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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."
Capitalism and the free market actually work.
Any excuse not to hire the unemployed, who do not exist.
There's a skills shortage because so many skilled workers are sitting idle after being laid off, since "being employed" is a skill just like "being young" is a skill and "being female" is a skill and "being brown" is a skill.
Every day you see some slashdot turdbro declare full employment, as long as millions of unemployed old white men stay out of sight and out of mind.
and I'm in! Seriously, I worked for Microsoft for just under sixteen years and start-ups in the past nineteen years since then. The last real vacation I had was in 1986 when I took an entire week off to go on a cruise. It sucked since it was cut short by the weather. I've only had long weekends off since then. I would kill for a job where I could take time off.
First Post!!!!
I had to get halfway through TFA before I realized that they weren't talking about Richmond, British Columbia. Or Richmond California, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio or Oregon. Who knew there was a town called Richmond in Virginia?
Have gnu, will travel.
> 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.
editor is a dead-end job, too.
wow. This is starting to sound almost like a free market again.
If these jobs are so simple, they will be automated soon anyway.
I've made some brilliant hires by looking for people in my company who were stuck in dead-end jobs and looking for a way out. They knew the business, which is usually the hard part. A little training and they were productive in short order, and reenergized to boot.
a New Jersey-based software company went hunting for a U.S. city with a surplus of talented employees stuck in dead-end jobs...some companies have decided to move closer to potential hires.
Software company, but no working from home option? They prefer the expensive moving the office option instead of providing a cheap remote option especially for 'dead-end jobs' staffs?
What a disappointment.
'They were not in real careers,' said Tri Nguyen, Network Capital chief executive. That's a pretty disgusting attitude from Mr. Nguyen. I won't be doing business with Network Capital.
each and every one of these businesses will get sweetheart deals with massive subsidies that pay for the wages and land paid for by bonds taken out against the taxpayer's future earnings. What was that old quote? "Capitalism for the poor and socialism for the rich"...
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you're doing better than most. 40 years of the non-stop shitshow that is the US Economy for the working class has done a good job shattering those for a lot. There's plenty who would move. What we don't have is people willing to move and _able_. I moved from one city to another 5 years ago for a job and it cost me $3 grand (gas, uhaul, apartment deposits, etc, etc).
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This debate seems rather personal to you.
They want the recent grad at 90k who is indebted vs the expensive experienced guy.
It doesn't work well enough to embrace telecommuting which would solve a lot of labor problems.
I'd be happy if more companies went this route than playing the H-1B visa scheme or sending every scrap of work to Tata or Infosys because their competitors are doing it. And this is coming from someone who lives near a high cost city. HR departments, don't do anything their competitors don't do, and they will only listen to management consultants as a source of new ideas. It explains why nearly every company suddenly jumped on the outsourcing bandwagon at the same time, adopted the Google open office stuff, and enacted all sorts of other management fads. Maybe we have a mole inside of McKinsey who's starting to plant employee-friendly ideas in client's heads!
Satellite offices in cheaper parts of the country aren't new. Even IBM (before they went nuts and moved everyone to India) and other deep-pocketed companies had them back in the day, and that was when it was harder to stay in touch. The only difference was that the office was in Pittsburgh and not Pune, or Moline and not Mumbai. I remember reading something some time back that mentioned IBM would strategically locate big engineering facilities just far enough away from large business centers to be a short flight or medium length drive. They'd import the workers or hire from local university talent pools, and the execs would be mollified because they still felt like they had control. IBM used to have big facilities in Burlington, VT and Rochester, MN that fit that description perfectly. They probably didn't have to pay anything near what they'd have to pay for people in Westchester or Dutchess County, NY.
Spreading out the wealth of a big company over a bigger area is a good thing. Silicon Valley/SF and California in general are out of control in terms of housing prices and cost of living. Metro New York (where I live) isn't far behind at all. If enough employees could be convinced to move to a low cost city, sell the house and save 2/3 of its value while buying a mansion with the other 1/3, that would definitely lower housing prices. You can get over $1M for a total dump in SV, over $400K in outer NYC suburbs and way more when you get closer to the city. That's lots of peoples' retirement fallback plan from what I can tell.
I just think it's funny that companies are "rediscovering" that it's cheaper to employ people who don't have million-dollar houses to maintain. Expectations do need to come down on both sides. Companies have to be willing to invest in people, and employees can't demand unreasonable salaries or else they're just going to continue with the offshoring. The market can't sustain conditions where everyone who can fog a mirror and write Rust or Node.js gets over $200K, nor can it maintain a world with only super-rich executives and massive unemployment in every other class.
So there are people that don't live in the Valley or New York? Why? What are they doing out there?
I think these companies need to take care; you never know what kind of unreformed Deplorable you might end up hiring in Richmond. Ew. And Miami? That's gone now right? The global warming hurricane destroyed Miami; I saw that on CNN. Philadelphia? Where is that? Do I need my passport? Someone told me it was a colony where all the white people came from............... hmm.
Which company is this? ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
So buyers get off their arses and look for sellers (of labour): Who would've thought, that's how a free market works?
HR departments have worked in reverse for the last few decades because there was an excess of sellers. I wonder how long this state of normality will last?
...doesn't need a job with an investment firm. They can day trade their way into billionaire status.
"who are reluctant to locate but are cheaper to hire than competing locally in tight labor markets."
What does that mean? "reluctant to locate". Did they mean "reluctant to relocate"? What does "are cheaper to hire than competing locally" mean? Did they mean "are cheaper to hire than workers competing locally"? I don't know. The summary writer is an idiot. But then, this is Slashdot. Sorry - 'Climatedot'. Who let this article that doesn't mention 'climate change' through the net?
If a job has a good wage, it will be listed. If the pay sucks, it will not be listed.
...gets shit done.
"required only a heartbeat to perform." ...and advancement only requires a slightly faster heartbeat?
I for one welcome our AI posting overlords.
It's good that AIs don't need vacation!
Only very few people have a job where they can fulfill their dreams and make this world a better place.
The rest of us just wants to pay the bills and has to work for it.
I can't really speak so much for how difficult it is to find good programming talent, these days. I've spent most of my career in the hardware side of things, doing workstation support, server and networking support and build-outs, etc. Pretty much everything EXCEPT software coding.
But I do know that when it comes to hiring a computer support person capable of serving as "jack of all trades" for small or mid-sized companies, there are some very capable people out there who remain underemployed, often struggling along with their own small computer-related business.
One of my old acquaintances has been self-employed for the last 15 years or more, running various computer stores, comic book shops or coffee shops. He's kind of an outdoorsy type so he's always lived in the midwest -- currently outside Branson, MO. Truth is, he's got 99% of the skills any small business would ever need if they decided to hire a single I.T. guy to take care of things in-house. And if they offered him even $60,000/yr. or so, I'm pretty sure that would far exceed his current income and be a really tempting offer.
Unfortunately, there's really no business in that area who would hire a guy like him. So he scrapes by, helping grandma get that old Windows '98 PC upgraded to something more modern, or fixing old Joe's inkjet printer that clogged up its print-head again.
In general? I think there's a whole generation of computer geeks out there who grew up with the 8-bit machines in the 80's and pretty much lived and breathed computers for many years. I consider myself part of that group .... ran a BBS as a hobby for over a decade, before latching on to the first chances to get on the Internet using "high speed" via overpriced DSL connections. Worked in mom and pop computer stores, sometimes not even for any pay, just for the fun of learning to build computers from parts and benchmarking the latest tech to see how well it ran. Played with pretty much every software package that came along, even if I had to get a pirated registration key or what-not to make it run. A whole lot of us eventually wound up hitting a "brick wall" of sorts, as computers in business became more formalized and colleges and universities caught up with the times. Back when I was in college, you couldn't even really pursue such a thing as an MIS degree. It was either "Computer Science" (mostly math and theory), "programming" or "data entry". So folks like me just said, "Screw it .... not interested in any of those." and went down other paths.
Most people with this history are going to be excellent hires for any technical/computer-related job they're interested in doing. But these days? Most will be overlooked from the get-go, if they even make the effort to apply, because they can't get past the H.R. gatekeeper who is looking for specific credentials, college degrees, or "X years of experience" with the latest buzzwords. I mean, even if a hiring manager sees past that stuff and recognizes their intelligence and talents? They're all in their 40's.... almost too OLD to consider, vs. the new talent coming out of the colleges with shiny new degrees.
When I look back at my old friends from the 80's who I still keep tabs on? I see a distinct pattern where the financially successful ones got promoted to some type of management position in a mid-sized or larger company they got hired on with a long time ago. Then, the management experience gave them a "springboard" to job hop for higher pay and better benefits, as they climbed the ladder. Everyone else floundered when businesses they worked for did layoffs, cutbacks or just went under, and they kept fighting with long periods of unemployment followed by short term I.T. gigs. Most of them went into other fields just to make ends meet.
So my point? There's some great, untapped talent out there in the 40-something age group. But you may find some of them driving trucks or working sound and lights for concerts or ?? because corporate I.T. neglected to realize their value for too long.