Slashdot Mirror
Spain Runs Out of Workers With Almost 5 Million Unemployed (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader shares a Bloomberg report:Spanish headhunter Samuel Pimentel just can't find the candidates. After a frustrating search for specialist consultants for a client, he's given up and is casting his net elsewhere. "We were looking for people for two months," Pimentel, a partner at Ackermann Beaumont Group for Spain and Latin America, said in a telephone interview. "We managed to find one in Spain. We turned to Argentina for others." Pimentel's experience reflects a bizarre feature of the Spanish labor market that is hampering the country's efforts to repair the damage from the economic crisis. Even with close to 5 million people out of work, the next prime minister will face labor shortages with employers struggle to find the staff they need. "It's a paradox," said Valentin Bote, head of research in Spain at Randstad, a recruitment agency. "The unemployment rate is too high. Yet we're seeing some tension in the labor market because unemployed people don't have the skills employers demand."
"Why can't we find workers that will work for peanuts? They're all unemployed, they should be happy with anything!"
The issue is crystal clear and was to be expected. The government decided to allow the employers to treat employees like garbage, and they did because they could find someone else easily. However anyone with proper skills and education can easily be employed in countries like Germany and the Netherlands due to the EU. Close to a million Spanish people left the country since the crisis.
quote from article
what is wrong with training people?
The problem isn't that workers lack the skills needed. It's the fact that the companies are looking for the perfect candidates. They have no interest in training people to do the job. When entry level programming positions require compsci degrees and 3 years experience in 5 different languages/libs you know the barrier to entry is a bit too high...
Of course, part of the problem is the employees themselves. The company trains them then poof. The employee runs off to a different job that pays more. No loyalty to the hands that taught you how to fish.
How do the unemployment benefits work there?
What happens when employers stop re-training employees and start shitcanning anyone as soon as possible, relying on obtaining trained people from the rest of the economy when people are needed again? That's right: trained people are quickly drained from the economy leaving only the trained who command very high wages and the untrained, who cannot be employed.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
According to wikipedia, "in 2008 the rate of unemployment grew quickly exceeding 20% in 2010 and 25% in 2012". That is astonishingly high and it seems unsustainable for a society.
As automation eats into lower-skill labor, that pushes the demand towards the higher skill tiers. The problem is that many people just aren't able to do those jobs. They either lack the education, or the smarts to handle those jobs.
One other major problem is human overpopulation. Within the lifetime of people alive right now, human population was less than 2B. Today it is 7.3B and still growing. Those people have seen almost a 4X increase in humans! Now, as the population grows the demand for certain jobs also grows, but it often doesn't grow as fast as the population does. For some things, a few people can easily supply the whole world's demand, so those jobs do not increase linearly with population growth. This tends to drive unemployment.
"It's a paradox", said Chad. "There's so many nubile women in my country but none of them want to marry me. I've even had to resort to Indonesian mail order brides just to find a date.", whined Chad. No one is quite sure why no one wants to marry Chad, but we can guess that he is a total prick.
Happy birthday Laura Branigan.
Yours,
Spanish Eddie
The idea that businesses should actually train the workforce that they need, such as with apprenticeships, sponsoring employees in education on the job, or whatever, seems to be lost on Spanish businesses, I guess?
"We thought there'd just be the employees we needed out there somewhere. We didn't think we'd have to take responsibility for any of it!" seems to be their take.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
I'll never forget this piece I saw on CNN a few years ago about businesses struggling to find people to fill their "good jobs." The typical scenario was: bachelors degree, bilingual, 5-7 years experience, pays $35k.
Yeah even back then you's have to offer twice that. Nowadays possibly triple.
Yeah, but lets blame the workers for not wasting their time for something they will get paid shit to do, for a whopping 2 months of financial security.
Here is an idea, why not make all Government workers 2 month positions. How many of the leaches currently holding office would do so without any financial security? None, asshole.
they want H1B's like workers who are tied to the job and are willing to do what it takes even if means 60-80 hour weeks / not standing up for your rights.
London is far wealthier than the rest of the UK as all the skilled people move here from all over the country. Just the same happening but at an international level.
A lot of industries here in the U.S. are facing a similar situation: there's work they'd like to do, but its using skills that either haven't been in high demand in the past or haven't existed before. The only real solution is to create the workers with the skills that you need, but this is both expensive and generally outside of the scope of what the business is capable of doing. Training programmers, for instance, is a very different business than making industrial control systems.
We're taking a proposal to some of our clients to set up these kinds of training programs for them. But it's not a sure thing that they'll be willing to make this investment, because it's going to mean changes in the way they do business as well.
Easy Online Role Playing Campaign Management
corporations who threatened to take their offices/factories elsewhere, defunding the schools, so now they have a shortage of qualified workers and they have to import them. I wonder if they have anything similar to an H1B visa program...
With the money that most employers pay in Spain, I would not get out of bed, much less drive every day, pay fuel, and work 50-60 hours per week. I can work much less and get 4x the salary in France, Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany...
To put things in perspective, consider some numbers:
Spain's population is about 47 million
Spain's labor force is about half that (23 million)
The "5 million unemployed" represents more than 20% of the workforce.
If a headhunter can't find people in the country and has to import, my question is this: is globalism bad for Spain?
Globalism is taught as the one-true-religion in economics circles right now, but I'm wondering if this is a dodge. While globalism has made a handful of companies richer, it drives the people into poverty.
Is it possible that we have too much globalism?
Sick of this really, these kinds of myths about the unemployed have been demolished repeatedly over the years - but just keep being brought back in tabloid/zombified form, to deliberately try and peddle myths about why people are unemployed, and in order to generate acceptance of permanent high-unemployment, among workers.
It's disappointing to see Slashdot being used more and more, as an economic/political propaganda outlet like this - the basic-income trojan horse, the 'automation will take your jobs...' stuff, and this skills-shortage myth regarding workers - it's clear that the site aims to peddle tech-libertarian talking points, that aim to peddle wealth/tech-elite narratives about unemployment, and 'solutions' to these problems, which are oriented towards benefiting that elite (rather than workers in general).
People just eat it up though. You might see people debate the content of this type of propaganda, but you rarely see them take the publishers of it to task, for actively helping to warp the narrative in the first place.
Remember that Spain was actually a Fascist country up until 40 years ago. You're so ignorant it's barely worth replying.
Now that we've shown what a bunch of moronic, racist twats we Brits are, I'm desperate to leave the UK for Europe (or Canada).
Count me in.
you are a faggot
A lot of this problem is caused by the fact that Spaniards are really, really lazy.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
Data such as age distribution, education, previous work experience, and other factors are probably well known. If many of the unemployed just graduated from secondary school or college with art history, English literature or psychology majors, or a large percentage of the unemployed are near retirement age and were manual laborers, all this might explain the unemployment rate. And or course what skills are in demand? The original post suggests the problem is associated with skill needs not matching the expertise of the unemployed and the lack of opportunities for training the unemployed. It's also possible the unemployed cannot be trained because of native ability. Not everyone can learn computer programming skills or the math necessary to work in the financial industry or architectural design.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
The solution is simple: go back to an agrarian society and there will be plenty of people skilled enough for that.
every stereotype is covered in the comments. could we get more anecdotal evidence?
40 years is fast for going from Fascism to Capitalism. Good on spain. They just have to make sure they don't backslide back to socialism.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Have the employers these workers aren't qualified enough for tried raising salaries or paying to train people?
It sounds exactly like what we older workers deal with in the US. Once we start making 'too much," we're targeted for elimination because someone with no family or responsibilities can be employed much cheaper. I know it's very possible to let one's skills atrophy, or do the same job for 20+ years, but I don't do any of those and get lumped in with the "too old" crowd. As a result, I never get responses from a cold call resume submission -- most of my jobs recently have been found because people know me.
As for "not qualified," no one is a 100% drop-in replacement. Not even the Infosys, Tata or Wipro guys they send in...which is also part of the problem. Companies don't train people anymore, and expect them to be immediately productive on the first day. A generation before I graduated, large and even medium employers had extensive training programs for new hires. It was possible for someone motivated to come in out of high school. or you could graduate with a generic degree. As long as the new hire was motivated and trainable it didn't matter.
So yes, I think Spain is starting to get a taste of how the tech employment market is for US workers. I feel the current visa system in the US needs to be reformed (not eliminated) to allow for the domestic workforce to grow. No one with a modicum of sense is going to go into engineering, computer science or other STEM fields if they are destined to be the new humanities degrees in terms of employment success/ROI. Once people see a future in these fields, they'll study them again.
Last time I spent a holiday in Spain, I noticed a group of 8 young spanish people who were obviously trained to become Dive Masters at the same dive operator that I was diving with as a paying guest. I also noticed that much unlike other people I had met before who wanted to become Dive Masters, those 8 were kind of unenthusiastic about it, and also not really good at what they did. I asked why they were training to become Dive Masters, and got the answer that the state paid for this training, as they were unemployed, obviously hoping that this would open up career paths. Now everybody who has looked into the diving industry (even if only as a long term guest) knows that there is anything but a shortage of people willing to become dive guides. In fact, so many try to turn their hobby into a profession that dive guiding is certainly amongst the lowest-if-at-all-paid professions. I was really shocked that Spain wasted its money for retraining on such a futile effort.
They don't want to pay good salaries
They are looking for cheap workers
Money talks!!!
Per the Fine Article:
"Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
"Pimentel’s client asked him for list of candidates trained in “Agile” project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I know handfull of double degree or degree + masters CS, IT, comp eng Spanish friends whom couldnt find work for 8 years in Spain. Story these people tell is always the same.
So what he realistically thinks they'll stick around until the government decides to run high enough deficits aimed at creating employment? They should have done this years ago rather than let a debt-deflation stagnate go and create the jobs straight away.
Usual supply side fallacy. The people are there the jobs are not because they require recent paid experience.
Many of the Spanish went from degree to work experience 'stage' and then left the country or degraded their skills in the last 5+ years because the private sector was in contraction.
I'm not sure why people deny the reality of a shrinking employable labor pool. I've mentioned below that I do feel people can be trained, but my experience has shown that even among skilled employees, there are some capable of handling higher-level work and others who aren't. As much as I think Trump would be a disaster of a President, the experiment he proposes (cancelling NAFTA, implementing across the board tariffs, etc.) would be very interesting. if it overnight became prohibitively expensive for every company regardless of size to manufacture overseas, the domestic manufacturing base would have to return, including companies supplying tools and parts. Instantly, you'd have the blue collar labor force back, paying taxes and spending money in the economy. This would in my opinion restore a measure of balance. It would be suddenly OK again to have just a high school degree if that was all you could handle academically. People wouldn't be forced into debt getting a degree they're not interested in or qualified to have.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money. There's no easy way to dismantle our money-based economy short of a revolution or some disaster that causes a full reset. This is why the basic income has appeal...it allows a transition so the angry older workers who had to save for retirement, etc. age out and a smaller active labor force comes in.
Shouldn't it be at this point that the government steps in and forces the businesses to hire people who may not be trained, but has the educational background to prove that they can be?
It's like the businesses expect people to have a 10+ year degree in a field that's only 2 yrs old, and offer piss-poor wages for it.
Sorry, that's not how the world works.
If you invest in someone, you see what they can become, and you take the risk to train them. Five years ago I was one of these people, and though I had the foundation that my employer could build on, I didn't even know there was a job like mine in the workforce. I even told them as much, and they hired me anyway, because they believed I could learn and become an asset. So far, it seems that I have. Actually, the situation was even more beautiful than that, because no one really knew what to do at first, just that we had to do it. We all learned and grew together, and it's really helped the company. (Specifically, I'm talking about the BIM paradigm in the construction industry).
Meanwhile, I'm aware that the situation is vastly different for most other people. They go to good schools and get impressive degrees, and it's barely enough to get an unpaid internship. The hope there being that the internship would be enough experience for the reality that companies are looking for "ready-made" commodities. If I ever wanted to change careers, I'd have a hard time due in part to this. I already know a lot about one thing, and consequently would be a poor fit for anything else unless I'm trained (via internship or otherwise). I've got bills, and a standard of living I'd have to abandon for a while to do that. Meanwhile I'm getting older. I'm not old, but I might be growing too old for some of the hip new companies I've expressed an interest in.
It seems people can be treated as potential assets that become more useful with time, or fresh tomatoes that must be eaten before going bad. After a certain point, it seems like you just start looking like a bad tomato or a fully realized asset capable of only a single task. Perhaps future innovation will be with business leaders who see themselves surrounded not by rotten fruit, but by untapped potential (at all ages). If I ever start a business and need to hire, this is how I'll see things. I won't be afraid to train.
As for train-ability... I think it's really about temperament. Some people really are rotten and will never change. Some people are set in their ways and incapable of learning anything new. But employers just have to take that risk to sort out the good from the bad, especially if they're having difficulty finding glistening, ready-to-eat produce, fresh off the boat from whatever country producing them.
Who ever does this successfully can eventually be in a better position than the companies that rely on government legal wranglings (and let's face it, corporate welfare).
Slashdot caters to the unemployed and unemployable. This differs from their original base, but is entertaining.
That is one cherry picked example by TFA, but anyone that knows how Spain works knows that long hours and little pay are the norm. It's why unemployment is so high and why many of the truly skilled workers have fled to other countries in the EU.
I've been trying to hire a System Administrator, an actual American, not an H-1B, but there is a single American willing to fill the position.
I'm even offering DOUBLE the minimum wage ($10 in CA).
People just don't want to work.
of employers thinking that only 20-year olds fresh out of university can do the job, and so they ignore the 40- and 50-year olds with higher qualifications and longer experience, because they are "too old". Some employers believe you can not be competent and self-taught, that you can only know things if you have been to a university, and so you have a bunch of qualified workers but without the stamped papers, who will be refused a job they can do.
To put things in perspective, consider some numbers:
My town's population is about 10,000.
My town's labor force is about half that (5,000)
The "250 unemployed" represents more than 4.999% of the workforce.
If a headhunter can't find people in the town and has to import, my question is this: is globalism bad for my town?
Globalism is taught as the one-true-religion in economics circles right now, but I'm wondering if this is a dodge. While globalism has made a handful of companies richer, it drives the people into poverty.
Is it possible that we have too much globalism?
Sound stupid, yet? Btw, your begging the question with "it drives the people into poverty". The evidence is that it stagnates wages in developed country while boosting the wages substantially in developing and undeveloped countries. The real issue is that "a headhunter can't find people" is often itself a dodge. As others point out, companies want fully trained employees and will basically hire someone less skilled outside the area for a pittance as a "compromise". Often this occurs even when people in the area will work for a pittance.
There's just a heavy presumption: local people will leave if the job sucks (or they're lazy) but foreigners will basically commit no matter what (which makes all those "lazy illegals" stories such crap). It's a shitty approach to getting "loyal" employees. Just as the idea of waving more money is no sort of answer. But the real difficult task of getting good managers to actually, you know, spot and hire good employees is too much.
Hmmm...
Using the Mensa standard of 2%, those 250 unemployed people should have about 5 geniuses. It doesn't take much imagination to see that perhaps 50 of those 250 should be trainable in any real sense.
The evidence is that it stagnates wages in developed country while boosting the wages substantially in developing and undeveloped countries.
Let's tell the whole story here, shall we?
In the US, wages have stagnated and unemployment has gone up and inflation has averaged about 2%. That's a net loss for US citizens.
In the US we've about doubled our per capita GDP since we started globalization, and since wages have stagnated this means that a select few people became rich, all the while everyone else has had a net loss.
And finally, and most importantly, why should the US citizens sacrifice their well being and accept being driven into poverty for people in other countries?
I mean really - I see this argument all the time. "Our people are miserable, but just look st all the 3rd-world people we're helping!"
The evidence is that it stagnates wages in developed country while boosting the wages substantially in developing and undeveloped countries.
Really... that's what sounds stupid!
You figure the Spanish headhunters were getting that 20-line shell script from Argentina, do you?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So Pimentel was unable to find a candidate who had a few years' experience with something like Scrum, coming from a related field in the industry?
Because that is what is immediately coming to my mind as a reasonable compromise. Said candidate might not be familiar with all agile methodologies, but he/she would already know at least one of those and hopefully bring some domain knowledge as well.
If Pimentel is insisting on someone with experience and certifications in several different ''Agile'' project management techniques, I can imagine that the search might be difficult.
But that is also the point where expectations go from "high" to "unrealistic".
C - the footgun of programming languages
No way they could code many recruiters think.
Do not know how they do their un-employment but in the UK,taking part time or short term jobs can lead to all sorts of problems with other benefits while working or major problems trying to get back on un-employment when job finishes.
Originally, you were good at a few things, but you had a sizable interest in other topics as well. Perhaps you have a film industry, a steel industry, a car industry, and a farm industry that produces the world's best avocados. You're proud of all of these, and so are your people, even when you're not the best.
But now you're global, with little to no trade barriers, and the only thing the world wants from you are avocados. As a global country, the flourishes of your nation that made you interesting, unique, and gave you a culture instead cede the floor to meet the increased demand for your avocado.
At first things seem okay. Your workers retrained and are in the fields now. The ones that wanted to stay in the other industries are subsidized (either on the corporate level or the personal level), by the hugely successful avocado industry. There's so much money flowing in from the world that no one is poor.
Then the world decides it doesn't want your avocados anymore. Consequently, it all falls apart. What would have otherwise been a single industry faltering among a healthy selection of many others, becomes an economic collapse.
Bankrupt, you seek help from the countries that were happy to be your friend in better times. They liked your avocados, but they're not interested in helping you now. Depending on your prior arrangement with them, you can neither declare bankruptcy, nor receive money without strings or interest attached to it. You become indebted to your former friends, and your people decide that this arrangement isn't working out.
They assert themselves again, and through a referendum, convince you to leave your friend's club in favor of defining your own destiny and reasserting your own unique culture of cars, steel, film, and... undeniably the world's best avocados. If anyone else wants them, they can work for it... but it's not for them anymore. It's for you.
----
I don't know if this is a good characterization of events. If I'm mistaken about something, feel free to criticize it.
Too bad that experienced project manager with 10+ years of experience in big IT projects aren't easy to come by...is this a surprise? I don't think so.
My company's problem is more to do with the fact that you have people who have certifications and know those certifications well. So, for example, they may know their Redhat certification like the back of their hand. They could create a self signed SSL certificate, but ask them to sign that certificate with a Certificate Authority certificate and suddenly they don't know what to do. They can't Google, when you get them to Google, they can't seem to follow guides or anything. It's ridiculous. We don't even select based on what certifications you have, but whether your CV actually shows you've got relevant interests in what we're doing and can prove your ability during the interview practical.
Our company does not have a series of managers watching people, we expect people to get on with work, on their own without oversight. The team reporting to each other daily (daily scrums) etc.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
You can't squeeze blood from a turnip. By definition, half the population has an IQ below 105 and is fundamentally incapable of mastering more than the most basic of information, skill, and tooling. Most of the employment in the US is via small businesses and most of those are providing basic goods and services from lawn mowing to hamburger flipping. You can't make these employees worth $15 an hour in a mobile economy by fiat. Indeed, businesses can't make these employees "high tech" by training at all. What you can do is force more of the population - employers and employees both -- to either move or quit. Nevada, Arizona, Mexico, Canada etc. are close enough to California to make exporting every business that can be exported an eventual certainty. What can't be exported? Well grocery stores, hotels, fast food, etc. But a really high percentage of the customers of these businesses are, themselves, lower income and raising wages in these businesses is going to actually going to squeeze prices up on the most basic goods and services for most of the segment the $15/hour mandate is supposedly there to help. So the biggest victims of the artificial price increases in labor will actually be those employees and small businesses least able to afford further victim hood as employment hours go down, jobs disappear, and welfare goes up. The government, of course, will win as it gains more power and more labor taxes per employee. It will be a completely predictable train wreck although, of course, with time and obfuscation the blame won't be unequivocally be laid at the feet of the supposedly "liberal" government. If you visit Spain and talk to the people there (I have) they will tell you why even those in Spain who theoretically could work often choose not to - or simply can't. Meanwhile, here in the US we must, at all cost, keep capital gains tax advantaged and stock options expensable -- while dividends are not. Got to keep that Ponzi running and the government growing! As has been noted (but not adequately considered) for ANY entity -- including fictitious ones -- any growth beyond maturity is a sign of either obesity or cancer.
That's my job now. I'm qualified for software work. I know c++/c/oc, go, perl, python, ruby, I can write assembler in comfort, I actually like it. I have serious finished application projects in several areas I can show. I'm 60. I haven't been able to find a regular job to move to from the utter shite one I have now since I turned 50. I make ends meet with side projects, EBay, investment income from my midlife, etc. I don't do badly, financially, overall. But if I were just depending on my salary, we'd be living in a fucking trailer. I have exactly zero hope of getting a decent job. I know others in my situation, or close to it.
When I hear of recruiters whining they can't "find anyone" I just shake my head. They're either incompetent or complicit in filtering the job market on non-skill-based criteria. I don't think they're incompetent, either. I've been inside quite a few tech companies in the last few years courtesy of my younger friends and acquaintances. There are almost no older programmers. You can't tell me that no older person has a workable skill set for everything out there. You also can't tell me they're all asking for too much money. I could transition to McDonald's fry cook and not take a pay cut, and it wouldn't take much more than that to get me to move because my current job really sucks.
So how easy is it, do you think, to pick up and move yourself (and possibly your family) from here to there, when you have only the dole as income, if that?
"Free to move" is only a valid statement if you have money to move with, not to mention a place to go where you will immediately find employment to pay your bills.
Which is to say, it's not usually a valid statement at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Protectionism doesn't work. The world is competing now, and running away to avoid that just makes you into East Germany, and the Berlin wall is falling.
Protectionism doesn't work because of rationalization.
Globalism doesn't work because of evidence.
But I'll give you a chance to explain. What changes should we make to prevent the American people from being driven into poverty?
Alternatively, by even mentioning Agile and Scrum in the requirements, all competent potential applicants went elsewhere.
Sadly
Its not that easy to move around, if you are young and with no commitments is somewhat easier, but if you have a family, mortgage to pay, and been working for years in a factory, going to another country where they speak a different language and with little money in the bank, leaving your family ties and friends back is a very difficult proposition, the only way i could see people in that situation to move to another country would be if they were in a situation like Iraq
The OP also assumes that there are jobs in other EU countries he could get.
By and large, if you're in an industrialized country you find your jobs are taken by immigrants from a pastoral country, but be unable to find equivalent jobs in those other countries.
To take a specific example, one slashdot commentator noted the tech workers at a cancer testing facility in the UK were Spanish, Italian, German, French, Polish, and Greek.
How likely would it be for a qualified UK worker to find a job in Greece, Poland, or Spain?
This is one of the lies of globalism, that you can go to other countries to find jobs.
The economic "theory" of globalism is founded on a rationalisation.
I guess I'm one of those people who feels that full employment should be the primary goal of a society, if living comfortably in that society requires money.
Is it the number of people who are unemployed that is important or the length of their unemployment? Isn't it less of a problem if the unemployed can find a new job in a few weeks?
In a welfare state, the people are paid whether they work or not. The people who do work get taxed to support those who don't so they stop working.
Taxes are also applied to businesses at a usually much higher rate (progressive taxation) so in order to stay in business they have to automate as much as possible and layoff older workers who are less productive who then go on welfare.
There is little incentive to train workers in the sometimes very high skills needed to service the automation of the remaining businesses. Those who have the incentive, those who are naturally curious and learn high skills in spite of the educational obstacles put in their way by the public school system, will see the landscape and escape to other places where the pay is better and the tax burden perhaps isn't as high.
This leaves the welfare state without the people who are still needed to service the automation of government. Business can't find qualified workers who are willing to work for the meager wages that the business can pay after the state extracts its taxes so the business will eventually go out of business.
To carry this progression to it's final end, even the government will run out of people and businesses to tax and it will finally sink into collapse.
If you don't believe me just take a look at the result now playing out in Venezuela.
Edwin
Don't know if it helps, but I liked your story.
^^Found a welfare troll^^
Ever try to find work after _any_period of unemployment, no matter how short? At least in the tech sector, I think the tacit assumption is that there's no way you could be unemployed if you are any good. Until you can change that, then the goal has to be continuous employment.
This is in my opinion what is driving a lot of the $15 minimum wage support. it used to be that a semi-skilled worker could support a family on a factory job that involved little more than a repetitive task. Now, most of those people are being forced to work in fast food, cleaning and personal service jobs, and the reality is that this is the only work available to them. These low end jobs are now lifetime careers for low-skilled people, and people really do have to support families on wages at this level because they have no options.
Wait until automation takes over the low-to-mid level corporate jobs that involve processing paperwork or similar for solid middle-class wages...I think people will be heartily supporting higher minimum wages at that point.
Human Resources will not hire anyone with a gap in his or her employment history.
Only employed applicants with the right lingo for Taleo are interviewed. If no one still meets that? Then go overseas
http://saveie6.com/
Being a highly skilled worker in Spain means trying to leave the country asap.
The difference in income between low skill work and work that requires heavy training/education is so small it acts as a disincentive to training for better jobs and/or staying in the country.
And you can see it in this story. You can guarantee that the conditions tied to the 2 month contracts are garbage.
Spain is a total mess in so many ways that if an article pins it down to one or two superficial causes it is pushing an agenda.
So many squirrels, but NONE of them are the right shade of purple. What are the odds?
We need super human workers that can walk on water for miserable wages and be happy about it!
Agile techniques may not be all that good, but the other techniques also have their problems. For certain purposes (including what the project is) Agile is probably the best technique. (That I've never had those circumstances doesn't mean they don't exist. Some quite successful projects have used it.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
"Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in âoeAgileâ project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Pimentel is a fucking sociopathic moron.
No, I mean it. That's all that needs to be said.
But in reality, he was *not* a) offering 200 grands for a suitable candidate and b) he wouldn't know a suitable candidate even it he was spouted to his face.
Oh, and c) his customer wouldn't distinguish "agile" from "eagle" even looking at wikipedia.
Because everybody knows a certificate in Agile makes you a professional project manager. I have yet to meet a project manager with said or PMP certificate that is actually more competent than a well paid glorified secretary.
You have 5 million unemployed, most of them probably could do decent jobs and would want to, provided they were there at decent pay. The trouble with private industry is you have a large collection of self-interested entities all of who want certain things. They do not care about people who could work for which there is no job they can do, they do not care about contributing to a society which could provide pathways for those unemployed, as a private company they cannot afford to, since the resources they would spend wouldn't be recouped by them, and would put them at a competitive disadvantage. So we have a mismatch between what is wanted, and what is available, and the wanters don't want to change their demands, and the available labour won't magically adapt to match the desires of the companies.
Let's get this clear: 5 million unemployed is wasteful. Some may not be able to work for health reasons, but only a small fraction. What happens in the West is that all these competing private companies have no incentive to improve the work situation for those 5 million unemployed, and the nature of market competition means they have a strong incentive no to. Thus bringing the country to a point where jobs are available, or appropriate training is practically accessible, is left to a government who is already heavily in debt to private companies the world over, and thus cannot afford to help the situation either. Those 5 million have little they can do beyond protests and protest votes. This is wasteful, and we need to take a top-down view, seeing all human and material resources as a single pool, and work out how to rectify the situation. Or we can simply have 5 million unemployed, employers with jobs they can't fill, overworked people complaining about the unemployed sitting on their arses, right wing politicians demanding we remove any social support and starve the poor buggers until they magically turn into the workers the private companies want, and left wing politicians demanding we tax the shit out of private companies to pay for better sofas for the unemployed to sit on, better TVs to watch, so as to win their share of the votes, and basically f*** all else. This is a tremendous waste, but who on earth is going to do anything to rectify the situation?
(Yes this is a rant, and is rather less well researched than I would like, so read it as such.)
John_Chalisque
I can relate to that. We've been hunting for someone with 5 years of experience with a technology that's been created last year who has 10+ years of professional experience but isn't older than 25 and willing to work for 2000 a month. Think we could find anyone? It's like pulling teeth, the people clearly have the wrong skills, it can't be unreasonable expectations.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
How good are you with comparative statics? Protectionism in all forms results in suboptimal allocation of resources; an import tariff or quota, etc. all result in dead-weight losses.
Why is optimal allocation of resources more important than citizen well-being?
Which comparative statistics contrast protectionism with armed revolt?
Your defence of protectionism is economic, and ignores reality.
If enough people are dissatisfied then your economic analysis is worthless.
Let's go back to the time when the welfare of our citizens were valued over the welfare of other people!
so long as the unemployed are happy with their lot. Automation + Productivity means we've got lots and lots of excess people with nothing to do. Hell, when I was a kid this was the _goal_. We weren't suppose to be inching back to a 60 hour work week... And Japan has proven that if people have something else to do they won't breed uncontrollably. Fact is, we've got a _lot_ of folks not smart enough or creative enough to be productive in a society based on knowledge alone.
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I would honestly ask the same, if I could finance my lifestyle on wellfare, my ass would have to take the other elevator because I'd be out of there too fast.
Seriously, anyone who is working despite having a way not to without cutting down his lifestyle is an idiot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
For one thing, many unemployed have no marketable skills. Their skills may have gone out of demand or they may not have been able to acquire any currently useful skills in the first place. That is going to become very common, as we are moving into a post-labor economy where producing goods and services takes much less effort than is needed to keep a workforce employed. In addition, many remaining jobs have far higher skill requirements.
Unless that problem is solved, society as a whole will disintegrate. For example a basic free income is a possible solution to keep society functioning. There are others, but "work" as primary means to distribute money is becoming less and less able to do the job.
The other thing is that a 2 month commitment is not worth moving or making larger changes in your life and quite likely, they did not offer reasonable conditions.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Forcing labor intensive manufacturing to on-shore won't magically create a domestic blue collar workforce.
Say a company has a widget that costs a dollar to be manufactured in China and shipped to the US. That same widget if manufactured in the US today costs two dollars.
Adding tariffs such that the Chinese price would equal or exceed the domestic manufacturing cost would in theory incentivize domestic production. What it would do in reality is incentivize investments in automation to reduce the domestic production cost to any point below the two dollar mark. Removing the cheap option will just make companies move to the next cheapest option not just jump to the most expensive option.
Labor intensive low-skill production happens in places where the labor cost is low. There's no incentive in having human beings doing the work unless they are cheaper than machines.
Trying to force labor intensive manufacturing to return to developed first world countries will just hasten the adoption of automation. This will mean output and profit margins won't change for manufacturers and the number of manufacturing jobs will remain constant or decrease. Robots have less management overhead than humans and can be retrained for new positions much faster.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Solution is quite simple. How badly do you need to fill the position, versus how much you are willing to pay? if pay is fixed, find the best candidate and train them for whatever period of time it takes, even if you have to send them out to a university, or hire some tutors. If the need is high, import the right person and pay them whatever they are asking. If you do not like either solution, ask yourself: do we really have a need for this position?
Train people, or hire skilled people who lack qualifications.
From the (Bloomberg) article: "From software developers and mathematical modelers to geriatric nurses and care workers, a mismatch in qualifications means companies are struggling to fill posts, even though the unemployment rate at 20.4 percent is the second-highest in Europe".
Yea, right. Mathematical modelers are always thin on the ground and software developers can be, depending on what you ask. Geriatric nurses are an impopular specialisation, and demand is growing fairly quickly. Working conditions tend not to be the best though, so it's not the most popular specialisation. Takes a year and a half to qualify though, and not many hospitals are willing to pay you to do it. Those that are pay you a pittance, fire you the day you graduate, and start with the next bunch of trainees.
Problem is: can you trust current industry demand to guide your choice of curriculum?
Answer: No you can't. Companies (with the exception of the likes of Shell, IBM, GM, Unilever etc.) don't plan any further ahead than 6 months. Easier and cheaper that way. So, current industry demand isn't a very good indicator.
And this: "Pimentelâ(TM)s client asked him for list of candidates trained in "Agile" project management techniques for helping companies boost their productivity by using more I.T. systems. The client was offering as much as 200,000 euros ($220,000) a year -- almost 10 times the average salary in Spain."
Salary's pretty good, especially for Europe. But "trained in agile". Does that mean "attended a few lectures in scrum or whatever"? No. From the rest of the article: you need to have sufficient experience to know what software development is and what the issues are. And then the article lets it transpire that you'll be talking with senior management ... on your project. Sounds like a "development lead with experience in agile" position to me. Definitely not for your average coder, with or without course in "agile" development bolted on.
I can only conclude that the Slashdot headline is a bit misleading. The Bloomberg headline is more accurate, and the article goes on to lambast the Spanish educational system for not paying sufficient attention to industry needs (STEM subjects).
However ... about a year and a half ago I made the acquaintance of a (very smart) Spanish PhD in experimental physics who (1) couldn't find a fitting job opportunity in Spain when she graduated (6 years ago) (2) went abroad to do a doctorate (3) was subsequently unable to find a faculty position (two years ago) in Europe) and went to work as a data analyst for the government.
Several interesting things in this story: she couldn't find a decent job even though she was smart, motivated, and well-educated, she had to look outside Spain to do a PhD (well, some would call that a valuable education in itself), then couldn't find a job in the field for which she had just qualified (experimental physics), and went to do work for which she wasn't "formally" qualified but for which she was quite well prepared (kudos to that HR department).
Now think of your average HR department. Would they have hired her as a data analist? Nah ... too many boxes not ticked. No Hadoop experience, no Java programming certificates, no certificate in SAS, not SPLUNK certified, no Python programming certificates, no Linux certificates (although she did her PhD work on Linux systems like all physicists). Yup. Probably no MS Office certificates either (but perhaps those can be overlooked).
So it's a sum of circumstances: insufficient attention to trivial but "in-demand" qualifications on part of educational authorities to please box-ticking HR departments, HR departments being generally unable to bring any understanding and intelligence to their job (costs too much to have somebody working there who actually understand what the job entails, right ... so keep with the box-tickers). industry as a whole being unable to provide reliable forecasts of future personnel demands.
A lucky bunch of Spaniards, living and not having to work for it...
I've noticed this in my country, employers who once used to run apprenticeships and training schemes up until the late 1990s decided that they no longer needed to bother because they had access to a labour market from 26 other EU countries so they could find applicants already trained up. That's all well and good at first but the pool of people available for skilled jobs fully trained up with several years of experience who can just "drop into" a position are limited and without training people up the pool dries up.
My employer after 20 years has just restarted its apprenticeship scheme because its finally realised that the situation cannot exist forever.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
Train your own HR people and hire your own staff.
Recruiting agencies cut the chaff yes, BUT they mostly filter out the desirable applicants for anything 'specialist'
"Or maybe they have laws that once you hire someone you're stuck with them for years. Hence nobody hires unless they know the person is already skilled."
Which lead them to having nobody do the job : and thus either that person was not necessary if they are still doing their widget without problem, or they are losing money by the shovel and they are idiot.
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That's not the employee's issue, that's the employer's issue. Standards are set too high. The company doesn't want to be on the hook for training. Companies of old had classrooms where people were trained. Investing in your Employees meant investing in your company. Companies all over the world are going to be hit hard as time goes on. The global economy is already showing signs of hitting a ceiling.
This also ties in very closely with wage inequality. As wages go down, so does the GDP for a given country. People can't spend money they don't have (excluding using credit cards, etc.) That means 'growth' will no longer be possible, and instead you'll be seeing recession after recession as the market continually corrects itself.
Note that I don't have a horse in this race (I make a good salary).
Any time from the year 2000 onwards I could have found you hundreds. Did you forget that it really started taking off in 1995?
It is the employee's issue because that's exactly why we don't hire some people or why some people end up getting let go. They're not suitable.
Last week I trained an employee on Scrum in my home.
My company has a minimum of 15 days mandatory training that you have to use. You can use to learn practically any IT certification, course etc. you want. We're an Agile company and have the expectation of the employee (even myself) to do be independent and do better, we even give the resources to do so.
So does everyone in my company and I.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
I've sat there. Way back when, I was on the interviewee side of the table, generally looking for either an EE or programmer job (or both.) I wasn't hugely impressed with most interviews, either. Later, having gone out on my own, I did the interviews myself, and later yet, after my companies had grown large enough, supervised those who did the interviews. My experience has been that if the job is specified well enough, and you don't suffer from application of non-skill-based criteria such as age, weight, credit report, arrest records, sex, degrees and certifications, and you don't proffer an abusive workplace or shitty remuneration, then there's no problem whatsoever hiring qualified people with sufficient or superior skill sets and quite easily recognized ability to learn. I've never, ever hired anyone who couldn't / didn't do the job they were hired for. Sure, yes, lots of people interviewed who weren't qualified by skill set. None were ever hired for something they weren't capable of either doing or learning. This was neither unexpected or a significant burden. It was a very rare unqualified or over-the-top abrasive person who didn't reveal their lack of suitability in just a few minutes of questioning. Not one made it to a job offer. Not in 30 years.
In software, my companies have done image and signal processing, both hardware and software. We put the very first morphing software for a desktop PC on the market, and our image processing / special effects software was used in myriad movies and television shows. We also did artificial life software, paint software, cross-assemblers, microprocessor emulators, and some of the earliest object-oriented CAD systems, among other things. We did absolutely top-notch technical support, second to none -- that's the thing I remain proudest of to this day. In hardware, we designed and manufactured graphics engines / accelerators; fax systems; status display systems; software oscilloscopes, FSK modems that were 100% DSP before DSP was a term on anyone's tongue; blitters; etc.
As to security clearances, I can't say. If you want to hurdle that particular wall, then you've bought into whatever requirements they lay on you from above, and yeah, I could see where, especially today, you'd have trouble. Fortunately, I'm mostly retired now, writing free software and only taking the occasional really interesting consulting job for myself, and I won't ever have to put up with that particular brand of oversight. Not that I ever did.
WRT criminal records, some of my best employees were those whom others had simply refused to hire for that very reason. None ever did my operations any harm at all, and a few were real stars.
I can't say I have any sympathy for operations that impose non-skill set criteria on their hires. No matter what size. it's a choice. Not an imperative. You make the choice, okay, certainly you can do that, but I am utterly deaf to your complaints about the consequences to you -- my sympathies lie entirely with the people who remain unemployed in the face of job opportunities they could handle perfectly well.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Spain has been through some deep shit lateley, and if their economy is picking up these days, that will only be in highly specialized fields, as mentioned in TFA. Thus are the modern times of automation and efficiency.
However, an economy can't turn on a dime in highly specialized jobs, no matter how much you offer. The young educated spanish spread throughout Europe in the last few years, seeking jobs. They're all gone and have left the homeland. Getting them back will take a while. They will come, because rainy east Germany isn't quite as sexy as the spanish atlantic coast - but salaries and infrastructure have to provide some basics for an extended period of time for that to happen.
AFAICT Portugal and Spain have learned some hard lessons in the last 10 years or so and are slowly gaining traction again - also with the help of EU money and fiscal balancing by EU rescue funds. Portugal is actually gaining reputation as the newest hippster location for digital nomads and counter-culture digerati to be - some indication that they've passed the deep end of the slump, if you ask me. Same in parts of Spain. 15 years down and gentrification in Barcelona will be rampant again, as it was 12 years ago.
Whining now that you can't find that specialised software guru no matter how much you offer won't help much, simply because they've long left for someplace else. I expect this to even out pretty quickly in the next 5 years - unless the Eu falls apart that is. Which I sure as hell hope doesn't happen.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
One could argue that this isn't the best choice for a PhD. Outside of places like CERN, where does one work? Government/weapons labs tend to be nationals-only in hiring and many have found them a distasteful option over the decades. Possibly the automotive or aerospace industries, but they might not be anywhere the bleeding edge for a physicist. If they're charismatic, they can always do documentaries but again, a limited job market. Yeah, they probably picked up some engineering and programming skills along the way, but 4-8 years is a hard way to get those two.
A very smart guy I know once said that if people want local production of goods, they'll have to willingly pay more at Walmart...
Did this "clever" headhunters mention that the IT companies are called here (in spain) meat factories (carnicas) because they treat people like if they was meat?
The tipical earnings here for the IT sector are 30000 euros before taxes. Is this worth the effort to be a good IT guy? Don't think so
They are complaining because they are eager people. Who can blame us for not accepting peanuts for a work that needs a whole life of dedication?
Jerks, they are jerks
"It takes at least eight months for an experienced software developer to earn an Agile qualification and they also need the ability to deal with senior executives, limiting the pool of people who could potentially fill the roles."
Is he seriously saying he can't find a decent software developer in the whole of Spain?
Agile: Incorporate feedback from the end users as you write the software, instead of releasing a version and then incorporating feedback into the next version.
There is a whole book about it: http://wdp.wharton.upenn.edu/b...
TL;DR: HR managers are way too picky and specific in their requirements. They only want to hire people who are currently doing the exact same job. They increasingly expect people to be willing to commit to shorter and shorter contracts for tasks that should take far longer to do right. But primarily: HR managers have, as a group, turned into power-mad, elitist, snobs who routinely throw away resumes after barely a glance if they feel like they just wouldn't like the candidate; just because they can. The personal bias being applied here is enormous.
The worst part is that the actual hiring managers are desperate to get the role filled, and would have been happy with half of the people the HR manager rejected. But the HR manager is using their position to attempt to control the durection of the company, or just fill it with "their kind of people."
So, do everything you can to bypass HR.
This post was doing so well until the last half of the last sentence.
No, robots cannot be retrained. The left-front-wheel-attaching robot in an auto assembly is only ever going to attach the left front wheel to the car body. It would cost you many millions of dollars to reprogram it to attach the left rear wheel instead. You might as well build a new left-rear-wheel-attaching robot with that money.
I hear the same complaints here in the states. The fact is that employers don't want to train new employees or they expect workers to have more skills than they are willing to pay, so in essence they are looking for workers to do now what used to be the jobs of two or three individual people but only want to pay the old wage of doing only one job but wanting three times as much.
Sigs are dangerous coy things
Even if most of the returned manufacturing is automated, those robots must still be built, still be repaired, still programmed. They are housed in buildings that need upkeep, etc etc. It would still be a great boon to the economy to be making things here once again.
If only there was a way to train new employees. Nah, maybe that's too old fashion to be revolutionary.
REPLACE ALL WORLD LEADERS!!! Any fucking leader too stupid to see the easy solution needs to get the hell out immediately! EDUCATE the people for the position(s). Ummmm. DUH!!!
The slogan from the Australian conservatives is "The New Economy".
Crapolla
The new economy is what has been happening since the 70s.
"The rich get richer, the poor get the picture"
Can't find someone to fill the position? Eat Shit!
I don't work in my trade because the wages offered are too low.
Every time I have gone back to "employment" it has been crap.
I have withdrawn my labour.
I only work for myself or friends.
I now enjoy working as an artisan, don't earn as much, but I'm not a wage slave.
Go well
After reading the comments here for a while, I wonder how many Spaniards are actually giving their opinions...
There are a pletora of problems here:
1. Unemployment is high, yes, but mostly amongst "blue-collar" (no disrespect here) jobs. Economical growth has been largely based on Real State and related blue collar jobs for the last 20-25 years. You can't turn many of this workers in say java developers...some of them, yes, but quite a few actually.
2. HR, many times, have no clue of what they are talking about when they look for a candidate. Not that the employer has not given them exact details; it is more that they do not know what the fuck they are talking about. This is changing but still...
3. As a result of the high unemployment rate, many employers believe that they can offer less money to some candidates. This is true...for certain markets that crashed, but mostly does not apply for the IT market, for example. A good Java developer will not accept less than 2000€/month (depending on the location and social benefits, etc, this is just an example). I have seen hundreds and hundreds of job offerings for less than 1500€.
4. As a result of low wages on high skilled jobs, many workers aged 22 to late 30s GTFO to Germany, UK, France, Norway...etc. where wages are higher. Costs are also higher on those countries but still, wages are better proportionally to these costs.
So yeah, they can't find a lot of workers they need...for what they offer. Sorry but fuck them.
1. I suspect the pay is not all that great, and extremely low for the type of work.1
2. The contract is for 2 months. This means that the unemployed person, will lose all unemployment benefits for a mere two month contract. It will take them nearly that long to get re-established on unemployment benefits. And, if at reduced pay, means that the unemployment benefits received will now in fact be lower.
So why would a company expect anyone to take a 2 month contract? You might get a contract worker to take it...but if you can't find that in an entire nation, with 5 mil unemployment. I suspect you are strongly trying to take advantage of said unemployment by offering a pittance wage.
We write that 20 line shell script that saves the companies millions. They give the CEO a $2 million bonus and fire us.
Sure they hire a few,....
But in 2008, McDonald's hired 50,000 workers.....they had 500,000 apply.
Jobs just don't exist...
We want a highly experienced professional with multiple backgrounds in Agile for 2 months.
Translation, we want you to come and train us for two months and then we will let you go after you teach us your knowledge. Who'd take that????/