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Comment by guard-of-terra | Hacker News Reader

If the company is in position to treat you as a slave (e.g. it can decrease your compensation or degrade your status without suffering and the only thing preventing it from this is their goodwill), there is a good chance they would.

If the jobs market is so badly screwed that they can treat server admins as slaves, maybe USA is no longer sustainable after all?

Because you know, in a normal job market, those server admins quit. And IBM has to hire new server admins. For considerably higher salaries (because of bubble inflation and because of haste to fill positions).

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No, it's quite possible to hire new server admins at the same salaries or less, and just endure lower quality work. I see it all the time. It all depends on where the company's priorities are, normal job market be damned.

I think you didn't get his point. You're actually agreeing with him. You're saying that it's quite possible to ignore the notion of a normal job market in the USA. So, it's not sustainable, competitive equilibrium don't exists.

I think instead he's saying that in a "normal" job market it's possible to higher server admins of lesser experience for lower pay and suffer through the consequences of having to train them up and get them proficient. There's good business reasons not to do this but that doesn't make it any less of a normal job market

There are 3 other variables to consider:

1. How low a quality of service are customers willing to bear, trading off price and quality?

2. What is the supply of such lower-rate employees who can continue feeding the beast, once the trained employees become too expensive for the company to keep? If they could afford to keep well-trained employees, they probably would be able to attract good employees from the get go.

3. How good is the company's employee retention rate for keeping well-trained employees without significantly raising salaries?

But it's a normal assumption on this kind of discussion to deal with employees of the same quality. You can always pay lower and get less.

If that were a normal assumption, we wouldn't be seeing otherwise decisions in the real world so frequently.

Is that really what happens? You can't hire someone with the same experience as the previous one had starting out, so prices are effectively rising. Is this related to the value of currency decreasing?

As I noted above, you can if you're willing to endure lower quality work.

Not only bubble inflation, on a normal job market, people would quit, and the turnover costs would be bad for IBM. But, actually, i do believe IBM was not smart on this one, that 15% cut will result on a productivity shortage way below 15%. That level of demotivation don't pay off.

Maybe they were all AS400 admins that really have nowhere else to go?

Has a 'normal job market' ever existed outside of an ivory tower?

I fail to understand your sarcasm. It is, well, a normal situation when employers compete for employees the same way employees compete for jobs. I fail to see how IBM managed to be in tech but extempt from it.

The idea that people can always just quit and be hired elsewhere is not one that exists anywhere in real life, not just the US. Sometimes quitting is not an option.

Many countries recognise this, however, and regulate companies' behaviour towards its employees. IBM's exploitation of its sysadmins would be totally illegal in (most of?) the EU.

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