Slashdot Mirror
The New Corporate Recruitment Pool: Workers In Dead-End Jobs (msn.com)
New submitter cdreimer writes: According a report from The Wall Street Journal (Warning: source may be paywalled, alternative source), corporations looking to hire new employees are opening offices in cities with high concentration of workers in dead-end jobs who are reluctant to locate but are cheaper to hire than competing locally in tight labor markets. From the report: "Pressed for workers, a New Jersey-based software company went hunting for a U.S. city with a surplus of talented employees stuck in dead-end jobs. Brian Brown, chief operating officer at AvePoint, Inc., struck gold in Richmond. Despite the city's low unemployment rate, the company had no trouble filling 70 jobs there, some at 20% below what it paid in New Jersey. New hires, meanwhile, got more interesting work and healthy raises. Irvine, Calif.-based mortgage lender Network Capital Funding Corp. opened an office in Miami to scoop up an attractive subset of college graduates -- those who settled for tolerable jobs in exchange for living in a city they loved. 'They were not in real careers,' said Tri Nguyen, Network Capital chief executive. He now plans a similar expansion in Philadelphia. Americans have traditionally moved to find jobs. But with a growing reluctance by workers to relocate, some companies have decided to move closer to potential hires. Firms are expanding to cities with a bounty of underemployed, retrieving men and women from freelance gigs, manual labor and part-time jobs with duties that, one worker said, required only a heartbeat to perform. With the national jobless rate near a 16-year low, these pockets of underemployment are a wellspring for companies that recognize most new hires already have jobs but can be poached with better pay and room for advancement. That's preferable to competing for higher-priced workers at home in a tight labor market."
> Network Capital Funding Corp. opened an office in Miami to scoop up an attractive subset of college graduates -- those who settled for tolerable jobs in exchange for living in a city they loved
Honestly, my reluctance to relocate (which I've overcome a couple of times) is more related to how far I'd have to move from my ageing parents or how far I'd be pulling my kids from their social network.
When I was younger (and my parents were too!) and unmarried, I frequently considered moving elsewhere in the Empire for a good job. Now though? These roots aren't pulling up again until my parents have died and my kids have moved out, at a minimum.
There's no real shortage of nice places to live, but there's a massive shortage of places to live near my folks and my kids' friends.
I work about 36-40 hours a week, and have no problem taking time off. Sounds like you all are doing something very wrong.
I have seen zero evidence that there is a vast pool of qualified techs sitting on the sidelines, waiting for salaries to go up.
It's not that people are sitting on the sidelines who are already in tech, it's that there are people who are capable of doing programming jobs but are choosing to go into a different career path, perhaps electrical engineering, physics, math, or plenty of other disciplines. You can't argue that if the salary for tech jobs rose $20k across the board that none of those young people would reconsider and choose to study computer science instead.
We pay fresh grads with a BS in CS an average of $90k to start.
That sounds really, really good if your company is in the midwest, but absolute shit if you're in silicon valley. It's not always just a question of money either. People place a certain amount of value on where a job enables them to live, what kind of hours they are expected to work, or even the nature of the work. For example, I could make a lot more money if I were working in the medical field, but I wouldn't do that work for the prevailing wage because I really don't want to deal with sick people all day long. There are other people who find a lot of fulfillment in jobs that work with people despite low pay. I can't imagine there are many social workers who are doing it to get rich.
I suspect that there are a sizable number of programmers that are in the profession not because they have a strong passion for it, but precisely because the field generally does pay better. There's probably a pretty wide pool of people that can do code-monkey work, but there are a lot of programming jobs that require strong problem solving abilities and that kind of work may be outside of the capabilities of a large part of the labor pool and there are probably many who are capable, but have no interest in that kind of work. The problem is that employers want more programmers still and that means even higher wages are necessary to sway groups of people who were not previously swayed by the allure of better pay. I don't see the H1B program expanding much under Trump, so there isn't much ability to continue to hold down wages through cheaper foreign labor. I think enough companies have been burned by outsourcing that they're more willing to increase local wages than offshore anything that isn't viewed as low level work.
if you choose to live in a shithole like the US, and take it up the arse from your employer, that is your whiny fault.
Want good working conditions, join a union or STFU