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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
(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.
They still need to pass the tests, there is a backlog of people waiting to take them.
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.
There always seems to be a shortage of people willing to work for little never a shortage of people wanting the CEO's jobs
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://ir.dominos.com/news-releases/news-release-details/do...
Edit: sorry not OP
If anything, CV19 is much less a safety concern now than before.
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?
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
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...
Very few people leave poverty in the usa because of many factors that have nothing to do with welfare.
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
/s
Or is that not something that could really happen outside of a textbook problem?
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.
Realistically, you can even hire people to manufacture additional workers, if you have the financial and time resources required.
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.
Pay living wages and provide paid, on-the-job training. That will get prospective employees through the door.
This used to be standard practice. It's a modern development (80s on) that businesses demanded workers come pre trained.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Journalists can apply for jobs and do an exposé too.
All for a public who can't give a damn (gimme the cheapest).
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.
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).
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.
I see 35 year olds and think "that guy is just a kid"!
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.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household...
> 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.
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.
That doesn't sound too great. You probably mean better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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? $$$$$$
[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
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.
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.
Off to shave my head...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Doesn't necessarily have to be an overwhelming product, but just a way of practicing and exploring work.
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).
> 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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Engineering labour market is extremely skewed towards the job seeker right now.