Ask HN: We had mass layoff but companies are still complaining about shortage
Explain this:
Mass layoffs but still we have labour shortages.
During COVID-19, my company had a mass layoff and several departments underwent "restructuring", even laying off our sales people, but never replacing them. For months, we sat with very little work, just hoping we still had our jobs. Fortunately, it has picked up, especially as I took my required PTO, in which the only night person beside me got so busy, she had to leave jobs for the morning team, which technically shows the justification of why I have my job and her and I need to stay working together.
There are so many reasons why companies might do this... but it really all comes down to CEOs coming in and working with a finance team, where all they see is, "This department is bringing this amount, while paying this amount, and we want to see more profit... so we have to let X amount of people go."
After they laid many people off, they got rid of our bonuses and no more raises. As a result of this, I take up any work when it comes to freelancing or working a second job. Also in my downtime, I spend time on my side projects in hopes that one will eventually do what I need it to do in regards to bringing in enough income to supplement what I make at my current job.
This is what 10+ years of loyalty to a company gets you now.
Companies like to intentionally conflate "desire" with "supported by a business model".
When I was at Travelocity a million years ago I was involuntarily reassigned from a design job to a developer job. I had to teach myself how to program. I did horrible that first year and got a horrible annual review. Then came the economic disaster of 2008 mortgage crisis following on the tail of $4/gallon of gasoline fuel crisis. Mass layoffs followed and a ton of people were pushed out the door. Not me. As a front end developer I was essential and hard to replace. This was before jQuery and giant frameworks that did your job for you. You just had to be vaguely competent and nothing was going to do it for you.
I have noticed in hiring compatibility is more important than competence. For example you could be a brilliant developer who solves amazing problems and delivers greater value than entire teams of developers. At most corporate employers those are talking points for late in an interview after you have survived resume death and leet code filtration. Far more important is whether you can write Java like a fresh college grad with 30 seconds of experience. Shortages can happen when nobody wants to work in that kind of environment or when prospective employers dismiss talent looking for something that resembles the interests of that Java loving fresh college grad but with 10+ years of experience doing actually important things. We can call that poor expectation management, bias, or misery looking for company.
Sometimes employers hire people just because they need bodies in seats. They need people pounding on keyboards typing things because there is menial work to be done. These people do serve a purpose, but they are expendable. Easy to hire is easy to fire. You can still have critical shortages of people who actually write original software, which is confusing when everybody has the same title and gets paid roughly the same.
That's not necessarily the same thing as a shortage of workers who have a particular set of skills.
The difference is usually related to social conformity, particularly deference to authority. Employers prefer workers who, when asked to work late, work weekends, or work on ethically murky projects will do so with relish (or, at least, without objection).
There may be a shortage of those.
"We could get so much value if we could hire skilled people at half the market price!"
Same thing has been going on for cyber security specialists for the last few decades. Serious shortage of candidates for entry level roles with 10 years of experience.
Mostly I see this from places offering low skill work, and IME, there’s a host of problems there. Pay is one everyone talks about. A lot of these crappy jobs looks like they pay more than they used to. I see very few jobs paying minimum wage anymore, but they don’t seem to hire full time workers anymore. Funny enough $7.25/h at 40 hours is more than $15/h at 30 hours. There’s also process issues. Not sure I want to go into all that I’ve noticed right now, but I really believe these companies are lazy as shit and could help themselves by being a little more proactive and adaptive to the current market.
What?
Labour shortage: some companies did make good use of investor's money. They keep getting money from them, and what do you do with money? Hire more people, of course. But, as you probably should know the "working age" population is shrinking over the years (inverted population pyramid). It may not be so obvious to you, but in a macro-scale that's what first world countries are experimenting right now.
Money dries up and now the game is to survive, so layoffs begin. However that doesn't mean that projects that are profitable aren't in need of developers. The market rate forces higher pay, but you actually need to make a product that sells, which requires people that know what they are doing, which was a challenge even before the pandemic.
It allows to lobby the notions of need for workers’ visas to bring in cheap labor. This cheap labor is then much more easily controlled (visa conditions, e.g. H1B - cannot easily leave workplace, several years to transition to next immigration status, yet more years to citizenship).
For example: In the US, the layoffs are largely in tech sector. These companies took advantage but perhaps too much (humans and greed etc) of low interest rates for more than a decade + the crescendo of the pandemic money injection which all made it easy to borrow capital and hire more people than needed. It’s like you don’t realized you have had too much alcohol till the next morning. The night of the party, In the moment you can justify “just one more” drink a few times. That’s your layoffs.
On the other hand, I keep hearing that there is a massive shortage of restaurant staff these days. None of these restaurants owners want to pay their employees a fair wage. They don’t realize that at the receiving end of their employer - employee relationship is also a human who is just like them. Who simply wants a better life for the most part. Tipping culture is out of hand - restaurant owners say that if they pay their staff a fair wage they have to raise their prices. So these morons think that keeping the prices low will attract more customers but the reality is that the customer still pays more for their food as they will need to tip. That’s your shortages.
One of the big problems here is real wages in America have been stagnant for 30+ years [1]. People are being asked to do more as cost of living keeps rising while making the same amount of money. Nobody wants to address it let alone talk about it. The biggest irony in America is there is lobby for almost any kind of business. But there is no lobby for the people of the country. So what ensues is a rat race. People trying their hardest “make it” as that’s what is in their control.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
I think yes because of rise in cost of living and higher taxes.
They want to keep you guys divided and distracted.