Why Bad Jobs-or No Jobs-Happen to Good Workers

Here is a fictional account that illustrates the point:

John Doe currently writes C++ and finds Company A with great benefits and excellent compensation, but they only hire experienced Python programmers. But across the street, Company B will hire C++ programmers and train them on Python. Company B doesn't pay nearly as well, and the benefits are also pretty poor in comparison to Company A.

Company B offers John a position, but at a below market salary for Python programmers. John would be taking a pay cut from what he makes as a C++ programmer, but he takes the job anyway.

Being a highly capable individual, after 1 year John is one of the top Python programmers in Company B. John meets some engineers from Company A at a local meetup, and they recruit him to come interview with Company A. John passes the interviews with flying colors and is offered 30% more salary at Company A than he currently makes at Company B. This is now more than John ever made as a C++ programmer so he gladly takes the job, after only staying at Company B for a year.

Similar events occur with many more employees from Company B as they all start getting poached by Company A. Company B creates a non-compete agreement with Company A to keep its programmers from leaving.

Company A now complains to Congress that it can't find enough workers and needs to hire more foreign workers to fill the gap. It gets more foreign workers, which it can then hire at lower salaries without having to poach talent from Company B. Over time, the executives at Company A realize the cost savings and start cutting salaries, raises, and benefits.

Engineers at both Company A and B now realize their wages are stagnating and they all start leaving for other opportunities. Executives at Company A and B start lobbying Congress more and complaining to the press about a talent shortage and their inability to find workers.

If you want experienced, wildly competent workers, you'll have to pay for them. If you're not willing to pay for the experienced workers, you'll have to train inexperienced workers. Also, the requirements you're listing for the job is probably ridiculous, and your screening process is probably broken.

You need to cultivate experience in workers sometimes, especially if you have a complex system in place.

Employees have no loyalty anymore, because of the cutting of benefits and wages.

Employers have no loyal employees anymore, which means they require 3 to 5 years experience to give them some return on hiring said employee.

Students are having a hard time finding work, because Employers are requiring this experience.

Employers have a skills gap, because they can't hire Students to fill the gap, because they'd just quit before giving some return (loyalty).

I think I'm starting to see the clusterfuck caused by limiting compensation and benefits...

Myself, I'd rather train someone up in my process without them learning bad habits, even if that means they're pairing with me for 30 hours out of 40. That said, I'm an exception.

Once upon a time, some companies hired new workers as QA, trained as QA, and those with the aptitude were moved into programming. I know that IBM still has an internship program that streams people into their system.

Seriously? Everyone I knew with just a business degree ended up with a crap retail job. Most of the people in engineering seemed to go into the jobs the business majors wanted.

Peter Cappelli: That’s false, and that’s almost by definition the case, because we know how markets work, and markets adjust and wages adjust. I had an employer write to me the other day saying they had a skills gap, and they really did. It wasn’t wages, because they did market wage surveys, and they were paying what everybody else was paying, and all the employers, by the way, are having a skills gap, so it’s a big problem. Well, if everybody’s got the same problem, and you’re all paying the same wage, it’s probably the case that you’re not paying enough. So the way markets work isn’t you set the wage and say, “Well, this is good enough.” You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it, right? "

I think I get it except for the "and they really did".

It's an obvious selling point for the competition. "It looks to me like they're one illness away from missing shipments" is an easy fear to plant in someones mind.

Couple that with hiring away one or two solid staff members, and you're going to fail publicly.

The more committed you are to the fiction free markets don't work, the more you're going to suffer.

  "[I]t’s kind of bizarre if you think about it: if you were, say, a computer company, 
  and you had a product that was all based on this particular chip. You didn’t build 
  the chip yourself. You were expecting to buy it on the outside, and your expectation 
  was just that you’ll be able... to buy this chip on the outside in the quantity you 
  want at the price you want to pay... The software engineers, the systems architects, 
  are often the key component in these companies, expecting to hire them right 
  out of college, and they don’t really have much relationships with the colleges... 
  They don’t get close to their suppliers; they’re just hoping it will come up. 
  If you did that with a chip, your board of directors would probably fire you for 
  terrible risk management, but when it comes to skills and employees, it seems to be 
  kind of a standard practice."

I don't think this is true - everything I've read about outsourcing companies is that they have a very high turnover of staff.

Anyone know how to crack this trust game?

People always dismissed it, when I told them - if only I was born x years earlier I would have graduated at the start of the boom cycle. I would have landed a high paying role out of college/Uni and earned enough cash by the end of the cycle to see me through the bust years. With the work experience I would have a better chance competing against new grads. Considering the value of money etc, benefiting from a 2/3 boom cycle could put you well ahead financially.

While this is rather simplistic and exceptions to the rule, timing can make one hell of a difference.

<blockquote> Peter Cappelli: Well, the employers, if you look at what the hiring managers are saying and what they’re looking for, they’re not, for the most part, hiring people out of college anyway or out of high school. What they want is three to five years’ experience. So the shortages that they report, the difficulty hiring, are for people who have quite specific skills, and those skills are work-experience based. </blockquote>

Workers without three to five years' experience will never get three to five years' experience. The only way for a young worker to be hired is through corruption, by knowing somebody or lying about their experience. The employers have designed a system to create the shortage that they complain about, and they perpetuate it because everybody's doing it that way.

In any workplace, the grunt workers should outnumber management. It is no different in software. For every software engineer there need to be testers, bug fixers, and doc writers. Yet in the want ads for programmers, it is the other way around. Senior this. Senior that.

The way to fix this situation is easy, but like anything else it will require time and effort. Next to the routine 3-5 year want ad, also post something like this:

Job title: Computer Programmer. Requirements: can program a computer. Compensation: $14/hr or DOE.

You will get plenty of applicants because the economy is that bad right now. Use interviews to determine the best fits for your company. Hire two or three for every Project Manager or Senior anything that you have. Give them raises if they are any good, treat them with respect, and they'll stick around. Three to five years later, you will not only have coders with three to five years of programming experience. The coders will have three to five years of domain knowledge of your company's operations. That might be just as valuable as their coding ability.

Nope, the cat is the cat o' nine tails, when it was taken out of its bag, it was because someone was about to be punished. No idea what he means by this comment.