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Comment by nerdsniper | Hacker News Reader

99% of the time, I agree with you.

But hypothetically, what would you call a situation where 20 companies would all be willing to pay salaries of $1 million/year to fill 10,000 open positions that required 5 years of training, but there are only 5,000 people who have that training? Would that be a "labor shortage"?

It seems your solution works for companies willing to pay more to poach from other companies, but might not work in situations where all of them need more skilled labor now.

Also, the $1M/year illustrates a point...why not $10 million or $100 million/year? At some point, the salaries are indeed "high enough" but the skills still just aren't available to hire.

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A better thing to say, is that there are no long term labor shortages, in the short term you can have booms where there aren't enough people to fill the jobs but in your example the shortage would last at most 5 years but you'd also have things like better assistance or automation so one person may be able to fill more then one of those positions, you'd probably also have people that could come out of retirement for enough money, or people in related fields that could train in less then 5 years. For enough money on the table you'd probably have people trying to figure out if you can train somebody in less then 5 years. This is also the issue that HB1 visas are intended to solve.

If enough money is on the table people can skill up fast.

I would call it posturing. If these companies really needed to fill these openings, they wouldn't raise an offering they know they won't pay ; they would train in-house.

> At some point, the salaries are indeed "high enough" but the skills still just aren't available to hire.

But the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out, no?

In a perfectly efficient market, yes, but the market is notably not perfectly efficient. People make decisions about which career(s) to pursue or not pursue based on a huge variety of factors that stretch far beyond money.

There is absolutely no scenario in which you could convince me to train as e.g. an underwater welder, no matter how much cash you’re offering.

Sure. But the GP is arguing that "there's no such thing as a labor shortage". I'm trying to determine what their definition of "labor shortage" is. Perhaps the GP believes that the term itself is meaningless, or perhaps they believe that no current real-world situation fits their definition.

So I created a hypothetical situation to illustrate what, to me, is a clear example of a temporary labor shortage. As you say, "the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out" ... and I'd say that's true, but until it gets sorted out, the situation can reasonably be described as a "labor shortage".

> As you say, "the incentive to develop the skills should sort this out" ... and I'd say that's true, but until it gets sorted out, the situation can reasonably be described as a "labor shortage".

That's fair. I wasn't thinking about the types of skills that take years to develop. I was thinking more along the lines of re-training in the sense that I can take somebody that's got a solid base of tangentially related skills and get them up to speed quickly.

Yes, but the point is this takes time and stability guarantees. A true labor shortage can actually persist for many years.

Because people have to a) take the years to learn/develop those skills, and will only do so if b) they know those jobs are still going to be around for a while after that.

In the long term, yes definitely, and we saw that work first-hand in software development as bootcamps and comp-sci grads started cranking people out. However, the ramp-up time means that during those 5 years that it takes for more people to get qualified, this corrective affect won't help.

Also in the real world the wages are sticky enough that they take time to adjust, and then it takes time for people to realize that X field is becoming well paid and then start pursuing it, so realistically the 5 year period is more like 7 to 10. Plus as long as the industry is growing/expanding, demand can continue to outstrip supply due to that stickiness.

Even rapid moving stuff like AI has bee illustrative of this. The AI leaders are all primarily poaching, and wages are astronomical. This is undoubtedly fueling a massive number of people to study/specialize in AI, but it takes years (maybe even a decade) to complete that path (depending on your starting point).

> In the long term, yes definitely

So, in the automotive industry they've been paying too little to attract people. Meaning they now have a shortage. That's still on them.

Sounds to me like they made some really nice profits for a couple of years and are now feeling the pain of that.

Funny that you mention AI where people are saying there's no need for Juniors anymore. Exactly the same, you'll make some money now and will then likely have to pay for that later.

Yeah, you're not wrong. But collectively saying "the automotive industry" is a little too simplistic, since in theory they are competing and can't be colluding, so "the automotive industry" paying too little shouldn't be possible. In practice though, we all know it isn't that simple, so your point has merit.

Sure, in an economy with an inexhaustible supply of new workers seeking new skills and employment. Do we think that accurately describes the United States in late 2025?

You could call that excess capital as easily as a labour shortage. Or a shortage of training pipelines in an irresponsible industry.

When GM realized they needed more mechanical engineers than existed, they built a whole university. These days, capital just whines. If you can spend $100 BILLION on data centers, you have the budget to stand up a proper school.

> If you can spend $100 BILLION on data centers, you have the budget to stand up a proper school.

This is an excellent point. Georgia Tech, a top 10 computer science university, has an annual budget of $2.7 billion (2024) for the entire university to educate an enrollment of 53,000 students. Really puts it into perspective; this is 1% of Google's annual expenses.

> If you can spend $100 BILLION on data centers, you have the budget to stand up a proper school.

That is a good point. Odd that our reactions, including my own given that I think the AI data center boom is pretty nuts, to that much being spent on data centers is "not surprising" while a company standing up a school sounds like something from science fiction.

It was normal for large firms to build schools. All the big 5 accounting consultancies had a month or two of residential boot camp. Toyota built a school. GM too. When you’re that big, you can make your own weather.

What you have mentioned is hypothetically true, but not usually relevant. Folks bring up "there is a labor shortage" for vast swaths of lower skill jobs, famously so: e.g. waitstaff, dishwashers, drywallers. These are jobs that huuuuuge portions of your population can do, if you give them the minimal training the job requires. So it is with many of the entry-level factory jobs discussed in the parent article. Folks in hiring positions for entry level factory jobs, or waitstaff, or dishwashers, those folks say things like "there's a labor shortage" when what they typically should be saying is "wages for the positions I am hiring for need to increase to match market rates."

Did that job/skillset just conjure itself into existence? Or were the companies shortsighted in not training in-house 5 years ago?

I'm guessing we see a lot more of the latter than the former. Cutting edge knowledge industries might be an outlier here, but certainly for anything related to "factory work", it's probably true.

The good news is we will likely get to see this in the software industry over the next many years.

Hire an expert and an apprentice to work with them. Now you've got 10k workers.

Hypothetically, we could look at reality instead of looking at hypotheticals.

The hypothetical he is describing has actually been reality in the past, such as in the US during much of WW II.

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