being productive enough to really work.

I wonder how significant the booming stock market is? Maybe people are neglecting to work because their Tesla stock is up some absurd amount over 5 years or whatever. Same for crypto. But when these people start treating such capital gains as disposeable income then it will cause inflation.

> companies are abandoning office spaces in favor of full remote for months now

On the other hand, traffic during rush hour seems to have returned to as bad as it ever was.

I think hn has a little bit of forgetful bias that their industry has probably the most amenable situation for remote work.

All those new and used cars are now PPE bubbles and added freedom for people that previously took the bus or carpooled. If they make work at the office mandatory now we're going to see even worse than pre-pandemic commutes.

[UK specifically] not seems, it has gone back to normal (as in pre-pandemic).

I walked down through the financial district of London on a Tuesday morning recently and I did not see one single office worker sat at a desk in any office I passed. Just empty buildings with lights on and bored receptionists sat at front desks.

I’m willing to bet a lot of money school is not in session this fall in many parts of the USA.

> doesn’t make sense that people would choose no job at all over a job that doesn’t pay the wage they want.

I don't agree. The pandemic is still very much happening and low-paid workers are expected to be on the front lines. If this had all happened when I was working retail, I probably would have made the decision to not go to work and catch covid while making 8/hr.

It’s propaganda to justify cutting social welfare programs.

Anecdotal but...can we mention burn-out? as a "blue collar" worker i dont think anyone mentions it enough.

I have a coworker who left a 9-5 body shop making decent money as a painter for a medical billing job that was closer to her father in 2020. she came back to that body shop just two weeks ago because she was pulling non-stop mandatory overtime in a salary position that treated her like trash. she never even gave notice she was quitting, just stopped showing up.

I have a friend who quit his bartending job to work at a grocery store and had the same experience. mandatory overtime, limited breaks, and the angriest customers. He quit about seven months into the pandemic and picked up a CDL position as a regional truck driver.

these "hero" fields that exist as a sort of meat grinder during covid have chewed through all the social credit most people are willing to give them.

Turns out a “services based” economy is a euphemism for austerity based economy.

Adam Smith claimed that “…landlords' role in the economic process is passive. Their ability to reap a revenue solely from ownership of land tends to make them indolent and inept, and so they tend to be unable to even look after their own economic interests".

Look at dollar rich rent seekers destabilizing their value store.

Dead guys already had human economics figured out.

Humans haven’t literally evolved that much in 200 years.

> Humans haven’t literally evolved that much in 200 years.

You’re being generous. I would say we haven’t evolved in thousands of years.

I mean sure, the tech is better but we’re the same self absorbed, careless bipeds we’ve always been.

> I would say we haven’t evolved in thousands of years.

We’ve become slightly more lactose-tolerant!

Lactose to the rescue!!!

And the appendix became seemingly useless.

There are a couple more up to date theories on its current utility

1. If the appendix was both useless and deadly (before procreation), there would be a strong evolutionary pressure against it, so it likely is unobviously useful

2. Western diet possibly causes problems with the appendix - "Appendicitis is uncommon in rural Africa and Asia"

3. Anatomy involved with immune function or microbiome is hard to understand function.

From links:

The peak incidence occurs in the 15- to 24-year-old age group. However older individuals are more likely to have complications and die from the malady. Symptoms of appendicitis in older people frequently are not as clear-cut as are symptoms in younger people.

People with acute appendicitis often think they would feel better if they just could move their bowels. To encourage a bowel movement, they take a laxative. This is a serious mistake, one that may lead to rupture of the appendix.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1987-04-14-87012404...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-funct...

Slightly off topic, the surgeon who had to remove his own appendix.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32481442

Also interesting is the idea that the appendix is a local optimisation. If a smaller appendix was more likely to get appendicitis, it might remain a vestigial organ rather disappearing completely, even it the organ has no function, because there is an evolutionary advantage to having the current rather than the smaller size

Very smart!

One of my favourite pastimes with Hacker News is thinking about how commenters have been trained by playing games to follow incentives and game optimisation (gaming the system).

And with bowels 300% more irritable!

Both you and the parent seem to assume that 'evolution' means 'improvement'

Humanity has clearly evolved, even in the last 200 years.

Doesn't mean we are getting better

I think there is an individual and a meta/society level. I think both me and GP were referring to the individual/micro level.

And I think the person you are responding to was acknowledging that evolution didn’t just stop…as long as there are babies there are mutations, and the environment will select for some qualities over others.

If you meant super micro, then the same can be said of your immune system / gut flora, though I’m not certain of the relevance.

The point is that “evolution” doesn’t magically direct to some better outcome, or even towards a more sustainable local maxima.

Our software has improved since the domestication of animals and crops.

Our hardware has not changed and we are still on H. Sapiens 1.0.

Isn't it the other way? Hardware has changed as massive inventions have augmented our living standards. While at the same time, the software (IE human mentality) hasn't over 1000s of years, except for maybe hard disk usage (which is human knowledge).

The hardware they were referring to is the human body. All that’s changed is we know how to maintain it better and can fix more types of premature breakdowns. It’s essentially the same hardware, just better maintained.

I hope you’re correct. All our domesticated animals have smaller brains than their wild cousins. If the phrenologists hadn’t been so focussed on proving their racist fantasies, would they have found our skulls a few marbles smaller than our ancient (modern human) ancestors?

Will CRISPR on humans usher in Homosapiens 2.0 in our lifetimes?

I still believe our social evolution is possible. We have to talk about those things and take a break on economics.

We’ve seen the value of modern technology. There’s no need to continue to obsessively speculate about the advantages they provide to daily life.

Having beers with a grey haired VC yesterday, I couldn’t help but think this guy really just wants to feel relevant. These guys are the real energy vampire; IMO. Constant reverence is exhausting. It started to feel like he was one of those guys who peaked on the high school football team. “Yes, I’d like to hear about your car collection. Again.”

> I couldn’t help but think this guy really just wants to feel relevant

Great insight. Now apply it to everyone you know. We ALL want to feel relevant and we all want to feel like what we are doing matters.

Everyone does and this is, in a twisted way, one way we are trying to achieve immortality. You do stuff, you make an impact, you leave your mark.

I just watched the documentary on John Delorean on Netlfix. It’s very interesting and reminds me of this. Check it out if you have a chance!

I just watched the documentary on your recommendation. There's so much more to the story that I had no idea about. Thanks for the tip.

I took a course on Plato’s republic back in school. Our class conclusion was that nothing has changed in the last 2000 years in terms of society/issues since that book was written!

"Progress" is a Western myth. Perhaps "progress" is The Western Myth. Things simply change.

TIL from my Classical Archaeology professor.

You can't say this kinda stuff on HN since too many people associate their job with creating said progress. Michel Foucault spent his whole life making this exact argument - things simply change.

you can say it. they just did

For context, grandparent was in the grey at the time of my posting and I was responding with my dismay that such a perspective was striking whoever as not only controversial but also not worthy of a proper reply given that ostensible dismay.

I think what he said still mostly applies to landlords. Maybe even more so as real estate enjoys several tax and policy advantages that other investments don't.

Yes I get that economic rent seeking is huge and things like patent trolls financial lobbyists are problems but his comment fits traditional landlords best.

> these "hero" fields that exist as a sort of meat grinder during covid have chewed through all the social credit most people are willing to give them.

I really think people are underestimating this.

In the middle of this fiasco, who were going to be the people coming out and interacting with the service economy most?

That's right--the shittiest, most selfish, most ignorant dipshits. I have all manner of stories from restaurants that never had issues suddenly having to call the police regularly after the full lockdowns ended.

So, your already shitty service job just got its "shitty knob" turned up way past 11 because the shitty people are going out and the nice people are staying at home.

Is it any wonder the "service economy" workers just decided to bow out?

> It is strange that the top known factors for this are not even mentioned in this or other similar news stories. First, closing of schools caused large numbers of women to leave the workforce in order to care for children.

I'm a bit skeptical of that explanation in the US because schools close for 3 months every summer, without an accompanying large number of women quitting their jobs.

Between summer camps and the weather being nice enough to just go outside and entertain oneself, the 3-month summer vacation is a notably different effect on the economy than the year-long covid isolation with indeterminate future horizon.

What you find when you look at the numbers is an awful lot of White collar firms simply get less done during the summer months. "We expect to move forward on that project, but we're blocked on the report from the ads team, and 2/3 of the ads team just took a week-long vacation with their families" is a common pattern in summer.

To echo this, a previous employer has scheduled downtime that coincides with spring break because they recognized so many parents take time off because of having school-aged children.

Those months can be planned for well ahead of time, and there's generally plenty of child caring activities (camps, schools offering day sessions, etc). This was... very different, and a lot more difficult for most people.

In many families, summers are typically full of "summer camps" that are actually "themed daycare for older kids". Those were mostly closed as well during the pandemic lockdown phase, and some still haven't come back (in the US, anyway).

What rich bubble do you live in where kids go to summer camp?

Summer camp is even a working class thing. The YMCA runs day camps for way cheaper than day care.

Definitely not just a rich kid thing. The camps are usually run by small-ish organizations like the local church. And considering the point is to bring in children, there are often options for those who need financial assistance.

Besides, rich kids go on overseas vacations during the summer.

Well in most cases losing one of two incomes in the household costs a lot more. In the US, anyway, it is a lot more common to have a stay-at-home mom in the upper incomes; the working class is mostly every-adult-must-get-a-job (or two or three). Occasionally there are grandparents available, but in some cases they're in another town, and in some cases they are deceased. Summer "camps" are definitely not a rich thing (in the US, anyway).

"summer camp" is also "day care outside during the summer" not only "sleepaway camp".

Police Activities Leagues, in cities all around you.

And even for those that are open, there's now some ugly decisions to be made by parents given you can't vaccinate under 12s yet.

There's a lot of international volunteers that go to help run those camps too as a holiday. Any of that was obviously gone too.

As many others have said, there are programs in the summer and folks can plan - and these programs have been in place for years. Unfortunately, these programs mostly stopped and on top of school closing, there wasn't enough day care space. And for the school age children, not all of them could do online schooling themselves, needing someone to help them with the computer.

Schooling at home is a lot of work for someone, and it is work daycares aren't prepared nor staffed for.

Exactly..

I think I stopped having a daycare by the age of 10 or 11... I grew up as a Latch key kid...

I would see my parents at Dinner Time, then Dusk where my 2 curfews. other than that I was outside 90% of the time. of course this was before Internet, Cell Phones, etc... I did not get dial up internet until I was like 16-17 (which by then i was driving so....) , and broadband when I was 18 or 19... Today i talk to parents where they have 24/7 electronic tracking of their children every movements, kids well in to their teens still having babysitters or not being left lone...

Society has grown extremely risk adverse, likely if parents tried Latch key kid at the age I was Child Protective services would be called... In General the reaction to COVID has highlight just how risk adverse society is over all, there are other warning signs, but it has really been a eye opener for me...

Another element is that the government now pays people to stay at home and not work. That is the number one factor. If people did not have money, they would work.

Plus mortgage forbearance and eviction moratoriums... So you have more money in monthly unemployment and a pause on peoples' #1 expenses. Until these programs end, I wouldn't even speculate about the future state of labor markets.

Eviction moratoriums ended yesterday (7/31/2021). Not the smartest thing to just cut off all at once. An obvious tell as to who the government (both parties) considers their constituents.

Also not the smartest thing to do during a pretty large resurgence of COVID. Expect another year of this at least. People without a place to live are a great way to spread a communicable disease. I mean we're talking millions all at once. Expect an uptick in crimes of desperation. We might even read a few articles about dead bodies on the streets in the coming months. It could get that bad.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/30/housing-e...

I dunno what's gonna happen, but it probably won't be good.

https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/sta...

I'm not advocating for the cessation of mortgage forbearance nor eviction moratoriums. All I'm saying is that they distort the labor markets and will continue to do so until we reach a new post-COVID steady state.

(Don't know why this triggers down votes.)

Another aspect is that most of the people in working low wage jobs who may have been living on their own or with roommates eventually had to abandon them and move back in with their parents, or find more roommates.

The people who worked these jobs may simply be gone. And with COVID lingering, there's no reason to leave current stable living situations even if they're still relatively broke.

> workers have moved on

Moved on to what?

Not other jobs, obviously.

Unemployment insurance for income, eviction moratorium (reducing expenses), maybe, but that's all ending.

Lower income standard of living? More efficient higher density households? Dropping out of the rat race?

Unemployment rate is at 6%, which isn't perfect, but pretty low all things considered.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

Unemployment (in this sense) does not count those who are not (any longer) searching for jobs.

But all those workers that have moved on - where have they gone? I can understand restaurant workers moving on for example, but that should mean they have filled positions elsewhere. It just doesn’t seem like the numbers add up. But your comment about women staying home to care for children might be it.

In the context of this article, the main reason is Brexit. In fact UK, government was helping a lot with Covid situation including paying to furloughed employees.

UK no longer can attract workers from EU. Eastern Europeans are moving back because after the Brexit vote they no longer feel welcomed and theirs home countries improved a lot in last 10 years. UK created perfect storm in last 10 years:

  1. Add tuition fees for higher education.  
  2. Build negative perception on immigration.
  3. Reduce council housing, keep house prices artificially high.
  4. Vote Brexit and fail in process, destroying currency value. 
  5. Fail to provide opportunities for upward mobility for most immigrants.

The value exchanged by employment is more than just a paycheck, it's a regular paycheck. It's like an implicit insurance of future pay. Once the government and businesses labeled and straight dumped 'non-essential' workers, they send a message that the 'ensured future pay'-value of employment is empty and meaningless. (Don't @ me with an argument about how it's always been this way without acknowledging that recent developments represent a step change in the employment relationship.)

"Just pay more" is not caused by greedy workers demanding more money, it's caused by employers reneging on the important but implicit consideration that is the stability of keeping a job. If you demonstrate your unwillingness (or inability, no difference) to fulfill your contractual considerations (even the implicit ones), don't be surprised if the other party wants to adjust the contract to compensate.

The position low wage workers are in extends beyond what they make, too. Most part-time hourly jobs, especially those that pay less than $15, have extremely unpredictable schedules and have to deal with aggressive and rude customers day in and day out, while being treated as “less than” by management.

Fortunately, when I worked for near-minimum wage, I was a lifeguard so I had the authority to tell off and kick out bad patrons. I still got treated like shit, with 10-12 hour workdays in 100+deg weather, inconsistent scheduling, and once even being told I had to stay after my shift when I had plans or lose my job (I called their bluff and decided to quit anyways).

I have a software job now and it’s better than food service, retail, and lifeguarding by a WIDE margin. I think a lot of people here take for granted the stability and consistency offered by their (typically) office jobs, as well as the significantly better physical and mental conditions.

I think you raise a very good point. It's only logical to minimise long term risk

I think that people started to realize, that they can live much better with lower amount of money.

What corona crisis did to me was suddenly figuring out that just, from the pure fact of not leaving home much (or I would rather say, not going into the consumers world any more - I rather went to a forest, hills, rivers, lakes,...), there was an overhead of 500 euros left on my bank account each month. Same life but the unneeded expenses were cut off and interestingly - I didn't miss them at all.

This would (in case I wouldn't love software development) mean that I could go for 500 euros lower wage with a fairly decent life and with far more time for myself.

As time is the only commodity that you cant buy, this seems like a very reasonable way to change my life for the better.

But I am not the one who doesn't like my job. There is probably more than a half of people that don't want to do what they are doing for the wage they get. And with corona, they got out of the system that calls for more money.

Surely they would return back but not under the same conditions. Pay them relevantly more and there will no longer be employee shortages but you will earn less. And it is debatable if this is not what needed to happen.

> I think that people started to realize, that they can live much better with lower amount of money.

I might be able to buy this argument if the person in question is making 6 figures, but what about the median person making $36k/year? If you can barely make rent, reducing your working hours because "can live much better with lower amount of money" isn't really an option.

I quit my software engineering job to drive from Alaska to Argentina for 2 years and then to drive around Africa for three years. I have not worked at a desk for 6 years now, and I live on about $20k - $25k.

I've never been happier. I have so much free time to spend how I please, and I just don't buy crap I don't need. Yes, I've got house mates and I can't afford to live in some expensive city and eat out every night, but those things have never made me happy anyway.

I ride my bike, I throw the Frisbee and I snowboarded 97 days this past winter (a luxury, for sure) My dollars per day spent is extremely low.

Is it worth considering whether increased/extended unemployment benefits are a factor in the employee shortage?

The article mentions employees on "furlough" who are "biding their time". I'm not from the UK, but this appears to mean the government is paying much of their wage while they are not working.

Anecdotally (in the U.S.) I know several people who have remained on unemployment as long as they possibly can, despite the fact that their job would've hired them back by now. Technically this is breaking the rules of unemployment benefits, but there are several easy ways around it.

Not that the increased/extended unemployment benefits have been a bad thing. They were quite necessary, especially early on in the pandemic when there was so much uncertainty. Perhaps they're still necessary. But it seems to me that if you allow people not to work and still have money, many people simply won't work. Mystery solved.

If labor is a market, laborers are at a fundamental disadvantage compared to employers when it comes to clearance: the employer has an asymmetric advantage in its ability to wait to hire someone; laborers are a lot less capable.

I don’t know that unemployment is a good solution, but I think it speaks volumes that people might be using it to balance the standard inequity.

Can you explain this further? It sounds like you may be assuming employers are able to simply not hire and bear the opportunity cost. How are you weighing that up against employee urgency?

Not GP, but forgoing opportunity does not carry the same urgency as forgoing food, utilities, and housing.

Both are important. One is urgent.

Employers need employees, and employees need employers. If you have orders to fill, and noone to do the work, you're just as fscked, as if you have bills to pay, and no money to do it. Employers get an added benefit of being able to wait it out a bit, since they generally have more money than workers, and workers have unemployment benefits, which means that they can wait it out (until the benefits stop).

The problems will be more apparent when the benefits stop, poorer employers will close down in the meantime, and when people have to go back to work, there will be fewer workplaces for them available, bringing the wages down.

assuming the demand is still there, other employers will take up the slack and potentially be in a position to hire the employees.

that's only partially true, as a company you have infinitely more leverage in society than an individual

you weigh more, you're worth more, it doesn't last forever but the difference is staggering

You also have product to sell/deliver, and no unemployment benefits.

Many, many businesses have failed during the current plague situation... maybe not amazon and walmart, but a lot of small and middle sized businesses.

yes but depending on the state / size of your company, you can reallocate people in emergency mode, work more yourself (if you're the boss), ask for loans at the bank, you can absorb a lot more than a single individual can

The business owner can close up and file for unemployment if that pays more than they’d make paying prevailing wages.

> Employers need employees, and employees need employers. If you have orders to fill, and noone to do the work, you're just as fscked, as if you have bills to pay, and no money to do it.

Na, not really. An employer can just raise their prices until incoming orders and delivery capacity align. That’s a sustainable situation for the employer. There may be some opportunity cost, but they’re doing okay.

An employee on the dole on the other hand is not in a sustainable situation. They have to find a job before they run out of benefits and savings, or the consequences will be dire…

https://twitter.com/DevitaDavison/status/1391415254710632448

Yeah, good luck raising prices prices.

> An employer can just raise their prices until incoming orders and delivery capacity align. That’s a sustainable situation for the employer.

In practice, this will reduce incoming orders so much that the total profits from them won't be enough to cover the company's fixed costs anymore.

Only in monopolistic situations or situations causing everyone to raise prices at the same time would the possibility of "just raise their prices" be workable.

If the price gets too high people will seek alternate suppliers or do without.

Example: We pay a private company to haul trash to the dump. There's many such companies, so if my company raises it's prices, I'll switch to another. We had one company raise its prices recently and everyone switched to another. I'm not sure this company is still around.

Example: Comcast kept raising my cable TV bill. I eventually just ditched it and went Internet only. $200/month for TV isn't worth it.

> If the price gets too high people will seek alternate suppliers or do without.

That’s exactly the desired effect. I didn’t say raise prices to make more money. I said raise prices until incoming orders and delivery capacity align. The purpose is to get less orders.

This is a common refrain, but I doubt many who say have actually actual experience as an employer. In many businesses the inability to staff leads to existential threat to the entire business.

If you're a restaurant and can't seat customers or a SaaS startup and can't keep your service uptime, you'll go out of business very quickly. That represents millions in enterprise value. In contrast an employer who gets fired, but is otherwise competent, might be looking at a few weeks of unemployment and a couple thousand in lost income.

If the business is run sensibly and isn't hemorrhaging a large percentage of its workers, not hiring just means delayed growth, not an existential threat.

Governmental meddling since last March has caused a lot of businesses to hemorrhage a large percentage of their workers even though they were run sensibly.

A business has no right to exist.

If you want staff, pay the rate or close.

Or automate/improve your processes.

We need businesses in an economy, not any particular business.

I have seen many employers who look for unicorns rather than using optimal stopping (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimal_stopping) for positions that are more flywheel multiplier positions rather than existential positions.

In the long term, it rarely leads to the death of their business, but it substantially lowers the quality of life of most/all of those working in the business.

People who are furloughed are still employed. They are not contributing to these statistics.

Pretty much.

I was sceptical of that they did in Aus but it sort of worked.

Instead of just giving everyone unemployment they,

Doubled unemployment for those that needed it

Created a new system that injected money into businesses, but only if they kept you employed, i.e. subsidized wages.

This let things snap back really quickly. Though there is still a lot of damage and the new lock down in Sydney is hurting without the same measures again.

The thing were finding is those that left jobs are just hard to get back into jobs, it takes time to hire negotiate and train people

There is no "employee shortage". I don't know the reason why the main stream press started to roll with that narrative but this is a blatant lie. However unlike before the pandemic, some candidates might refuse a job that only offers a pittance, especially given the high inflation in most of the west.

> unlike before the pandemic, some candidates might refuse a job

I don't understand this one, wouldn't a pandemic (entire industries had to cut back on costs) cause more people to be looking for work and thus tip the supply and demand balance towards people being less picky?

The US instituted an unemployment benefit actually large enough to pay the expenses of the unemployed. This cut poverty by half, with a corresponding decrease in demand for minimum wage jobs.

The idea is that the disruption has shown workers they have a wider range of options than they considered before. Maybe they have changed to a different field, maybe they have started their own business, maybe they have moved. In any case, they aren't looking to get rehired at their old position and compensation.

"Essential workers" weren't treated well during the pandemic, even now with arguments about masks it's pretty much awful. Consider also how many were laid off initially (showing how their job sees them as disposable on top of that) and combine that with how they were barely scraping by before but now inflation of essentials like food have gone up to the point that it wouldn't scrape by as easily anymore and most aren't willing to put up with it for a pittance anymore.

I actually think the bigger picture is that with schools/daycare/camps closed there is no affordable way for kids to be watched while at work which has caused multi income families to go back to single income families and in many cases this causes them to have more money than they would have with daycare, especially if they are utilizing unemployment benefits in place of one of those multi incomes. I'm not sure how this is working with single parents but my guess would be that a lot of them moved back with parents when they got laid off at first, thus also causing an imbalance.

It's also worth mentioning that a lot of people died from covid and if you look at it outside of political leanings a lot of those who didn't get vaccinated are the less educated and less wealthy, so I'm sure that's at least a part of what's going on.

Meanwhile:

> Tech CEO Says Workers Get Too Much Pay and Benefits

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010718

"Sla- I mean, workers get too much pay and benefits, they should be happy to work. Why can't I find any workers?!"

There is no employee shortage.

There is a decent pay and conditions shortage.

There are still 3.45 million without work that want it and 1 million short of work. Yet only 0.8 million vacancies.

https://new-wayland.com/blog/uk-employment-stats/

I am an unemployed programmer. I am 50 years old. I have 15 years of C#, 15 years of sql server, two years of golang, two years of node.js, vue.js, svelte, css, html, postgress, rabbitmq, etc etc etc.... My skills list is about 10 times this short list I just threw up.

They tell me there is a skills and labor shortage in tech. That's complete bullshit

I am UNEMPLOYED for a year. I don't believe one dam word the government or the media says anymore. Not one word. Not about the cough. Not about the labor shortage.

They will tell you the economy is booming meanwhile they are boarding up New York City and there is homeless everywhere. It's the same thing right across america. We are being lied to at an awesome level.

As a programmer if you’re not working for a year it’s safe to say you’re not actively looking and thus by definition excluded from unemployment statistics.

Are you looking for remote work? Where do you live? In the south, everywhere is hiring.

Have you tried remote-only positions? I’d assume they tend to care less about age, if that’s the problem.

I employ freelancers and pay competitive fees by European standards. I would hire someone with your experience without thinking too much about it (provided you had a modicum of people skills) since I only care about people being courteous and getting the job done, and not about “culture”…

As noted elsewhere, it seems Europe may be a better place for older folks. I know that some nations have some fairly strict laws about discrimination.

In the US, we have the same laws. It's flat-out illegal to discriminate by age, as it is by race, religion, gender, pregnancy, marital status, etc.

Out of that list, if a company tries anything other than age discrimination, they are pilloried and investigated.

However, in the IT industry, age discrimination is actively encouraged. Companies write job ads that basically say "Bros only."

The story I hear, is that older folks are "just waiting for retirement, and won't be loyal." That's rich, in an industry that has been completely formed around the idea that engineers will stay at a company for no more than two years.

In my case, I had my retirement set, years ago, and would have been willing to work for half of what a lot of younger folks would demand, if the work was motivating, and the work environment was good.

I have an enormous portfolio of exemplary work. My skills are "five minutes old." I'm not some old duffer, sitting on COBOL skills (which, I understand, would actually have made me more attractive).

It's been my experience that no one ever bothers to look at the portfolio. They've already made up their mind, and the only reason they are talking to me, is to tick off an EEOC checkbox.

I don't see any evidence Europe being better for older folks. On top of that salaries are really really low in Europe.

Unless you are in the US and are going to graduate university at 22-23 best to forget about a career in STEM. Not worth the effort and time. Milk has a longer expiry date than a STEM worker who's perceived over the hill late-twenties or early thirties.

Many things in those sentences are plainly not true. In Europe, you can get very rich (by say western european standards) if you do 1-man consulting well. I mean in top 0.01% salary bracket for some countries while having fairly standard current skillset (soft and hard skills). Switzerland and Luxembourg have very high permanent salaries - not SV levels, but definitely fine ones and affording a great lifestyle.

Quality of life, say in Switzerland, (and I know this can be a hot topic that depends on personal preferences) is way better than basically anything US can offer for similar wealth bracket. That's my personal view, based on my personal opinions, evaluations and wish to give my kids the best and healthiest environment to grow up in so obviously not universally true.

Older dudes are definitely very supported here, but this is specific per sector/company. Average age of my coworkers (banking en Suisse) is around 45-50, all devs, admins, devops. We wanted to hire one 55 year old guy for dev position last week, we made him (a generous) offer already but he chose a different position. He didn't have the skillset list much bigger than what is flying around by OP (maybe some crypto stuff but we don't do it yet).

What you describe are mostly startups full of folks who want to get rich quickly, mostly fail, have attention span shorter than tick of second hand on my watch. You can find those everywhere. But that's a relatively small part of the market and at least here definitely not the best paying one.

Luxemburg junior salary average is 36K, take home around 2300. 1300 for rent and food you are left with 1000 euros.

Germany is where startups valued at $25bn and $45bn (Zalando and Klarna) are paying less than $100k for 10 YoE with >40% income tax.

Please let's not discuss already obvious things though I agree that Switzerland is better in terms of salary and taxes.

As per your own company you are using anecdotal evidence. Ageism in tech is very well-known and pretending it does not exist is not going to fix antyhing.

Since you mention banking (and I don't want to be ageist here, greyhair here as well) is the prototype of an old, crusty and backwards environment where nothing changes and nothing gets done at a reasonable pace. Unless you think of crazy deadlines being given as reasonable pace. Speaking from experience. I never want to work in a bank ever again.

> salaries are really really low in Europe.

...by American standards. Ask anyone in Northern Europe if they are happy with their salary and they will almost say yes. It's America that is distorting everything with their ridiculous salaries.

> In the US, we have the same laws. It's flat-out illegal to discriminate by age, as it is by race, religion, gender, pregnancy, marital status, etc.

This is true, sort of. Age discrimination is different where it matters - the threshold to prove age discrimination is so high that the law could just as well not exist.

> They will tell you the economy is booming meanwhile they are boarding up New York City

> and there is homeless everywhere

Both of these can be true. The economy is great for all the people at the top rungs of society while the rest may not be seeing any of those prosperities.

It stretches credulity that you have that many skills and still unemployed. Employers are hiring just about anyone in tech these days. Where are you located?

You can kvetch about the media all you want, but the job market is the best it has ever been, and unlikely to get any better. Sorry to be harsh here, but if you can't find a job in this market, you ought to reconsider your professional choices.

My father-in-law is in a similar position, just ten years older than parent. He always gets rejections based on "lack of cultural fit". Ageism is real in tech.

> but if you can't find a job in this market, you ought to reconsider your professional choices.

There is enough literature out there about the racist, sexist or ageist hiring practices in the tech sector that you might as well rethink your comment here. How old are you?

In may English-speaking countries ageism is the norm. You don't get any offer after 45 unless you are famous.

Only in tech

> It stretches credulity that you [...]

> You can kvetch about the media all you want [...]

Why engage with a primary source when you can have your worldview spoonfed to you by a thinly-veiled Pharma ad masquerading as news?

Yeah, let's keep kvetching.

For what it’s worth: I live in NYC. It is not boarded up.

I'm sure the GP reserves his charming side for the interviews.

That's the narrative a lot of these people living in the flyover states are fed on repeat 24/7.

You'd think NYC , SF, LA were third world countries according to them. You can tell right from his comment why he likely doesn't have a job.

My wife and I have both been hearing this narrative from coworkers outside of where we live (in NYC), asking if we're living in a ghost town or warzone. It feels strange.

By the way I think the term "flyover state" is probably a bit offensive to folks that happen to live outside of coastal cities.

It's bizarre but if you see the content they are watching and are fed it begins to make sense. They're never exposed to these places so they never have an opportunity to think for themselves.

Often times when I've gone to more rural/southern areas it's amazing how kind the people are - I think on both sides people just forget that there are just regular folk everywhere. The politics attempts to dehumanize.

> By the way I think the term "flyover state" is probably a bit offensive to folks that happen to live outside of coastal cities.

It's not. It is, however, a certain way to get us to ignore anything you have to say.

That's already happening anyway.

I was puzzled by this as well. There was of course instances of this during the George Floyd protests (over a year ago), and a bit right around the election, but that was just companies protecting their property from some of the rowdier protesters.

Yup, on top of it ageism in tech can appear as early as late twenties!

That's nuts but I can believe it. My own experience is that if I am being interviewed by a 20 something, I am not getting the job no matter what. Not a single exception in a decade now lol. It's real

Strongly agree. Has been my experience as well.

Might also be an attitude problem on your side. If you're serious about getting a job, consider coaching.

This "nobody is hiring, everything sucks, and I'm the victim here" narrative isn't really helping you.

Also, bringing up stuff like "lies about the cough" (which I assume is OP talking about COVID) absolutely undermines your credibility as an individual capable of critical thinking, which is necessary for software engineering.

It’s true though, the media has massively distorted the truth about covid over and over since the beginning.

For the most recent egregious example, see this exchange: https://mobile.twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/142122951874...

People started noticing during covid but it's been going on for a very long time. I think it's awesome to see so many people realize this now though. We need that to happen.

OP's statement leads straight to "they're out to get me," which is absolutely not helpful, and it's absolutely an indicator of a difficult hire.

If I'm interviewing someone and the person is demonstrating a victim narrative, that is a huge red flag.

Similarly, the inability to see shades of gray (e.g. "using MySQL is always utterly stupid, you should never use it in favor of Postgres") which OP demonstrates with their COVID statements, makes a person virtually non-employable in my book.

> OP's statement leads straight to "they're out to get me," which is absolutely not helpful, and it's absolutely an indicator of a difficult hire.

Not at all. If you've been out of work for a year and seeing your savings (if you have any) dwindle and vent on what is an internet comment sections, doesn't indicate how you are in person at all.

> If I'm interviewing someone and the person is demonstrating a victim narrative, that is a huge red flag.

You are ignoring the present situation entirely. Governments have put everyone's life on hold for well over a year now (we are in month 17). Statements from authorities have been contradictory, non-sensical, they have lied in some cases and some have broken their own lockdown rules (e.g. in the UK Matt Hancock which was in charge of public health IIRC was exposed as having an affair during COVID, which BTW was illegal under the lockdown rules).

So many people can see it for what it is. One rule for them and one rule for the plebs.

> Similarly, the inability to see shades of gray (e.g. "using MySQL is always utterly stupid, you should never use it in favor of Postgres") which OP demonstrates with their COVID statements, makes a person virtually non-employable in my book

You are reading far too much into comments around COVID due to your personal bias (which btw is obvious here). Because you disagree on a particular issue doesn't not indicate someone's thinking in a different field of expertise. e.g. there are many great scientists that believe very deeply in Religion. Which as a non-believer I would think would be at odds with one another.

I have personally found it very difficult to find a job during COVID as well. I am almost 40 now and it worries me that I might experience the same in the future.

In addition to Matt Hancock, there was also the case of exemptions from quarantine for UEFA football VIPs. [1]

I think it's right the UK is returning to personal responsibility, especially as many of the rules haven't seemed to be science-based e.g. you must wear a mask entering a pub, but you are allowed to remove the mask while eating seated.

It's health-theatre, rather than virus prevention.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/18/vips-to-be-...

There were many notable people who were exposed as to exposing that we all should be lockdown while breaking the rules themselves. It is quite frustrating when I live in an area where almost everyone followed the rules.

Yes there is a quite an element to theatre to the whole thing, which makes sensible discussion about the issue impossible. Which I believe is somewhat by design.

> Which I believe is somewhat by design.

That's a really interesting thought that had never occurred to me. Maybe somewhat akin to Steve Bannon's "flood the zone with shit" strategy.

There is a short by Adam Curtis called "Oh Dear". You may have seen it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcy8uLjRHPM

The basic takeaway is that you make it impossible for the average person to keep up the thread of events and they become apathetic to it. I've also watched Adam Curtis's "Hypernormalisation". It is well worth a watch.

Fantastic, thank you.

>there are many great scientists that believe very deeply in Religion. Which as a non-believer I would think would be at odds with one another.

And you would be right, we definitely shouldn't trust religious people to do science, of all things.

The fact was that I wasn't right. They were doing decent work and their beliefs didn't affect their work.

A lot of non-believers (in the past I would have include myself in that list) seem to believe because they don't believe in a higher being that they are somehow more "rational". Nothing could be further from the truth. It took me a long time to realise that I wasn't being more rational than the faithful and I dogmatic about things that were simply quasi-religious. It took a lot of introspection and several times I had moments where my ideology hit reality hard and I spent several days dealing with cognitive dissonance and having to accept I was just wrong.

Believing in something that lacks any evidence is textbook irrationality. It is also at odds with science.

Indeed, but I think that was the point. It's entirely possible to hold irrational beliefs in one area without them affecting your work in another area.

Whether you think it's at odds or not, in practice many great scientists have been devoutly religious. For example Newton.

After some searching I found both old recommendations, and new ones about this explicitly [0].

The problem here is that nobody knows for sure, and someone must decide based on precautions and ongoing research. It is expected that new knowledge will make old information obsolete. An ongoing situation will also change during its course. Media just reflects this and there's no expectations of perfection.

It's on what basis opinions are formed that truly matter. Anyone can make thousands of bets and congratulate themselves on 50% of them.

[0] https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-says-fully-vaccinated-people-2015...

You've got cause and effect flipped here. It's not the bitterness that causes one to be not hired, its not being hired that causes bitterness. I experienced the same when trying to get in the field. The narrative at the time was that there was a labor shortage, and they were trying to push for more H1B visa holders. Yet there were very very few entry level positions, nobody was training, and the company that hired me paid horribly($12/hr) and didn't teach me anything. Keep in mind, I had recently graduated from university in the field.

For decades, employers had far more leverage than employees. Now that that's eroded a bit, everyone is panicking. But this is exactly what is needed to employers to actually train and care about their workers.

> The narrative at the time was that there was a labor shortage

Not unique to the particular time or place : Dutch employers are complaining about a lack of technical workers for decades, think welders / metal workers / machine operators etc.

Except they pay sh*t. Somehow the statement about the lack of workers gets printed in the media everytime.

Now we have the 'free transfer of people' in the EU. The EU is not there for you, but for the employers ( just like HR ).

> It's not the bitterness that causes one to be not hired, its not being hired that causes bitterness.

That's a pretty absolutist statement. Is it not possible that both are sometimes present, and lead to a downward spiral of poor attitude and unemployablility?

When I got out of university I was doing a web dev job that paid me less than a full time super market job in the UK.

However after a year of working there I quickly moved on and got a big pay rise in doing so.

I think this is something that every university graduate needs to understand so as to not be bitter.

Your first years of your career will be shit, there is just no beating around the bush around this fact. You will be treated like a kid, you will be paid like shit (borderline minimum wage a lot of the times), and you will have to work ridiculous amounts to be seen on the same level as other people in the field.

Once you break the 1-2 year experience mark then you can begin to expect entry level benefits for entry level positions. After you break the 5 year experience mark, then really the world is your oyster. 10 years or more and you can demand blank checks.

This guy wouldn’t make it past a first phone screen with that attitude thank goodness.

Sure tech companies generally are generally on your political side and not on his but he's most likely not getting hired because of ageism and because people don't really need people with tons of experience. A kid with some basic knowledge who will comply to whatever bs is being told is good enough. Plus they can easily convince him to care about the company, do overtime, etc. Good luck trying that crap with a 50yo.

> Might also be an attitude problem on your side.

I don't know about the OP, but I think sometimes people forget that getting hired is only part skill list match. The other part is likability. I've worked with enough smart assholes to never want to do that again if I can avoid it. I also frequently reflect to make sure I'm not being an asshole.

Being able to be picky about employees is the opposite of a labor shortage.

This sounds like a complete misunderstanding of the situation. In a thread about employers having trouble with hiring someone posted their honest frustrations as a potential employee looking for work. It is extremely unlikely that any cover letter, resume, or job interview is in any way similar because that context is completely different.

Just to pick one common idea among recruiters, it often takes about a month of job seeking per year of experience to get a position that is a solid match. That means that the people posting here with decades of experience can expect years of leetcode interviews before getting hired. Recruiters seem like a better source of information than currently employed and in demand coders.

These aren’t honest frustrations, lol, this person basically called covid a hoax and said all the official labor numbers are made up.

And idk what recruiters say this about experience but that’s not even a claim that could be substantiated. What even is a “solid match”? Sure, if you have crazy specific requirements to be willing to take a job it will take you longer to search. That applies regardless of age. Maybe on average older candidates tend to me more rigid in their expectations and are less open to working with new industries or programming languages or something, but that’s their choice.

The media downplayed covid until some places started closing. Then they kicked it into full on "zombie virus everyone is gonna die" mode real quick. On top of that, they (meaning social media as well) tried to circumvent the CDC numerous times by flagging things they've said because the media doesn't want COVID to die now that Trump is out of office. Trump was a damn goldmine and they're trying to force COVID to be another one.

I don't know. I am fifty one years old, last year I was sent packing. I found that it is increasingly more difficult for me to find a new job as a programmer, as the years go by. I am very grateful that I found a job, eventually.

Dear Calltrack, don't get too upset by the reactions in this thread, some people here are, well, not very compassionate, to say the least.

It's not about 'compassion', it's about denying the Covid pandemic being real and calling it 'the cough'.

Would you rather , on this site, people post what they honestly think, or what they would say in a job interview situation? Because if the latter, you might be better off not assuming that the OP is dumb enough to let out their unvarnished thoughts in an interview.

> you might be better off not assuming that the OP is dumb enough to let out their unvarnished thoughts in an interview.

After a glance at Calltrak's recent comment history, I think that might actually be an ok assumption.

The guy is frustrated and people say things like that when they're frustrated, it's understandable, though he certainly isn't helping himself by expressing such thoughts.

The "lies" he's talking about, I think, are a side-effect of the dichotomy of having an investor class that is doing better than ever and a working class that's in a downward spiral. Sadly, economic performance is measured strictly for the benefit of the investor class. So yeah, when someone who's involuntarily unemployed sees booming market numbers and talking heads on TV are calling out an economy that's "bounced back", it looks like a lie (and honestly I believe it is a kind of lie too).

Can't you hide your age for remote jobs? At least initially, when interviewing (they are not allowed to ask)

He probably gets the "no culture fit" euphemism after each video interview.

I know you’re not trying to interview right here and now, but listing tools doesn’t move the needle. That’s not what employability in tech is measured by.

I’m trying to hire for a number of software positions and that’s a common issue I see in resumes.

I don’t want to hear that you’re a wizard with a hammer. I want to know about the times you lead a team in building a house from start to finish.

> I want to know about the times you lead a team in building a house from start to finish.

What if that's not something I can do? If I'm really good at tech, am really good in terms of writing code fast, correct, and readable, but management just isn't for me? Would you not hire me for a software position, also not at a lower salary or with a junior label or something?

We're not interested in hiring "perpetual juniors". The increased oversight of junior employees is an investment in them becoming senior in a 2-3 year timeframe. The skills listed above are for independent action, follow-through, communication, and teamwork, in a tech lead position, which are more important than writing code. If you haven't acquired those skills by now, it's unlikely any amount of mentorship will teach them to you, so it's going to be a pass.

> The increased oversight of junior employees is an investment in them becoming senior in a 2-3 year timeframe.

So in your mind, they go straight from junior to senior? I've been developing software for 8 years now, and still call myself intermediate. Senior is for people with incredibly deep knowledge of multiple technologies and how they work together, in my mind.

We don't have an intermediate role, the step after Software Development Expert II is Senior Software Development Expert. This is pretty consistent among peer companies. Your description of senior isn't inaccurate, but, after many years of schooling, personal development experience, and on-the-job training, it's expected that people will gain that level of expertise in at least one domain -- maybe not to the same degree you're expecting, but career progression does not necessarily stop at SSDE.

Have you considered that this model is perhaps only a current trend and that it isn’t necessarily the “correct” model?

Sure, but, we're already well over capacity as it is. Feel free to experiment at your company.

It isn’t unreasonable to want to hire people that will be able to grow into senior positions. If you are demonstrating that you’ll never do that, this is a red flag for hiring.

Careful not to conflate this with management.

Even individual engineers will get tasked with solving problems, start to finish. And even if not, you were part of a team that did it. Talk about the process of how you contributed to some meaningful unit of work.

I don’t care about what tools you know. I can teach everyone how to program. Everyone. Programming is really not hard.

I can’t teach everyone how to be an adept problem solver or how to work in a team (in any role) to actually ship things reasonably bug free and on time. I can’t teach everyone how to work in harmony with others. I can’t teach everyone how to gracefully handle all the business realities that throw wrenches into software purity.

To add a bit: what I’m trying frantically to figure out in the hiring process is if you’re an asshole or not. I can’t fix that. If you don’t know some language or tool, that doesn’t even register as a problem to me. But if you seem stubborn and too opinionated, especially on trivial things, I don’t care if you’re a programming wizard.

Just a side note. I’m actually working on building a remote team and when I went to your profile, the link in there was dead. How do people casually browsing your profile discover what you’ve worked on and learn more about you?

There must be something more to your story. Some slight mental issues, way too high expectation from work/salary/special requirements etc. A lot of folks think of themselves as perfectly fine, but on interviews they come as hard-to-work-with introverted weirdos. Applying for a very senior lead/managerial position. And so on.

A year must mean tons of applications and at least some interviews. Do you have any idea/feedback from failed interviews on why they failed?

Exactly why I am sidestepping out of software into embedded and hardware development. You could never make a 6 week boot camp for EE.

No one gets a job because of how long they’ve been alive or how frustrated they are. I suggest changing your attitude and I’d also suggest avoiding rants about the government and media, as well as spreading misinformation about “the cough” and NYC during your job search.

This is actually part of the problem. Did you conveniently ignore that they mentioned years of experience in particular technologies?

Absolutely. YOE != value or skill.

FYI the contact info (URL) in your HN account is 404ing...

No, they are not “boarding up New York City”, but conservative trolls do seem to be invading this post, maybe we should board the post up instead.

I was unemployed for 9 months in the UK. I was a contractor/consultant and had to take a full time position.

When Lockdowns started I was literally finishing a contract and was happy to have some time off. After month 7 of not having any work and eating into savings and constantly lockdowns meant I had to go full time.

Interview process was frustrating to say the least. Lots of pre-screen "tests" which some were two to 3 hours of asking computer science style questions that are irrelevant for web development.

It was a frustrating process that was exasperated by COVID.

> I don't believe one dam word the government or the media says anymore. Not one word. Not about the cough.

If you really mean this, if you really think the pandemic is all a big conspiracy created by your government... makes me genuinely curious how you come across in interviews.

I don't think you're wrong about the labor shortage thing. Similar story here: quite a bit of trouble finding a job as a 25 year old tech person while you hear left and right that nobody can seem to find any employees anymore. But that one statistic is skewed, or perhaps that companies and employees aren't properly being matched, doesn't mean "the cough" (and what many people that contracted the virus describe as the worst week in their life) is all a big hoax.

I am curious as to how did you jump from not believing the government to pandemic being a conspiracy? Pandemic is real and governments have lied to their people, more so in last one and a half year - both of these statements can be true.

Also you should not question someone's capability to come across in the interviews based on their venting on online anonymous platform. Humans can have vastly different emotions depending on the situation.

Over the past 18 months or so, since the COVID-19 pandemic has been foremost in our minds, a group of people have espoused certain opinions or viewpoints. Namely:

    The pandemic is a hoax
    It doesn't kill people
    Those that did die, died from other causes
    That they won't wear a mask
    That they won't get a vaccine
    That the vaccine modifies DNA

The person who referred to the COVID-19 pandemic as "the cough" may or may not hold any or all of those views. But 18 months of hearing that group of people espouse those views leads many of us to learn that if they support one of the views above, they support them all.

Again, that may or may not be correct or ethical. It's just our experience.

> Not about the cough

I\m going to go ahead and guess that this is an attitude problem, not a skill problem.

Further - do you _really_ have 15 years of experience of C# and SQL Server, or (as is very common in that space) do you actually have one year of experience 15 times?

We are looking for SW engineers in the USA. Can you drop me an email leisenming AT protonmail DOT com? Thanks and good luck.

We reject more senior candidates for soft skill issues than we do for technical issues. Most common one is them aggressively saying "why did you do it this way, you should have done it this way" during interviews without knowing any context.

>boarding up New York City

Not really, we're doing rather well over here.

>there is homeless everywhere

There have been homeless everywhere for decades, if you think this is new then you haven't been paying attention.

edit: Also believing covid isn't real indicates that you have overall issues with rational understanding of complex topics or processing third party information. That underlying mental model tends to leak in interviews and is definitely a massive red flag.

As a (potential) employer, I wouldn't really care about age. It's all about how much you make money for me. What your performance to cost ratio? People can be cats or dogs for all I care.

Young have the advantage that they usually drastically undervalue themselves and thus provide an unbeatable proposition. They're usually more energetic, positive and optimistic, which is more pleasant to be around and thus makes the work environment more productive.

In an ideal system: if employers fail to hire workforce that benefits their company more, they will fall behind the competition. There most definitely are preconceived notions about people on how they look, but that should be a competitive advantage to a company that can leverage it.

> Young have the advantage that they usually drastically undervalue themselves and thus provide an unbeatable proposition. They're usually more energetic, positive and optimistic, which is more pleasant to be around and thus makes the work environment more productive.

This feels myopic. It cuts both ways. Young employees are often much more susceptible to conflating their personal identity with their work identity, which can lead to serious emotional and psychological issues down the road. Even if we're looking at it purely from an extract-value-from-employee angle, I don't want a team that's running purely on misplaced idealism and ramen cups, because that's not sustainable.

So the counterpoint to your comment would be: older employees have the advantage of serving as an example to younger ones for how to better manage work/life balance, which yields a healthier team in aggregate.

Only a Sith hires in absolutes.

[edit: grammatical typo]

If you do, stop including your birthdate on CV-s, and don't answer questions regarding your afe.

Only display the last 10 years of work history on your resume.

Apply for Senior/Staff+ positions.

Do not display your graduation date.

Do not display age.

Dye your hair or shave your head, etc.

Get more hip eye glasses and just wear black t-shirts.

Fake a more hip accent/voice during your interview.

The talk about ageism reminded me of picking up Filipino in-laws at Heathrow airport a few years ago. My brother in law commented it was nice to see the airport employing some older people. In Philippines it used to be pretty normal to get rid of service sector workers at 30. The country has changed the law recently to mitigate this.

Couldn't it be that people don't want to commute to places anymore for hours every day? So they don't take those jobs where they have to suffer anymore.

I read several article about how people realized during covid that they don't want a job they don't like anymore. Specially tech, since its very demanding.

Housing costs spiked pretty much everywhere too. There has been talk of a restaurant bubble for years and not enough was done about affordable housing.

The other thing is during the restaurant bubble, it cost owners little to be open during slow times because it came at the cost of the workers' tips. That was good for convenience-obsessed customers who could easily get a table but it obviously wasn't sustainable.

We all went remote to good companies with higher salaries. Stop trying to control our lives so much and pay better, it is that simple.

Quote: "...hospitality and catering had gone up 18% ..."

Let's spin up the inflation calculator for UK: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/in...

and you get that the year is 2013. 100 pounds in 2013 are the same buying power as 117.20 pounds in 2020, which can safely be assumed is around 118 today. So people want to live just a little bit better, something like only 8 years ago and these kind of articles are wondering why employers can't find workers?

How about less control and even better payment? Then you'll see there is no "workers shortage" for your business.

In addition to the article and to other comments and in relation to expat workers in UK, AFAIK, Spaniards who worked in UK came here when COVID started to be a big issue, and most of them, won't go again.

They won't come mainly due to BREXIT and other difficulties of being an expat working in UK, but also because the price of the GBP dropped since when they started going there more massively, about 2010, and with that they don't earn the same quantity of euros, and because the conditions weren't usually the greatest.

Most of who worked on children care even have online groups to keep updated list of "bad families", who did not behave or even threaten or hurt a worker. And working having this in mind isn't healthy at all.

When these articles are about the US they never mention the brutal policies of ICE (Immigration Control and Enforcement) which discourage seasonal workers from Mexico, who are already hesitant due to the pandemic. I mean, if you're going to deport Mexicans who served honorably in the military it's a big FU to Mexicans. I wouldn't come here either.

When i was in the Air Force, people got citizenship for serving... How are they being deported?

This NYT article [1] has some quotes from Sen. Duckworth that outlines the problem as she sees it.

One in particular: "People don’t even know that we are deporting veterans. I think most Americans assume that when somebody serves, they gain American citizenship. They don’t realize that we are actually deporting people who served honorably."

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/us/politics/veterans-depo...

Generally speaking they commit serious crimes before they complete the naturalization process.

> Under the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act, “aggravated felonies” are a basis for automatic deportation. Struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse put veterans at greater risk of incarceration than the general population. In 2017, nearly 28% of minority veterans – that’s 1,315,989 people – reported a service-connected disability, principally PTSD.

I worked with citizen veterans who ended up in jail for crimes committed while distressed from PTSD. The VA treats these veterans. It's inhuman to deport them imho

https://theconversation.com/deported-veterans-stranded-far-f...

Yeah and letting ICE run wild was supposed to make labor more scarce and more valuable.

Thank immigration hawks for the wage inflation they promised.

At least where I live (PNW USA) there’s a growing concern from businesses that another lockdown is coming. They just started requiring masks again this week. If I’m an employee of one of those businesses, or was previously, I’m staying home. Why would I go back when it seems that yet another lockdown is imminent, and I’ll be laid off again. Many of these workers have had wold cried to them for a year and half. The whiplash of non masks, now wear a mask, lockdown, now no lockdown, to lockdown again is more than people can handle.

It's evident we're transitioning to a post-labor society. The labor force participation rate keeps falling. More and more people are on sort for of welfare, assistance, or are homeless or incarcerated. Tent cities everywhere all across the country, in poor and rich areas alike. Each crisis, from 2008 to Covid, only hastens this transition.

In contrast to the article, I rather believe that Brexit is more responsible for the shortage than Covid-19

We don't know because we don't keep proper statistics on people entering and leaving the country. The figures for net emigration last year are between 300,000 and 1.3 million but they are largely a guess.

I find it more interesting how the BBC is putting the absolute minimum required mention of brexit in the article.

Meanwhile if you actually look at the job seeker numbers...strongly suggests that it's a major if not primary contributor. Non-EU is back to pre-pandemic levels even.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/jun/17/number-of-e...

Is it controversial to state that many died?

I don't think it's controversial, but I don't think it's true. The job vacancies in the U.S. compared to the total deaths don't really match up. Even more so if you factor in that the age group with the highest death rate (elderly people) weren't in the workforce pre pandemic.

It's funny how this post is juxtapositioned on the frontpage with the article[1] stating that 1 in every 153 American workers is an Amazon employee.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28009868

Handouts and ubi are bad. Raising minimum wage is good. Consider iceland. Most of their lower pay workers were immigrants who returned to their countries when covid hit. And they are still in debt from the 2008 crash. Unlike the US, they cannot print more dollars to bail themselves out. Yet Iceland's minimum wage is $19/hr and healthcare is free. How can they manage to treat their people so much better than we treat ours??

Many companies are becoming increasingly unpleasant to work for, largely because of the increasing political speech at work. I wish more companies would take a Coinbase or Basecamp type stance on avoiding politics at work, and downsize their HR departments so they focus on benefits, compensation, and so on, rather than acting like political commissars and social activists within the workplace.

Let's set aside, for a moment, the very poorest people, who are just struggling to survive. Let's talk about every family (emphasis on family and not individual) that is above poverty.

The people in the family work to achieve a certain standard of living. If they want to afford 2 weeks in Bermuda every summer and 2 weeks at Vale every winter, then maybe they work a little extra to afford those things. Maybe they work longer hours, or pick up an extra job.

Indeed, consider that in the USA male wages were stagnant or declining for most of the period 1973-2000 and yet family income rose steadily until 2000. That's because women were entering the work force, and their additional income more than made up for their husband's losses.

We just had 18 months where people's standard of living was reduced by government edict. Some people have grown used to the new, lower standard of living. Others plan to raise their standard of living, but plan to be strategic about it.

It is well known that the lockdown affected women more than men. But as things get back to something like normal, there will be no repeat of the somewhat casual way that women picked up low-wage work during the period 1973-2000. To the extent that women rejoin the workforce, they are going to be more strategic about it.

Sound exactly like what brexit campaigners said would happen: borders close, supply of labour goes down, local wages go up.

This the painful in-between time when citizens realize they have to take those jobs

It’s not a worker shortage it’s an affordable housing crisis nobody can afford to live where the jobs are.

"The Last Of The Deliverers"

Poul Anderson, "The Last of the Deliverers" IN Door To Anywhere, pp. 408-417.

I read this story once before in an anthology a long time ago. An author's note explained that the story shows one of our present conflicts as history because it will become history.

A future history is summarized:

"'Technology made it possible for a few people and acres to feed the whole country, till millions of acres were lying idle; you could buy them for peanuts.'" (p. 415)

A few people, yes, but a few acres?

"'Meanwhile the cities were overtaxed, underrepresented, and choked by their own traffic. Along came the cheap sunpower unit and the high-capacity accumulator. Those let a man supply most of his own wants, not work his heart out for someone else to pay the inflated prices demanded by an economy where every single business was subsidized or protected at the taxpayer's expense.'" (ibid.)

Living better on less work, people needed to earn so little that they paid nearly zero taxes, consumed little, thus causing a depression, and preferred to live in small country communities, despite rearguard action from both big business and trade unions. Individuals and families use town tractors as and when they need to and most grow garden vegetables. Land cannot be owned because it cannot be pocketed and carried around.

"'And when we do work, we'd rather work for ourselves, not for somebody else, whether you call the somebody else a capitalist or the people. Now let's go sit down and take it easy before lunch.'" (p. 414)

I literally can't find a job in any kind of engineering. Applied for dozens of cleaning and production positions and couldn't get a job.

You know what the media has become? A cesspool of bullshit unworthy of any trust. No wonder so many people mistrust actual experts, it's hard to even tell who they are.

Hey, try being over 50.

I just gave up, and retired early. Best decision I ever made. I'm working for free, with NPOs, and it's been a joy.

The worst part, for me, has been the naked contempt and disrespect. I don't expect to be worshipped, but raw insults are beyond the pale. It's -literally- like a hazing ritual. With all the news about "frat boy culture," I think I see where it comes from.

I don't think it's just us older folks. It seems as if the entire industry has gone down the bog. My guess is that younger folks are getting similar treatment, but are more willing to shrug it off, and power through.

It will stop, at some point. IT is still growing but we're reaching the point where IT workers are a decent percentage of all workers, so they are starting to become representative of the population at large. Larger and larger cohorts of IT workers are aging and recent graduates will stop being enough even for the top companies.

Also, salaries are lower in general but I get the impression Europe is better in this regard. I see older people in IT, at least in Western Europe (in Eastern Europe the field is too new).

I could probably go to the Web sites of at least a dozen successful IT companies, and go to the "Meet the Team" page.

They are invariably a large group of smiling -young- faces. There may be one or two greyhairs in the picture, but a quick shufti of the "Leadership" page often shows them to be C-suite or Board.

Yeah, I'm a cynic.

When you are old, everyone looks young. =)

I see 35 year olds and think "that guy is just a kid"!

This made me chuckle as it reminded me of an older employee referring to another employee as “one of the good interns”. Except the guy he was talking about was in his late 30s and had been with the company for over 5 years :-)

I wonder if there's a corelation in the sense that the young-biased "startup-y" companies are more likely to even have something like a "meet the team" page. (I.e. you kind of need to be below a certain size, and even then plenty places don't have them)

There's a fairly common ideal of what a team photo should look like, and so the people that contribute to that ideal will be in the photo.

This is certainly the case for newer VC funded companies. That isnt all of tech though.

Yes, being older and working in software doesn't seem to be big problem in Europe. A previous (European) employer of mine with a very geopraphically distributed workforce even employed some older Americans.

With regard to Germany, I have the same impression. Mature companies, at least, seem to have a mature workforce. Have a look at a picture of the SAP big band: https://image.jimcdn.com/app/cms/image/transf/dimension=2060...

It’s not that much of a problem either in the US outside of Silicon Valley and venture backed companies. Plenty of older guys in the not so cool industries.

Salaries may be lower but work/life balance seems much higher in Europe.

> work/life balance seems much higher

That doesn't sound too great. You probably mean better.

Indeed. :)

If you offer an American a choice between more money or more vacation, they will take the money, for the most part.

That's because American's can't afford vacations without more money.

Money is typically not the issue with most US jobs compared to Europe.

Americans have far more disposable incomes than Europeans. It's not even close. Average household consumption in the US is 65% higher than Germany.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...

That measure is wrong, it was designed to make USA look better. Read this part about the measure, it misses government subsidised healthcare etc:

> Household final consumption expenditure (HFCE) is not an exhaustive measure of the goods and services consumed by households. The general government and non-profit institutions serving households (NPISH) often provide goods and services to households for their individual consumption free of charge or at reduced prices. Examples are health services provided by governments or reimbursed by a social security fund, education services, the part of service provided by public museums, concert halls, operas, swimming pools that is not financed by entrance fees, aid for social housing etc. By adding the general government's and NPISHs' individual consumption expenditure to household final consumption expenditure one receives the actual final consumption of households.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_final_consumption_ex...

Edit: Also another way to interpret that value is that is how much households has to spend to uphold decent way of life in that country. So it is really expensive to live in America so people have to work hard to survive. Of course you can't say for sure what is true, but if an American has to spend 50% more to live the same quality of life as a German person then of course he will be less willing to take vacation instead of the money.

Hard to know where those figures come from, and the article itself says they divide household by capita, which is extremely weird.

If we look at median wealth (don't use average because highly distorted by wealthy tail), the US comes below a lot of other countries:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_...

i.e. cherry picking and using invalid metrics can tell whatever story you wish.

A lot of Americans I know seem to associate vacation with super luxury trips. They don’t seem to understand the concept of just taking off and relax but instead want to do trips that go to five star hotels and spend 100 dollars on dinners. No wonder they can’t afford vacation. When I compare myself to colleagues I can often do a one week trip for what they are spending per day.

It definitely is depending on the country!

This is something that is very difficult to see at a distance: Just like in politics, it's very easy to get an unrepresentative picture of the world online.

I am a Spaniard who was fortunate to qualify to a US visa, so I was able to come over. I have many friends who went into CS, but didn't have the chances to come over as I did. As far as Spain goes, what I am able to make in the American Midwest pays for an entire team of developers in my hometown, who don't get more vacations than I do, and often work far longer hours.

And it's not just Spain. A local company here has started a Polish development center, because despite the language barriers, and the time difference, it's hard to pass up a total cost per employee of about 1/4th the equivalent developer in Missouri, and those Missouri developers get a month of vacation, and nobody works more than 40 hours a week.

If the concern is just places with bad work/life balance, we can find them on both sides of the Atlantic. My brother in Spain works 60 hour weeks more often than not, just like some people I know at very large online retailers. Those kind of situations can happen anywhere: But in some cases someone gets to choose it because they like the RSUs that come with it, and in others, it's just that the local market really is that bad.

So if I were you, I'd look in detail, as a generalization on work life balance might be very different than you think once you are on the ground. Take a look at "The trimodal nature of the European software market". There really are very few jobs in the top tier, the second tier is quite a bit worse than the US's second tier, for similar work/life balance, and the third tier is so far from the US, you might as well be comparing working conditions of Software developers with Uber drivers.

People on this forum say EU - but they mean "rich parts of EU". Reality is EU has way more inequality between member states than the US, ironic given the propaganda.

> The worst part, for me, has been the naked contempt and disrespect.

If you don’t mind and if it’s not sensitive do you mind to share some examples? I’ve just gone past the 40 year threshold myself and I think I’m starting to see/notice some of the same things you noticed, i.e. less “camaraderie” (for lack of a better word) and more “getting on top of the other”, a feeling I didn’t have when I entered this industry 15 years ago.

Just yesterday I happened to sit in a coffee shop close to a table where an IT lead (or something like that) was interviewing (I think it was an interview) a younger potential hire (it was a woman, if it counts), and I found his tone and remarks and general demeanor quite off-putting, I was one step way of telling the guy “why the heck are you spewing such bullshit?”, but then again I didn’t want to ruin said young lady’s job interview.

I think tech attracts a certain type of person... People with high iq but very low scores in compassion and care.

I dunno. I get the same vibe from medicine. MDs in particular. Less so the further down the food chain you go. (Part of that is culture. The bottom is composed of immigrants who still act like normal human beings.) I think it's something that's more broadly acculturated among the highly educated and high-achieving. Or just selected for whenever competition is fierce.

I also did not get this feeling from other technology industries that weren't "Tech". Places full of PhDs, but disconnected from the SV culture. And frankly, less motivated by money and more by lifestyle.

Maybe it all boils down to money. There's too much money in Tech. It attracts the worst, and brings out the worst.

> There's too much money in Tech. It attracts the worst, and brings out the worst.

That is my thesis.

In New York, we have the finance industry, which is just as bad (if not worse).

It has also been like this for most of a century. That does not bode well for Tech improving.

Web dev, specifically.

That's where ALL the money is, and it's where the worst culture (and worst tech) is, imo. :p

I mean, hell, why else would anyone learn React? $$$$$$

All high achievement types are like this, because high achievement[a] requires selfishness. Compare the law firm partner who works until midnight everyday while his wife and children languish at home, with the priest who volunteers at the food kitchen and adopts orphans. Both add some value to society, arguably, but one of them lives in a mansion and one in subsidized housing. Highly prosocial behavior is not always incentivized in American society[a]. This gives us benefits like iPhones and Amazon Prime, and detriments like homelessness and deaths of despair.

[a] In a material sense, excluding moral and ethical achievements. "Mad Men"-style success, not Buddha-style success.

[b] Although Americans on average are extraordinarily charitable in terms of dollars donated

"High Achievement" is probably in the eye of the beholder.

I've written a fairly massive infrastructure system that is used throughout the world, and has, undoubtedly, saved lives. It will probably continue to do so, in some form or another, long after I take my dirt nap. It has formed the nucleus of an entire Service structure; not just one application.

Did I do it to be considered a "hero"? Did I do it for financial reward?

The answer to both is "No." I have stepped away from the project, and it has taken on a life of its own.

I developed the system over a period of a couple of years, at first, and refined it for a decade, before finding a team willing to take the reins. That required that I step away from the project, and cede total control: technical, IP, legal, etc., to the new team.

Before long, I'll be nothing more than a footnote in the historical record.

Thousands of people, around the world, use the system, every day. During the COVID impact on the users, it was rapidly adapted to serve a very new environment. It has always been completely localizable, and has a simple, powerful semantic interface that allowed all sorts of cool adapters that I only vaguely predicted, in 2008, when I started it.

I never charged a dime for it. In fact, it cost me thousands to maintain and evangelize it.

I'll probably never get credit for most of the work and planning that I did, and I'm fine with that.

I consider that "high achievement." I did a lot of it, because I needed to keep my tech chops up, and saw a need that could be filled. I enjoyed the process of envisioning the project's lifecycle, planning its genesis, and implementing it. It allowed me to do stuff that my employers would not let me do.

It wasn't because I'm some kind of saint, or martyr. In fact, a lot of folks, during its early years, thought that I was a cantankerous, dictatorial, controlling bastard. I needed to keep the project on task, and in focus. That often meant being a real dick (I'm good at that).

When I finally encountered some tech people that were qualified to handle it, and take it to the next level, it was important for me to turn it over completely, and get the hell out of the way. By that time, I was sick of it. I wanted to learn new tech, and work on different stuff. I basically slowed down the car, pushed it out onto the sidewalk, and went screeching off into the distance.

Most of the work that I've done, in the last four years, has been stuff that I wanted to do, for fun. I had a number of theories about developing high-quality software, I wanted to really get down and dirty with Swift, I wanted to develop applications that made me proud, and I wanted to work my ass off. I like working. You won't find me on a golf course. The coroner is gonna have to rub "YTREWQ" off my cheek, because I'll faceplant on my keyboard, when I pop my clogs.

I'm no saint, but I also consider myself to have a very high degree of Integrity. I have absolutely no desire at all to sacrifice that for money.

Yes, I included the footnote because I am defining high achievement as dominance of the social hierarchy.

Your screed reminds me of a scene from Justice League Unlimited[1] in which Luthor is questioned about why he continues to strive for great heights (or, in the view of the Justice League, nadirs) despite, on a conventional scale, having already achieved the high status of being rich and powerful and ,on a cosmic scale, being bound by a relatively meager existence that will eventually pass on as a forgotten footnote.

All said and done, what you describe is another type of high achievement and one that isn't necessarily opposed to massive earnings (at least as a means); that of the skilled artisan. Even if you have helped millions of people in lieu of lucre, the pursuit of high achievement of any kind still required selfishness on your part. You still decided how everything was run and as well as the standards under which it should be run following your departure.

In that sense you're a hero of a sort. Even if you don't see it. It takes heroic effort to scaffold one's integrity, vision, and time into a project with the goal that said project will improve itself years down the line. All of what you've worked on is ,directly or indirectly, a product of your choices.

[1]https://youtube.com/watch?v=K4TC1xMyZDI

That was fun. Thanks!

Off to shave my head...

I will not give specific examples. Here, there be dragonnes...

But I have been told "You know, because you're older, you'll need to ask for less" by recruiters (recruiters are the worst).

I've had testers (silly tests), be quite disrespectful, and use tone and engagement (or lack, thereof), to make it clear that this is an annoyance for them, and I should just "get it over with," so they can do something "more important," I guess.

I've had numerous recruiters suddenly develop "connection problems" on the phone, moments after I've made it clear that I'm older. They promise to get back to me, and I never hear from them again (I believe that kids, these days, call that "ghosting").

I've had initial screeners (I assume HR), do the same thing.

One pleasant experience was actually Facebook. They have been polite, respectful, and cheerful. I have not felt discriminated by them. I don't think that I want to work there, but I feel as if they would be approachable. I have had other FAANG companies that were shockingly rude, and that surprised and disappointed me.

Probably, the worst thing, for me, is the unwillingness to check my portfolio. It’s friggin huge. Many years in the making, with lots of shipping products.

I’ve actually been told that “I probably faked it,” and given a stupid binary tree test.

Working at startups has been my solution to this wide problem. No startup will turn away a domain expert in a field they need help with. A corporation over a certain size seems to glean all they need to know about me as soon as they see my bald head. Any social organization over a certain size seems to be allergic to people with much experience, I think because they cannot mold them into drones.

> No startup will turn away a domain expert in a field they need help with.

This has not been my experience. Part of it may be that I don't really do the whole "self-promotion" thing so well.

I'm pretty good at what I do. I have worked with many, many people that are much better than I am, so I don't let it get to my head.

But whenever I mention what I'm good at, it's met with snorts of disbelief. That's crazy. I am not claiming to be Superman.

I have a massive portfolio that proves what I claim. It has 30 or more (complete, documented, tested, and supported) repos, with over a decade of checkin history, and full source for a whole boatload of [mostly deprecated] shipping applications. Don't believe me? Clone the repo, and hit "Build." I have dozens of blog entries, articles, teaching series, etc.; all linked from my SO story. I even have the PDF manual for my very first engineering project, in 1987.

What I can (and can't) do is not a matter for debate. Like I said, I have worked with many folks that make me look like a piker.

Here's an example:

About a month and a half ago, I responded to an article, where the author claimed we "never finished" anything. This was what I posted:

>> I dare you to list three finished software projects.

> I can probably list 30, and point to the repos.

It's 100% true. You don't need to take my word for it. Simply look at my SO story. I link to it in my HN handle.

Someone that obviously did not bother to do exactly that, posted a challenge, basically calling me a liar. I responded by throwing the seed into the nest, and posting a link to my SO story[0]. They never responded, after that.

Like I said, I know that I'm pretty good at what I do, but I spent my entire career around folks that made me look like a beginner.

It's really, really sad that people seem to consider that kind of stuff to be a lie.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

I believe that such a long history of experience is seen with awe and respected much much more and compensate much better in traditional engineering fields (chemical etc.) rather than in tech. I could be wrong though.

That doesn’t sound liveable. How do you pay for rent?

I worked for over 30 years, lived frugally, avoided debt, and saved a significant chunk of my salary.

As a result, I reached the point, where I don't need to work, if I don't want to.

I want to work. I love what I do. I don't need to make money at it. I also like to help people, so I found people that want to help people, and can't afford much.

It really is a shame. I have a fairly significant set of skills and experience. Pretty much what a startup would need, to make a new product a reality. I know how to make very high-quality software that ships. I did it for my entire career. I also do quite well on teams, and have been a problem-solver, all my life.

The folks I'm working with now, pinch themselves, every day.

Have you thought about building small projects that could earn you a little bit of income on the side?

Doesn't necessarily have to be an overwhelming product, but just a way of practicing and exploring work.

I prefer doing them for free.

Most of the work I do, is self-education. I love to learn, and I have been maintaining my competency in shipping work for decades (Which often means that I am not right at the "bleeding edge." Shipping is usually a couple of steps back from that).

If you check out my SO Story[0], you'll see a whole boatload of published modules. They are -each and every one- totally "ship-ready." I produce them as if they are to be commercial-grade products, with the appearance of a major-league brand -even the experimental projects.

There are also complete source code bases for a number of published (and many, since, deprecated) apps on the Apple App Store. I've been shipping apps continuously, since 2012. I've provided full source code for all of them.

I don't promote them at all. I don't really care. I have no idea if anyone uses them. I have a few stars, and a couple of forks, but I've not seen my stuff appear anywhere (It's MIT, so I assume I'd be noted in the README -HAH!).

Many of these are 1-source-file development utilities, with dozens of files of testing code, wrapped around them.

I like Quality.

I'm my own best customer. I tend to be pretty skeptical of most of the available dependencies, out there, so I like to write my own.

The project I'm working on now, is non-trivial. It's the kind of thing that normally takes a team of at least five engineers, running 24/7 on Red Bull, to do. I do well at these kinds of things. It's coming along nicely, and will be ready in a few months. I also wrote two of the servers I use.

It is not (currently) open-source, but I may, sometimes, spin an open-source module out of it. I just did one, a couple of weeks ago (LGV_Cleantime).

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/story/chrismarshall

Tech was once not that respected, & mostly full of nerds who were just way into tech. But then tech rose in status & income, & was invaded by top school kids seeking such things, who took over the top slots. These new kids didn’t much respect older tech folks from wrong schools.

https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1421212798881722368

The reduced standing (and compensation) of Finance post-2008 has something to do with it.

I've observed this and it's just appalling.

It doesn't matter that 50 year olds can do the same work just as well, no, management seems to want freaking Energizer bunnies on their team.

Nevermind that they don't actually get more work done (and more importantly, better), it's just about being "passionate" about doing the same shit every day. Wtf.

It's not just better. It's shipping. I've done that, since I was 24 years old. I literally have the manual that I wrote, accompanying the first professional engineering project that I did, after my first promotion to a salaried engineer, from a bench tech.

When I read it, I am impressed, and it was done in 1987. It was an internal tool, that was used to test defense tech. I treated the project as if it was being delivered to the field, and lives depended on it. It was that much of an Honor for me to have the chance to do that work.

I am a high school dropout. I got a GED, and had to fight for everything I got. That means that I valued everything, and never treated it as "my due."

Every job that I have ever had, has been a Signal Honor. It has been a privilege, and a chance to learn more, and push my boundaries. Every team that I ever joined, was composed of people that were better than me, and had something to teach me. It was always an Honor to be admitted to their ranks.

I understood, from my very first assignment, that I needed to ship.

Shipping is what makes money. Shipping is what builds brands. Shipping is what the customer wants and needs.

Everything else is just a low SNR.

That's why I have always treated every single one of my projects as if it were a gift, given to me, and one that needs to be treated with Respect, Honor and Dignity. It needs to be done well, and it needs to be finished. I consider myself to be a craftsman, as well as an engineer. I won't design garbage, and I don’t want my work to be treated as garbage[0] (if I have any say in it -which has not always been the case).

I know that attitude sounds over-dramatic, ridiculous, and anachronistic, but it's the one I have. I'm not looking for work. I don't really have an investment in what people think about that, anymore. The people that matter, know me, and they know my work.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rsZfcz3h1s

How do you find NPOs that aren’t ego-driven sweatshops? I’ve been pondering doing this for a few years but the reality of many nonprofits is that they are quite exploitative of their employees and volunteers. I’d happily do net and server admin for a low overhead background task but not for a ceo ego org.

I've not encountered them.

If I'm not getting paid, I can vote with my feet.

If I take a job, and take money, then I am bound by Integrity and Personal Honor, to do all in my power to complete the contracted tasks; and to do so, well.

If I am working on a volunteer basis, then, if they become douches, I pack my bags and leave. I don't give a rat's ass about prestige and todger-measuring contests. I do the work, because I find it personally fulfilling. I don't act like a prima donna, but I also don't brook nonsense. They figure that out, fairly quickly.

But that hasn't happened. The sheer value of the Quality of the work I do -I am not exaggerating- is something most Fortune 500 companies don't get. I think that this gets past the egos.

I've found that I'm actually treated with Respect, and I don't have to arm-wrestle insecure managers for every damn thing.

Also, I have been working with NPOs for 40 years. It's only been the last 4, that it has been full-time.

I think the shortage is in positions companies don’t want to pay much. At least anecdotally, I’ve seen and heard a lot about restaurants having cook shortages. This doesn’t negate your point. I’d say it just bolsters your point.

Someone who isn’t willing to pay enough does not qualify as demand, thus is not considered a participant in the market, and therefore would not impact a shortage situation. A shortage occurs when an external mechanism prevents price from rising. Choosing to not pay more is internal.

I'm sorry to hear that but keep in mind the job market is very different from one location to another and from one sector to another.

The BBC is talking about truck drivers in the UK and it is hardly a surprise: UK used to rely heavily on eastern Europe workers in that area, and they vote (Brexit) to prevent exactly that. They got what they asked for.

If anything, we can complain that the BBC article title is too general and not precise enough, but your particular experience does not necessarily match the experience elsewhere

The BBC has for a long long time been more sensitive to the concerns of employers and investors rather than employees or the unemployed.

This has mostly been as a result of aping the trends followed by the rest of the private media in the UK since the 1970s.

They already had a business section and even rolled out a new capital section a few years ago. No word yet on when theyll get a section dedicated to worker news.

Why wouldn't they? Workers are generally not allowed to talk about specifics of work to media.

I think that’s a really poor excuse. People can discuss anonymously and about recent prior jobs (being slightly less bound by contractual gagging, or under less threat of being sued)

Journalists can apply for jobs and do an exposé too.

The sources will be criticized for being anonymous or ousted. Some journalists cover workplace too. However, corporate tactics optimize away most of what is possible in that regard.

All for a public who can't give a damn (gimme the cheapest).

In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers. You just don't want to meet the market price of the workers with that skill set. You could imagine a widget factory whose economics rely on paying employees < X. And if the market rate for those workers is > X, it doesn't mean there's a "shortage" of workers, but the workers demand a wage that makes your work unprofitable.

The fact is a lot of people are paid not to work through generous covid-related safety net measures. That are supply of workers has been restricted through immigration policies. But it's not a shortage.

What would you call it if we had 5 positions at the widget factory, but only 4 prospective employees looking for work? Wouldn't that constitute a worker shortage, as no matter how high I make my wages as a widget foreman, there are still less workers than there are open positions?

Or is that not something that could really happen outside of a textbook problem?

Advertise a higher than expected wage, and you will see more people coming out of the woodwork.

Offer people enough money and they will move. Offer even more and they will train specifically to do the job.

Jobs that require lots of training can have short term global shortages of skilled workers. But, that quickly self corrects as long as salaries increase.

That does not necessarily follow. It’s very difficult to put food on the table while going to school in hopes of landing a job in a new field.

Pay living wages and provide paid, on-the-job training. That will get prospective employees through the door.

It does at a high enough salary. Some people are unable to pay for their own training but you don’t need everyone you simply need enough people. Start offering Doctor money and people will jump through insane hoops, but it scales down so even 20$ an hour will motivate some people to do a specialized training course on their own dime.

If it's that important to employers, they'll pay them during the training period.

This used to be standard practice. It's a modern development (80s on) that businesses demanded workers come pre trained.

What are your requirements for the widget employees? Are you willing to train or educate? How effective has your advertisement for the job/wage been?

On a microlevel, a worker shortage is a reflection of lack of wage and too strict requirements. You can't find a worker because your potential workers are happily doing a different jobs. You've not incentivized them enough to come work for you. You might say "But we are offering $15/hour!" and that's fine, but that's what a lot of other companies are now offering. You make balk at the idea of going up further as being "too much" but that just underscores the problem.

Now if it truly is a labor shortage, SOMEONE is going to be left with not enough workers. That'll always be the person that wants "15 years of experience! We pay $30k/year!".

Just do the extreme. Do you think you'd struggle to find someone if the offering was "$200k/year!"? Hell no, you'd have people moving to live in your widget city for that job.

Thats not something that happens in real life, because you will run out of resources to pay the prospective workers with before the total supply of prospective workers is exhausted.

Realistically, you can even hire people to manufacture additional workers, if you have the financial and time resources required.

Not really. You'd have to add some very contrived constraints, like:

1) There's no one currently employed elsewhere that can make widgets who you could poach for enough money.

2) Widget making is so specialized and / or time is so short that you can't train up another worker to fill the role.

If #1 and #2 aren't possible because your margin can't cover it, then you have a failed business, not a labour shortage.

So basically "labour shortage" in a market economy is a myth, usually circulated to suppress wages. Anyone who says "labour shortage" really means "not enough cheap labour".

pay more money or any other incentive that would cause more people to be interested in the job. Why do you think FAANG has hundreds of applications for each job while startups struggle to hire?

Paying more is relatively easy to do when your company makes a few million per employee. The vast majority of companies aren’t blessed with pseudo-monopolies that allow them to do that.

The other employees will catch wind of your million dollar per hour offers thrown out in an desperate attempt to find someone, demand that you pay them that much as well, and you'll be bankrupt by Friday. At that point you will have no open positions and everything is corrected for. Or, to avoid bankruptcy, you won't increase your offer and therefore will be removed from the market as a buyer for that position.

A shortage occurs when an external force prevents price from rising. Medical doctors in some jurisdictions, for example, are often legally prevented from accepting higher offers to prioritize patients. Instead their service fees are fixed and they have to accept patients on system that is usually a mix of first come, first serve and needs-based priority. Therefore a doctor shortage, in said jurisdictions, is quite possible. But you generally won't find such restrictions in the general labour pool.

> In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers

You need a license to drive a truck in the UK (the actual subject of the article). It takes a minimum of two months acquire [1]. Even paying a thousand dollars an hour does not magic more qualified candidates into existence at short notice as you appear to propose. The reason for the shortage is the trivially foreseeable effects of idiotic hard-line immigration policies, not market economics or “generous” safety nets.

[1]: https://www.get-licensed.co.uk/licence/hgv

If the pay is good, demand is high and all you need is to go on a two month course, I'd bet a lot of unemployed people would be eager to do that. The "shortage" is indeed because of Brexit, but paying a thousand dollars an hour will most certainly magically summon workers en mass in a few months.

Unless people see through it as a short term gimmick in an unstable industry.

Given the example of last two years, what are the chances people see through anything.

I doubt it. If the pay was high enough and the term was long enough, you'd see interest from retired licensed drivers and licensed driver's who'd changed jobs. Then you have 2 months to train up and license new drivers.

Plus you can outbid others who are contracting owned and operator drivers.

There are people with commercial driving licenses who aren't currently working as truck drivers. They could be recruited if employers raised wages.

And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

They still need to pass the tests, there is a backlog of people waiting to take them.

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

I get why you've said this, but I'm not sure this kind of flippant remark is helpful -- what exactly isn't rocket science? Is it the actual act of training a truck driver? Is it the act of writing down the things needed to get more truck drivers?

Actual process is non-trivial, expensive (you need to persuade people to leave their families), time consuming and involves a chain of other non-trivial time-consuming tasks that currently doesn't really exist (or is at least regionally bottlenecked).

Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

> Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

Isn’t the whole idea behind the benefit a free/freeish market provides that it is the most efficient system for allocating resources?

Mind you efficient != resilient

I'm slightly leery of that. But to be fair to the markets here, gov policy + protracted negotiations + lack of concrete information + conflicting guidelines surely made it impossible for a market to actually function properly.

(to be fair to the gov, not sure how they could have operated differently without advising everything the remain side was warning against. Which would have worked I guess, but would have also been bizarre and probably tanked the economy [more])

So based in that, how can it efficiently allocate resources? Given time, sure, maybe in theory. Which is great unless you're a. a business that has actual costs now or b. a real person that needs to eat and pay rent now.

With above in mind, I don't think it's about resilience. Maybe that ultra-simplified answer works! But it seems a pat free market 101 answer -- ignore the context, market will fix it.

Raising prices doesn't only move toward equilibrium by increasing the quantity supplied -- it also decreases the quantity demanded.

There are currently many more licensed UK drivers not working in the industry than there are vacancies.

Maybe ask why so many people have chosen to do other things such as amazon delivery or other such jobs that pay better, have better conditions and don't require regular medicals and certification, etc paid from one's own pocket?

> There are currently many more licensed UK drivers not working in the industry than there are vacancies.

Do you have data to back this up (specifically for HGV-licensed drivers, which is what the post you replied to was talking about)?

I briefly looked for stats around valid HGV licences out there, but couldn't find any recent figures.

It was from a radio interview I heard the other day, not sure what the actual figure was or the official source. So, take my comment as unproven.

There can be practical shortages - there can just literally not be enough people in the area to do the jobs. Saying “it’s not a shortage because you could buy the Yankees and pay the players $millions to assemble widgets” isn’t very informative.

It is.. it speaks to wages not raising enough to meet the demand. You wouldn't need the Yankees a lot of people would do it for a million, half a million, 100,000 pounds.

There always seems to be a shortage of people willing to work for little never a shortage of people wanting the CEO's jobs

There is definitely a shortage of decent CEO's, which is why companies are forced to hire and try to work with the charlatans they have today. That is also why the salaries are increasing, they try to get one of the few good ones.

There is a huge supply of people who want to be CEOS so much in fact most places will not hire you unless you have been a CEO before or have risen through external ranks.

If you take what unemployment defines are qualification.. many able body people could perform those tasks if all CEOs decided to move to other careers.

Salaries increase because qualifications increase creating scarcity which benefit the people who create scarcity. If the hiring guidelines say only CEOs can be CEO prices goes up for CEOs, VPs and anyone in charge of making the rules.

>It is.. it speaks to wages not raising enough to meet the demand.

That doesn't really cover the current situation. In the US 7 million or so fewer people are employed than pre-covid. Wages haven't gone down so they can't explain the change.

Something else has changed for these 7 million people.

You could say the same thing about unemployment. There is no such thing as an unemployment problem in an economy, just workers who want too much and think too highly of their skills.

That's one of the problems with minimum wage laws: they prevent the labor market from clearing. Some people want to work but due to lack of skills their labor is worth less than the minimum and thus no employer will hire them.

I understand that people can't live on less than the minimum wage. But the solution to that is a proper social safety net, not imposing arbitrary minimum wage limits.

The problem with this idea is that, beneath some wage floor, workers lose money by working, and would be better off growing food somewhere. The minimum wage is often below this floor, actually - people working minimum wage are often overall paying to work.

Growing food where? Someone owns all the productive farmland and they aren't giving it away. But people who are willing to work hard and get dirty can certainly find jobs in agriculture.

Maybe growing food is a bad example, especially since you may be homeless, though if you do own a house, you can do subsistence farming in almlst any soil, raise a few chicken etc.

A better example could be that rather than working below minimum age in NYC you would be better off moving to a rural area and working there.

>But the solution to that is a proper social safety net

Playing devils advocate with your logic, how is this different from preventing the market from “clearing” non-viable businesses? I.e., don’t many safety net programs essentially subsidize business profits by allowing employers to lower wages?

It's different because allowing people to work for low wages gives them a chance to improve their skills and move up to higher wage jobs rather than perpetually living off welfare.

Or it traps them in a cycle of poverty where there’s never enough time or money to make the skills necessary to advance. When I worked as a dishwasher or landscaper, I wasn’t building valuable skills to progress my career. Maybe your point holds for some careers, but I’m doubtful it’s relevant to most low-wage (especially non-skilled) labor. I think the point is also diluted when considering there’s almost always more people at the lower end of these jobs than the higher, meaning everybody can’t always be advancing. There will always be more dishwashers than restauranteurs (ignoring automation)

For some people the skills they need to develop first are really basic, like showing up on time and sober, and following basic instructions. We're talking about the lowest tier of the workforce here where the concept of a "career" is kind of alien. Many of them have never been formally employed before and need an opportunity to learn really simple things that most of us take for granted. I think most HN users are disconnected from that reality.

> like showing up on time and sober, and following basic instructions

Poor people are not stupid, or unambitious, and have the same addiction rates as the rich. Of course, rich addicts go to rehab, and poor addicts are imprisoned.

When they try to work their way up at places like Walmart, and get fucked over again and again even when they are taking time off to serve in the military[1], they recognize that the system is rigged and there is no point in pretending otherwise.

There is not a single state where working full time at one minimum wage job is enough to pay for an apartment. [2] That's why more than 5 million people work more than one job. They are trying to beat the system. They want an education and a career. But our society does not provide a realistic path for them to achieve any of those goals.

[1] https://www.militarytimes.com/pay-benefits/2021/01/05/walmar...

[2] http://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/oor/2012-OOR.pdf

This comes across as one of those talking points where an employer exploits a worker under the guise they are almost doing them a favor. (See: NCAA athletes or unpaid interns).

I think this take is a caricature of low wage employees. It’s kinda similar to the talk I occasionally hear about the enlisted ranks in the military. “That’s just for losers and dropouts” or to that effect.

My experience is that those low wage jobs can just as easily be filled with every segment of the spectrum from incredibly smart and competent to those who struggle with basic life tasks. The commonality seems to be they were all disadvantaged in some way. Maybe it was a strained family life or disability or sick relative but the necessity of them taking the job couldn’t be boiled down to something as simple as they couldn’t get their shit together

Do you understand that most peoppe on welfare and/or section 8 housing also are required to work shitty jobs in order to receive those “handouts”?

Very few people leave poverty in the usa because of many factors that have nothing to do with welfare.

Minimum wage limits is one of the best tools we have to act as a safety net. What would you replace it with 1 dollar an hour workers with a bigger food stamp budget?

If you can't afford to pay someone the minimum prices you can't afford your business. A minimum wage creates a floor. Allowing low wages means pushing the burden to everyone else not that business.. raise your prices or move to a lower cost country.

Our local pizza places have raised prices dramatically in the last 6 months (16” pizza went from ~$10 to ~$15).

Based on observation during the far fewer times I visit them, they appear dramatically less busy than they used to be. It’s not clear that “just raise your prices and pay workers more” is going to work out for them.

What you actually need to do is keep your prices the same while everyone else raises their prices and collect all their business, then you can afford to pay your workers more. But the end effect is the same, less work for people.

Is this a joke comment? I'm starting to lose the ability to see sarcasm I think. Why would you have expected them to have been busy in the last six months?

Maybe I’m misunderstanding your comment, but why does the expectation of growth in a pizza parlor come across as absurd? Dominoes had 13-14% Q1 same store sales growth over 2020 numbers.

https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre comment: you said it was less busy when you visited it, at a point in time when everywhere was less busy, nothing to do with overall sales

Edit: sorry not OP

I’m not the original poster, but I would expect sales to correlate with “busy-ness”. To your point though, I guess if everyone was doing takeout, sales could still go up and the place could be empty. Where I’m located though, it seems like businesses have been open for dine in for months and people are filling the dining rooms

Yeah, fair as does depend on country (and region)

They were busier (for pickup) this winter than this summer. I checked my own order history at our previously favorite pizza place. We ordered about 5x/month from Nov ‘20-Mar ‘21 when large cheeses were $9+tax and there was often a line for pickup. We now order around 1x/month (at $13+tax) and walk directly to the counter.

If anything, CV19 is much less a safety concern now than before.

sorry, it just seemed a bizarre thing to comment on: yes the sales may have been higher, and anecdotally you may have seen longer pickup lines (at what times?), but you gotta understand why it reads as a joke, because regardless of above, in-person business is almost universally likely to have been lower, restricted to pickups clustered at specific times

As a VP does that $4 difference really mean anything to you?

We've switched many of our family's Friday night pizza nights to "make pizza at home". Can I afford $4 more? Of course. Do I see the same level of value in a ~50% more expensive pizza? Of course not.

Covid has shifted demand. Covid in some areas means limited seating and increased prep costs. Pizza is more popular in the winter. 10 to 15 sounds like a Covid related increase. This is the summer of the gauge where everyone is making back the profits they lost.

If think it's because minimum wage workers are making $50.00 more a week then this would only apply if the shop was selling less than 10 pizzas a day and had about 10 employees which sounds overstaffed and in an area with no demand.

A pizza shop with 1 - 3 employees working making 80 pizzas a day would only need to raise prices by pennies.

> Minimum wage limits is one of the best tools we have to act as a safety net

Minimum wage isn't a safety net at all. Minimum wage is a mitigation of the problem of low bargaining power of unskilled labor; it basically raises but narrows the tightrope above the safety net.

> If you can't afford to pay someone the minimum prices you can't afford your business. A minimum wage creates a floor.

Yes, it creates a floor for the value of labor you must be able to provide before you can be sustainably employed. (It also, simultaneously, sets a floor for what businesses will offer for labor even in conditions of labor oversupply; set at the right level, this makes it a net win even given the safety net problems it can exacerbate, but it is not the same as and does not remove the need for a safety net.)

> Allowing low wages means pushing the burden to everyone else not that business.

Only for the employees in fields affected by labor oversupply that would be employed in any case, and which are employed at lower wages.

Conversely, it also means lifting some of the burden off everyone else for the people who would not be employed with a minimum wage but who are employed without one.

> raise your prices or move to a lower cost country.

Unless you take the workers with you, “move to a lower cost country” means more people unemployed that are fully reliant on social support in the country that squeezed you out. Which is why minimum wage isn't a safety net.

Ugh, gross. That’s just slavery with extra steps.

The relationship between minimum wage and employment is profoundly complex and the empirical data is inconsistent with the simple supply and demand model many believe in. There are many documented cases of increases in minimum wage resulting in reduced unemployment.

>In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers.

Certainly there can be a lag effect though. If there is a shortage of doctors that won’t be remedied overnight by simply increasing incentives because of the amount of time to gain the necessary skills, licensing, etc.

Unless you are willing to lower quality substantially, there absolutely can be worker shortages in a real pragmatic sense

Except the discussion here is truck drivers (lag: 60 days) and restaurant workers (lag: ~ 0 days).

The comment I replied to didn’t mention truck drivers. They brought up a hypothetical widget factory as an analogy for the economy at large

> In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers

You can't meet the demand by producing more workers per hour in some plant though

If you need X doctors and only have X/2, no matter how much you pay them, they won't be enough.

Sure you can, skills based immigration. Poach from other countries.

In the 1970s the USA had a crippling shortage of nurses and doctors which was filled by relaxing skills based immigration laws and importing trained medical talent from the Phillipines en masse.

> Sure you can, skills based immigration. Poach from other countries.

there's no guarantee people will come to your country.

for example: would you go to work on the Iranian nuclear project?

Could you even go?

Would your country let you do that?

You keep counting on the fact that people will come to you instead of everywhere else, like it's the 70s.

But more importantly, the conversation is specifically about the hard stop on immigration that Brexit created.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

Market can't fix stupidity.

I think it's time some nations, like UK, begin thinking about restructuring their society to adjust to the fact that their relevance has plumbed and will keep going down for the next decade.

Using this logic, in a market economy there can never be a shortage of anything.

Yep, no housing shortage, just millennials who "don't want to meet the market price"!

> In a market economy there is no such thing as a "shortage" of workers

That's...not true. If you make a bunch of Econ 101-level simplifying assumptions, like that supply and demand curves are continuous, of infinite range, and monotonically increasing and decreasing, respectively, with price, it is a natural conclusion, but those “assume a cow is a perfectly thermoconducting sphere” kind of assumptions don't hold in real market economies.

Companies can't just pay infinity wages. They sell a product for a price, often times the economics start to break down for them. Prices are going to rise and we will probably see a reallocation of workers.

Yeah, I get it, I just keep reading these "there are no workers" articles and scratching my head. Ironically, I work in delivery now heh

Really sorry to hear that.

My personal experience, of hiring software engineers in London, aligns with this article. We have seen a drop in supply this year.

If you are looking in the South of England I would recommend finding a specialist tech recruitment agency.

As a counter point in London, I've found supply to be pretty good.

Multiple actually good and talented candidates to basically pick the best from, and not just dregs with "this person will do I guess - 50% is better than nothing" type sentiment.

Supply in London is fine, companies just need to raise their salaries tbh.

I personally moved companies during covid and got a more flexible role and a 90% increase.

Recruiters are going nuts on LinkedIn atm for anyone with skills and the salaries are rising from there.

With IR35 reform in full swing, I'd expect quality supply to incease as contractors start to seek full time positions.

I've turned down job offers in London because I can get the same salary with a 33% reduction in cost of living elsewhere or work in London for 200% of the salary doing software engineering for finance.

> any kind of engineering

> Applied for dozens of cleaning (...) positions

Is this a common thing to do when applying for engineering jobs? What kind of qualifications do you even get where you

1. Are not specialized in a specific type of engineering (chemical, electrical, software, etc)? All these fields needs massive amounts of technical knowledge and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't be hired as a chemical engineer even though I know a lot about electronics design and software.

2. Want to get in as a cleaner rather than (say) a junior engineer? How much extra on-the-job experience that would be relevant to engineering do you hope to get from a position as a cleaner?

I'm a mechanical engineer and I believe I can answer your first question. My take is that many engineering employers value the ability of entry-level employees to learn new things rather than what they know (their expertise). They want blank slates many times, to be honest, to be molded into the kind of employee that they need at the moment. As long as you have the most basic relevant engineering knowledge and a degree you are good enough. For example, my first engineering job was actually in chemical engineering largely (chemical kinetics), and I got it despite knowing very little about chemical engineering.

This is both good and bad for the employees in my view. It is good in the sense that you could (potentially) change subject matter easily, but it is bad in the sense that you are very much replaceable. That said, many employers do want and need specialized knowledge and experience even for entry-level engineering positions (not just for experienced positions), and any entry-level candidates with that specialized knowledge and experience will do better in the hiring process (as far as I know!).

That said, my recent experience in the job market actually matches bserge's experience. There are far too few open positions in my observations, and I too had to apply to way too many jobs, and it took far too long to hear back [1]. That is of course just another anecdote but it has been my experience as an engineer. I'm gonna be fine and will start a new position soon, but I think the narrative that there is an employee shortage only applies to low wage and unskilled workers and not to engineering professionals.

[1] I recently started collecting data on this from my own job applications. For example, the median number of days to a final decision for me was 55 days. The mean was 112 days. This appears to follow an exponential distribution. I only started looking into this data recently when I questioned why it took 4 months for an employer to request an interview with me.

I've been hiring a lot lately (software development), two senior level positions (5 years or more experience) and one mid, three hires so far, two more roles to fill. These are all remote positions in a full remote team. Just be living the continental USA.

For the senior level positions we had maybe 10 applicants. Only two met the requirements (5 years experience with Asp.Net and C#, and be able to legally work in the USA). We hired both of them. Both had multiple offers within a week or two.

For the mid level position (2-3 years, had done web development, we prefer .Net but will take Java, Rube, Node, etc) we had 150 applicants. 140 of them were fresh grad school grad with no work experience, all needed visa help. OK, threw those out, now down to 10, found 1 of those with decent web development. Hired.

Really, I don't think I'm being crazy with the requirements, but we just are not seeing applicants.

>For the mid level position (2-3 years, had done web development, we prefer .Net but will take Java, Rube, Node, etc) we had 150 applicants. 140 of them were fresh grad school grad with no work experience, all needed visa help. OK, threw those out, now down to 10, found 1 of those with decent web development. Hired.

Mind sharing the reasons why you refuse applicants who need visa help? I live a in third world country (It's been the worst, especially with Covid) and I'm 30 now and I'm planning to grind interviews to land a a job in tech in the US, so i was curious why is it so hard to get a work visa.

Thanks!

Thank you for giving an employer's perspective here. I can see how finding qualified applicants can be difficult, and I hope you find qualified people for your other open positions. Nonetheless, I think the hiring process you describe could be improved. As I had stated in my previous comment, it might be helpful to consider whether an applicant can do the work rather than just whether they have done the work before. I admit that is difficult to gauge, but that perspective may help you see more potential applicants.

I'm an electronics engineer by education. Sadly I've not worked in the domain (lol), but I have years of experience in electrical design and maintenance, digital marketing and sales, electronics repairs and maintenance, and construction.

But I won't complain about cleaning floors, working in a warehouse or as a delivery driver. It's a last resort type of job, but work is work.

My CV must be confusing as hell tbh, I just never understood why I should stay in one place for more than a few years. There's just nothing more to learn. But the real world disagrees.

Then again, one apparently needs years of education to set up a CCTV system or Wifi network in an office building in the real world, and you also have to be a smug asshole about it, an art that I have yet to master.

> You know what the media has become? A cesspool of bullshit unworthy of any trust.

I wouldn’t label all media outlets under the same but mainstream media (think of what we grew up watching - CNN, NYT, BBC etc) is increasingly becoming what you described, opinion driven activism fueled journalism rather than reporting facts. It’s a sad state of affairs but across the world it is the same norm, journalists have turned into crowd pleasing (many have their own tweeter world where they are not shy to be an ideologue) click rate seeking media professional rather. My sense is that this type of journalism and their wide coverage under libel protection for example in US only polarizes further the people and as you mentioned make people mistrust _all_ experts. Which is not a good place to be for a society.

Good news is more and more independent journalism (ones not behind under mainstream umbrella or with brands of their own) are doing works in real journalism. People such as Glenn Greenwald are using platforms such as substack which is far better imo than any news you read these days to cover and report a nuanced topic.

Sorry, I'm pretty emotional these days on account of not getting any help from a healthcare system I'm paying into. My medication is right there on the shelves, alas there are no doctors available to prescribe it. Even though I am literally forced to pay for it.

Would anyone be interested in me documenting this, btw? It just seems like there's a whole lot of people that are ignored or shafted by universal healthcare and yet everyone seems to be singing praises about it.

In having a similarly hard time finding something. It seems like every job I apply to has 50-100 other candidates that also applied. I'm not sure how many of them are actually qualified, but based on how many times I've been passed up, some of them clearly are. This is also compounded by the fact that a lot of the jobs are remote now, so anyone across the country can apply.

My friend who is a recruiter says it's a talent driven market right now. So, I'm not sure what to make of any of it. It certainly depends on the specific type of work you're looking for.

"Any kind of engineering" is a bit broad. Loation matters a lot with available jobs. Take a look at London and a 30 mile radius around it(or so). You can't find enough skilled (not talking about diplomas here) electricians, PLC/automation controller programmers, Security system engineers, Maintenance engineers and I could go on with the list.

I would suggest going straight to companies(managers and such) with your CV. Most(if not all) recruitment agencies have staff that are not exactly qualified to assess skill sets. If it's not a 1:1 match on at least 50-75% of the requirements for the role they won't put you forward.

I work at a massive, well-known tech company, nearly 5 year tenure, and I apply to jobs on LinkedIn, directly through the company website, to government jobs (via USAJOBS), about 5 per week. I live in a major U.S. city. I'm willing to relocate anywhere, or work remote. Full-stack developer. I never get contacted back. Am I just not good enough?

I know the discourse is around London, but I think this is an issue happening in many places, and seeing the "where are the workers?" articles is really troubling for me.

There's something weird about this. You should be getting recruiters on Linkedin reaching out.

What's your job title at the well-known tech company? I assume it's more like FAANG than a consulting firm? How many years of experience do you have? Have you reached out to people you've worked with in the past to see if their current employer is hiring? Are you in a major tech city or a major city with no tech presence?

Maybe you need to rework your CV/profile a bit. It's about keywords these days and only after keyworks comes the real deal.

As a side-note: My current boss told me straight up he hired me because my cv was shit but he looked at my hobbies. THat is what made him give me a call to get a feel for the "dumb ass" that is that bad at selling himself.

I have just been on remote job hunt this past month, and have ended up with a lot of offers and maybe-offers (refused before getting the final letter, but things have been going this way) from US and Europe. And I'm not a native speaker, live in Eastern Europe and don't even have a degree, just work experience.

Engineering labour market is extremely skewed towards the job seeker right now.

Yeah, I should probably move back there.

Mechanical Engineering is a very saturated field and it is very hard to open your own company. If you want to become self employed in that field then you need good connections more than talent. I would recommend switching to software engineering. Not that software engineering is much better but at least self employment will be a bit easier.

Agreed, I'm a mech engineer by education. Saw the writing on the wall half way through my degree and learnt how to code in my spare time. I'm an SWE now, it has literally changed the course of my life, had I stuck with engineering my household would not have an income worthy enough to pay for basic needs + internet. Some of my friends from university are still unemployed, it's so bad that I know someone with a MSc in Engineering working in a mall as a salesman.

The worst is when they say "experts say" and then just say whatever their own opinion was.

Sure, you can find "experts" to say anything. I'm more interested in who exactly you're talking about, or what data you're referring to. "Experts say" is just such a lazy and often misleading statement.

I've seen way too more articles that claimed "experts said" something which was NOT at all the consensus opinion.

I just want to know when I can go back to a $25,000 job with no insurance or benefits, so that the top 5% that own 85% of the wealth of the richest nation in the world, can make even more billions of dollars. Who wouldn't want that? Why is everyone so lazy, why doesn't everyone go back to making the top 10-20% of the elite more money?

From the 1940's to 1985, the top tax bracket was 70% to 90%. We need to go back to that again.

The wealthiest will stop at nothing to crush the American worker. If you are reading this, are you going to take it?

The wealthiest keep saying that they wish that they could pay more taxes. That's what they say. But when San Francisco passed a ONE PERCENT tax on the wealthiest, to help with the homeless problem, the wealthiest went out of their collective minds. All you read about was how they were going to leave San Francisco and take jobs with them. Well, adios, motherf-ckers, to you and the horse you rode in on, and go move to Switzerland. Adios.

But, back to reality, it's too late. The wealthiest are already bribing all our government "leaders". The only option is not to go back to work.

>Add Brexit into the equation, and the old assumption that companies can just hire extra people from Eastern Europe to fill any gaps can no longer be taken for granted.

Wild idea, but maybe companies should pay higher salaries. I bet they would find plenty of workers. If their business relies on paying people sub-standard wages, maybe their business deserves to fail to make room for someone else who is better at making a budget and paying their employees.

Wasn't this one of the stated motivations for Brexit? Fewer immigrants pressuring owners to raise wages for British citizens.

It was the same here in the States with border wall construction, turning away asylum seekers instead of letting them work while their cases were processed, issuing fewer visas and detaining and deporting more people.

Strange to see who is carrying water for owners instead of taking credit for what they've done for workers.

In the States, net immigration was negative before the border wall was proposed. It was an intentional distraction. It was also an intentional distraction when H. Clinton was lefty-punching over it at the same time the administration was doing NAFTA. No recent administration has earnestly cared about working-class wages. The reason working-class incomes have been rising recently is entirely due to public pressure and the need to pump cash into an economy that was on the verge of returning to a serious recession at a time when the two parties are absolutely even electorally.

But since the administration is trying to avoid a big recession followed by endless recovery (i.e. learn from the mistakes of Obama), they're only interested in interventions that pour money into businesses. They're not interested in structural change; they're just taking advantage how absurdly slowly the USD inflates no matter how much of it you print.

It was one of the motivations. BUT the people who voted for brexit were mostly not employed (too old, on various benefits etc). And as consumers they didn't want the immigrants THEY rely on sent away. So their wages remain unchanged and suddenly they have to wait longer in restaurants or the corner shop is shut early...

That won't happen mate. At least not anytime soon. (Where I work) we have a few partner companies (service providers) that are paying a ton of money to train people that are not even in UK (most from India and Pakistan). After a chat with one of their managers: They want to buyild their skills up before bringing them here. It's a lot cheaper than hiring someone already in UK.

You can work for yourself. Why work for someone else? They just take a cut and give you scraps, look at china for example. I can't wait to move out of here.

Onlyfans

Don’t know about UK but in the US former employees are sitting at home collecting juiced up unemployment benefits thanks to COVID and not paying rents.

But the free ride is finally coming to an end and the evictions are starting soon. These people will be living on the street for the foreseeable future. Many companies do not hire homeless.

This massive destabilization/bubble you are describing is not a good thing by the way.

Don’t care, I’m sick and tired of kicking this can down the road. Let the bodies pile up in the streets, in the end they’ll beg us to save them.

You must be pretty sure you're in the "us" camp and not the "them" camp... one hopes it works out for you.

That also means housed workers will be in more demand, command higher wages and increase cost of living for everyone. So I agree it's good for worker power if that's the point you're trying to make.

They won’t beg. They’ll vote.

Some might hope they will limit their actions to voting.

I know the commenter you’re referring to may come across as venting but I’ll try to be generous to their take:

In my laymans understanding of game theory, one of the things that becomes apparent is that the best outcomes come from cooperation but only when freeloading can be kept below some threshold. Once freeloading reaches some tipping point, the system destabilizes and collapses.

Once freeloading reaches some tipping point, the system destabilizes and collapses.

We're well past the tipping point of freeloading:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27432326

Can you elaborate how you reached that conclusion?

It’s obvious there is anecdotal evidence of freeloading across all classes (as has always been). What’s not clear to me is what constitutes a real tipping point where we can claim a destabilizing effect that makes the system unsustainable

Reply on news.ycombinator.com