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Why Bad Jobs (or No Jobs) Happen To Good Workers
sean_nestor writes "Back in October, an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal with the headline 'Why Companies Aren't Getting the Employees They Need.' It noted that even with millions of highly educated and highly trained workers sidelined by the worst economic downturn in three generations, companies were reporting shortages of skilled workers. Companies typically blame schools, for not providing the right training; the government, for not letting in enough skilled immigrants; and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages. The author of the article, an expert on employment and management issues, concluded that although employers are in almost complete agreement about the skills gap, there was no actual evidence of it. Instead, he said, 'The real culprits are the employers themselves.'" The linked article is an interview with Peter Cappelli, author of the WSJ piece, who has recently published a book on the alleged skills gap.
and workers themselves, who all too often turn down good jobs at good wages
Unfortunately, a company's definition of "good wages" is all too often directly at odds with what the workers themselves would consider to be good.
That costs money and would negatively affect short-term profit margins.
There are lots of people having kids these days, i've read its like the 50s baby boom. both parents work but need to pick the kids up from school/day care.
if you really want to lure people other than onsite child care have a flexible work schedule allowing people to work from home. there is very little that i cannot do from home and a lot of times i'm more productive at home than in the office.
There is supply and demand to empolyment. If the companies want people with specific skills they need to provide the money. The companies real complaint is that they can't find the people they want at the money they are willing to pay.
To the companies I say welcome to basic economics. If you want something specific you may have to pay a lot. In this case the companies are consumers of the labour market. And as we know it sucks to be a consumer.
In a world where employees are disposable, it doesn't make sense to invest very much in them.
It is actually pretty simple:
..
1.Networking. This simple word defines 99% of all recruitment decisions. If you don't know someone, then you cannot get the job. As a result, if the company provides good benefits, the chance that you, the lonely wold would pass the initial test and interview are very close to zero, minus zero actually (no pun intended).
2.As a result of the before mentioned networking, most of the bad developers are having the perfect resume, the perfect references, and the perfect self-confidence. And of course, as Darvin already proved, no skills are required, so they don't have them.
3.The consequence of 1. and 2. is that once they are hired, and prove their lack of skills, the HR team would panic, and would try to use some funny ways of finding the best candidate, which will end up hiring the worst candidate of course (the one with networking), and so the cycle is repeated....
It is not coincidence that the Great China Empire fall, not because of some external treat, but because of the corruption, ops, sorry, i mean "networking".
That costs money and would negatively affect short-term profit margins.
Seems a little redundant calling it specifically "short-term profit margins". All appearances indicate most companies are only concerning themselves with the short term lately.
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Welcome to neoconservativism.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Or they won't jump to anything if they weren't treated like a cog. But loyalty hasn't been a part of most employer's vocabulary for going on 30+ years. If you want good, loyal employees it *gasp* means you might have to spend a bit more to treat them well.
That's just being bitter about the root cause.
Of course it's about money, but it's not about affecting short-term profit margins. The problem is that if you invest a lot of money in training people but are the only company that does so in your field, you face a very real danger that your competitors are going to poach the trained staff by offering them slightly more money, but less than it would have cost to train themselves. Now you've sunk cost into staff you no longer employ, and wasn't particularly useful to you while you employed them. The article refers to this as as the Silicon Valley model. This makes it very, very unattractive for any given company to heavily invest in training until the majority of their competitors does so, too.
This whole "We can't find the skilled workers we need thing" is just a big H1B visa scam (here in the U.S. anyway):
1) Post ads for jobs with impossible qualifications (i.e. 20 years of Java development experience) or so specialized that only a specific H1B candidate can meet them.
2) Turn away every applicant as unqualified
3) Cry to Congress and the Labor Dept. that you can't find enough qualified workers to fill positions, ask for more visas
4) Get more H1B visas
5) Pay foreign nationals a pittance.
6) Profit!
What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
WAH, then pay your employees more money.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Boohoo. It costs money and takes real effort to keep people. Either accept this and find those good people or keep perpetuating a broken system, but don't complain to me about your woes.
I work at a Fortune 5 company, where we outsourced to Oracle, and Oracle in turn applied for H1B workers because they "could not find suitable US applicants". Most of the Indian contractors that showed up had no expertise in installing the software, and were completely lost when they could not find something in the manual.
This is not about experience, this is about screwing hard working and capable Americans out of jobs so that Larry Ellison and creeps like him can buy private islands and retire. It's about putting shareholders above employees and morals. It's about damaging the country that made your success possible in the first place.
The two biggest factors are work/life balance, environment, and the inability for the company to provide challenging work to it's workforce. Believe it or not, people will work for _much less_ money if you create an engaging place to work.
On work/life balance, companies should be offering 4 weeks vacation after 30 days of employment. They should offer a two month sabbatical every 3 years. I don't believe it "working from home" but time off and vacation _should not be audited_ unless a problem occurs with a particular individual. Scary though, huh? We're all adults, treat people like them rather than high school students.
On environment, they should allow drinking in the workplace (oh gasp!). They need to tear up timesheets (no one takes them seriously anyway). They need to _fight_ actively to retain key talent. Furthermore, they need to cut the crud out of their management chain by routinely firing incompetent managers (which creates a morale boost). The need to hire fresh talent for the older jockeys to train.
Finally on the work itself, they need to allow their engineers to drive the majority of the decision making process. First, if an engineers comes and says, "hey if we cut this out of our software stack, it'll make our stuff faster." Rather than say, "No, that's a key investment we chose two years ago" say, "Oh yeah? well prove it. Take one of your teammates and come back to me in two weeks with a POC." This will do two things, first, it will get them to shut up. Second, it may turn into something awesome; win-win situation. The biggest mistake is companies with management overhead blocking engineers from creating value. Engineers are loose cannons. You don't reign them in, instead you let them create lots of raw product, then you pick the best ideas and refine them. Failure to leverage a company's key assets (their engineers) will result in your business paralysis. As soon as engineering decisions become political, you'll see an exodus of your key talent and you won't be able to hire anyone, in essence, you have created your own starvation.
Price is set by supply and demand. If the point where those curves meet is higher than a bunch of potential buyers would like it to be, that is not a shortage, that is just greed.
Increasing the supply will bring the price down. But that isn't the automatic right response to an unpleasantly high price. If increasing the supply also brings quality down, flooding the market with cheap crap, everyone winds worse off in the long run.
When employers need people with a difficult and costly-to-obtain skillset, they should not expect such people to be cheap and should not expect that lowballing and bargain hunting will yield them a cheap but high-quality product.
Call the wahmbulance!
If you don't want your valuable employees poached, then pay them more than they'll make somewhere else, and make sure their work environment is good so they won't want to leave. It's that simple. You don't even need to pay the absolute max, you just have to be in the top 80% probably, and make sure that they like their job; not that many people will jump ship to a risky new job (where they might hate the work environment) for just a few $K more. But if your work environment sucks (because you have an "open plan work area", for instance), then expect people to leave as quickly as they get a better offer.
"Needs 5 years experience with Pascal." (edits resume to change C++ to Pascal). It's a catch-22 where they want people to have experience but they can't gain experience if they never needed Pascal previously. What former-sorority girls or fratboys - now HR people - don't comprehend is that if you are a programmer, you are a programmer. It matters not what language you are using.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
There's ways around that. Some companies put a repayment clause in the employment contract. The clauses basically say that if you receive training and quit in a certain period of time (3 months, 6 months, 12 months, etc), then you are responsible for paying the company back for the training costs.
People with full-time jobs spend more waking time during the week with their coworkers than with anyone else, usually including their spouse (whom they presumably love and chose to spend their life with). I'd prefer those people to be ones I like.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
In the olden days, you would hire someone at an entry position. They they would work with someone experienced who would both train and mentor the employee. At the end of the process, you had someone trained and ready for the position.
But some time ago, companies realized it was cheaper to poach from other companies. Let them do the training, then swoop in, and offer just enough to pry them away.
What we are seeing today is the end result when everyone poaches from other companies and no one is actually doing the training. For some reason, there's a lack of qualified people. DUH!
And more bullshit from managers trying to blame the employees for their incompetence.
The trend of Americans hopping jobs "easily", as you put it, is entirely the fault of management. There was a time when loyalty was valued, on both sides. You worked hard for the company, and the company would go to bat for you, and take care of you. Then management broke that, and told employees they can fornicate themselves with an iron stick. And now they're bitching that employees have no loyalty toward them anymore.
Hell, it's not always about the money, either. Yes, you have to be competitive, but having a work environment that doesn't make workers want to kill themselves, and in fact makes them happy to show up to work is a huge part of it. And this is something that employers have great control over.
The article pretty clearly states the real underlying problem: Companies strongly prefer hiring experienced people who are doing the exact same job, right now. But they are not owning up to the fact they may be poaching from a limited pool, because they and all their competitors are bidding for the same people. Obviously that will inevitably create a bidding war when the sector is doing well.
Investment in training people can help here -- that is the traditional answer. But companies are scared of that investment because their competitors will poach once the investment finally begins to really pay off, of course.
Now we come what we slashdotters see as the elephant in the room: the the H1B visas. The visa process is so long that provides a partial lock in, and therefore a measure of safety for the employers. Not only will many H1B visa candidates accept slightly lower salary offers, but they are more likely to accept lesser raises until they has their visa.
I do not feel strongly one way or another about more or fewer H1B visas. But it is clear that large companies have a powerful incentive to simply throw up their hands and claim they need more H1B visas, regardless of the underlying reality. They do not care if there is a thousand potential employees who be fabulous after 12 months of in house experience lining up on the street, clamoring for a chance.
I require nothing of the sort. But, if a company wants a loyal, long-term employee it will cost them money and effort. If they don't want to put in that effort I'm not going to shed tears for them. The broken system of cut-throat poaching is the one they created and perpetuated once loyalty was thrown out the window.
Good programmers can pick up new languages as needed, and do so quite quickly. Bad ones, not so much.
I used to feel this way. But far too often, the job I had to do was fixing what incompetent people had done. I've since switched jobs, and most people here are both competent *and* pleasant. That said, I like the smart assholes here better than I liked the lovable idiots at other places.
So once again, the problem is entirely management's fault for making workers disposable in the first place.
"To conservolibertarians,"
I love that Libertarians have made such impressive political inroads that, in your obvious and abject fear of them, you resort to your reflexive "MY TEAM IS BETTER THAN THEIR TEAM" screed, and don't even realize that in combining "conservatives" and "libertarians" you're admitting you don't realize they're completely opposing idealogies.
Next time, save space and say "I have no fucking idea what Libertarianism is, and because I'm a partisan hack, it SKEEEERS ME! MY TEAM".
All those kids that used to live on family farms? Well let's school them to be good factory workers. That's not enough though, let's use the "no child left behind" notion to, not integrate every kid but rather, start lowering standards for every student. And why are we spending so much money on those inconsistent teachers with their different approaches to differing students. And get rid of teacher unions, which just work for livable salaries and benefits which are well below that of the typical CEO giving advice to newspaper transcribers (used to be journalists, now hardly even reporters).
Then, then! Let's eliminate those factory jobs we trained those students to obey without thinking or resenting too much by moving the factories to cheaper countries. Countries where pollution controls and labor laws are rarely practiced. And place them in tax-free zones so no taxes are wasted on schools and infrastructure and such. Yeah the local workers have crap lives, but it's slightly better than farm life, right? And those factory workers in the original country, the ones that lost their jobs? They can go back to school!
And those people that pursue higher education, especially the ones doing it for better jobs? Well let's make universities extremely expensive, so graduates are in debt and will take any job and abuse in order to start paying back loans. Especially their credit card loans, which were offered in hopes of burying them in 12-30% interest payments for life; in addition to the 1.5 to 3% the credit company skimmed off the top. There is a need for a few scientists to figure out what's really going on in the world, and to make new devices (to simplify jobs, reduce worker headcounts, and entertain the poor who can't afford a vacation). And a need for a few financial wizards (that since the 1970s have gained control of 1/3 of the US economy), but those can come from the 1% of already rich families which have about 50% of the country's wealth; and the occasional (H1-B?) computer mathematician who can figure the odds on stocks, nanosecond currency exchanges, and credit default swaps--and fix the laptop. And if those financiers screw up and the whole economic system crashes, there's always the regular taxpayer providing insurance (why is it called "bail outs?") to corporations and their executives, keeping the cash flowing. Those same corporate execs who whine about paying taxes even when they don't. Yeah the newspapers publish that once in a while, but no one changes the tax laws to be more fair; so the facts recede from memory and we can get back to blaming immigrants, teacher salaries, sexuality, skin shadings, religions, and other nationalities--and if someone investigates too honestly there's always "national defense" to end inquiries.
Well, the laws do get changed, mostly by corporate lobbyists, who want to decrease taxes on the rich, remove laws that are costly to corporations (no matter what the effect on people and the environment), and increasingly shift jobs that are performed fairly well by government (social security, healthcare, military, prisons, schools, water, energy, roads) to the private sector. The private sector, AKA corporations, where a select few can make big salaries, shareholders can get their dividends, and workers can be replaced by someone even more poorly off who's willing to work for rent and food money while doing without healthcare (that's what the ER is for, and credit cards, and payday loans). And to make the business profitable, why not reduce expenses like retirement, healthcare, living wages, long-term livable surroundings, education, clean water, cleaner energy, and reliable roads? It's just business, got to keep those shareholders from selling their stock. Nevermind the stakeholders or the public.
And those people with a bad job or no job, what about them? Well they're poor or homeless because of the schools. Obviously. We should implement vouchers for private sector schools, and start training children correctly.
"Person A can earn potentially $80,000 a year for his company long term. However, in his first year, he'll only earn $20,000 for the company and cost $50,000 in lost earnings from having experienced workers train them. Now your studies show that even if you pay a person a package worth $80,000 a year, which will only break even for the person, he'll only stay 5 years on average. He may want to switch careers, go back to school, move somewhere else, start his own company, just try something different or any number of personal reasons."
In reality, Person A makes $20K a year, and 20K each year for the rest of his life because the boss is a scumbag and does not give out raises. OR have you missed how business has changed in the past 5 years.
This is why people jump ship, companies DONT GIVE RAISES, so the way to get one is to get another job.
I am VERY good at applying for, interviewing for, and getting hired for jobs. About 10 years ago I took a bunch of courses on how to write resumes, interview well, etc... Unlike most classes of this sort, these were run by an older black gentleman who I can only describe as a genius when it comes to the hiring process.
There are basically 2 ways a company can hire. The old way, which is based on gut instinct. The interviewer reads your resume, meets you, and if they like you, you're hired. This method is fraught with problems that revolve around the basics of human nature. Someone with a weak handshake will almost never get hired. They are immediately seen as passive, slow, lazy. Someone that understands the system (like me) can thoroughly thwart the system by simple changing the subject during the interview. You talk about things that interest the interviewer. Their questions are ALL bad. Every question they ask is a question that is meant to in some way disqualify you. The more you can get them distracted from their questions, the better chances you have. Do they have a sports teams pin on? Pictures of their kids? You bring all of this up... they talk about everything but you and leave the interview with a warm/happy feeling about you.
Some businesses have recognized the inherent problems with human nature and tried to implement methods to get around them. Unfortunately these systems almost always involve scorecards of some sort. The hiring manager lists out the key skills he's looking for... this is the first problem, the managers expectations are almost always wildly over the top. Their asking for someone with a doctorate and they really need someone with a 2 year degree. The person conducting the interview basically scores you off of your resume. As well as on things like appearance, personality, etc... etc... The solution to this type of interview is rather simple... lie. Just flood your resume with technical data. The interviewer gets so overwhelmed they just score you high, irrelevant of your real skills. Always ware a suit. Suit = 10 points. Anything else is < 10 points. A firm handshake and confidence is easy to fake.
The simple fact of the matter is, it is impossible to judge someones ability to do the job you want them to do based on a resume and interview. A degree is slightly better, but as we all know the vast majority of people with those degrees have proven nothing more than that they are good at memorizing things for tests. Actually being competent in a working environment is something entirely different. The entire system is flawed to its core. Many people refuse to be misleading in their interview or on their resume and think that shows integrity... when all they really get shown is the door.
When employers hire people... they hire the people that aggressive at selling themselves as a product... People that are fluent and at ease in an interview. If that person also happens to be good at the job... great! Despite what many people think, if you bluff your way into a job your not qualified for, you don't just get fired immediately. The manager doesn't want to look like a fool for hiring the person and usually they can hang onto the job for as long as they'd like to. Raises and promotions are another thing.
The basic problem with the workforce today is employers have no idea what they need, and even if they did, they have no way of finding out who has the skills they actually do need. Simple as that.