I imagine there's an opportunity for a startup that let's someone who wants to do a simple job themselves Facetime with a plumber to talk them through the work. No idea if there's any profit in it though.
"Now grab a 3ft section of copper tubing, cut it to length with your pipe cutter, bend it with your copper bending tool, and flare it with your flare clamp... what, you don't have any of those? Wellll.."
And in the end you'll have spent more than you would have with a regular plumber, you'll have a bunch of tools you won't need for another 10 years, and the job will look terrible.
Source: had to retile a bit of a floor, too small to interest a real tiler. Guess how it looks now?
I'm not a professional but I cracked a tile on my kitchen counter and replaced it and you can't tell. Likely difference between you and me? My uncle is a tile man and he walked me through the whole process (remotely), from finding a matching replacement tile and grout to what kind of tile glue works best for this kind of tile to grouting and cleaning.
> And in the end you'll have spent more than you would have with a regular plumber, you'll have a bunch of tools you won't need for another 10 years, and the job will look terrible.
That part of the business model worked well for Home Depot.
As someone who does as much as I can around the home myself, this attitude baffles me. I consider my tools and knowledge a financial investment: most are used at least monthly, some weekly. I'd never be able to afford living in my home if I paid a contractor to come out every time my toilet leaked. Likewise, my car ownership costs would increase substantially if I paid a mechanic $100 to change the oil or $1000 to service the brakes.
Also, most light everyday home maintenance work like laying tile, building a fence, framing a wall, installing plumbing, etc. is not rocket science. You don't have to be Bob Vila or go to trade school for years to learn how to do it.
Based on a fair bit of experience in these types of things (unskilled individual doing skilled trade work around various homes/rentals etc), anyone who's capable of doing these types of things while supervised via facetime is probably just as capable of and willing to do them with a youtube or web tutorial.
Sometimes you have to sink a lot of time into finding the youtube videos that have useful information in them. I am always annoyed at the extremely high volume of low quality self help content on youtube. I think some kind of guarantee that you were going to get useful advice or it's free would go a long way.
The return delivery costs are as much as the cost of the tools themselves.
I always tell people wanting to do a job themselves that the first time your costs are the same as hiring a pro, but the second time you own the tools and it is just time.
By the time you'd planned for all the tools and materials you'd need, loaded it into a kit, and shipped it off to the customer, you or the plumber probably could have just sent your business to someone more local.
1. Tele-inspection of the job.
2. Ship parts required. Tools can come in the same box which then needs to be returned after the job.
3. Tele-supervise the job
A substantial factor in licensed tradespersons' ability to collect the wages they get is that many situations require the work be done by a license holder. For example electrical or plumbing repairs done to satisfy a building code violation are often expected to have permit paperwork documenting the repair. License = ability to pull permit.
What, can't a tradesman certify that a job was done to code remotely? We allow people to get degrees online.
Of course, some things (is the screw really tight?) can't be verified by video only, but possibly one could devise smarter tools like pressure gauges and some such that can be shown over a video call.
I'd be curious what the cost savings in the end were regardless.
An untrained hand takes so much longer to complete a task that a professional is used to regardless of the understanding. Do you want to slog along a journeyman in video conference for 8 hours or hire him for 2? What's your cost going to be with either?
Beyond that a lot of physical tasks can be done blind, does he "see" that you've threaded the hose properly or applied the compound properly when you're doing it by feel as your eyes can't reach behind whatever you're working at?
I like the idea but I always relate back to my own real world experiences and think about how inefficient it is to remotely task with someone. Ever try helping your parents navigate their computer over the phone? Imagine doing that with a professional @ $100/hr or whatever to replace your faucet or wire new fixtures and run cabling to a breaker panel
The licenses tradesmen carry also tend to be paired with some sort of insurance or bond to back up the fitness of their work. Were it my plumber's license and liability coverage, for example, I'd be hesitate to approve a sweated pipe weld just from video footage. And the market for cheap sonar/magnetic gadgetry or whatever for laypersons to inspect the welds on bathroom plumbing probably just isn't there.
If the job would take a plumber 30 minutes, it'll take me an hour - so instead of paying a plumber for 30 minutes of work, I'd need to pay him for an hour of supervision; so I'd be paying more for the privilege of doing it myself.
Presumably a single plumber could handle multiple clients, plus you are already paying for his commute, which you probably don’t need to do (in your own house)
I was thinking more like having someone assess the job, point out potential tricky bits, advise on different approaches, etc before you start. Like I said, I have no idea if there's a profitable business there, I was just suggesting a way a plumber could actually work remotely.
My dad helped me disassemble a lawnmower to fix a carburetor float once via Facetime, and I felt like a living Apple commercial when it started back up on the first pull, especially considering I didn't know what a carburetor was beforehand.
That would be pretty funny, but plumbing can be pretty damned complex work.
I could see some potential in apprenticeships taking place remotely, though. At least in the latter years of one. And maybe compliance tests, journeyman tests, etc — depending on the nature of the work. And in that case, less Skype, and more AR.
The risk is pretty high, too. Instead of a $300 p-trap replacement, you can do it yourself, but if you do it wrong, you can have 4-5 figures of accidental water damage to the house.
Absolutely! And that's just in your bathroom wear-and-tear maintenance.
Never mind commercial plumbing! Small business owners trying to sort out a commercial block backup caused by a grease-trap failure could start to turn out a few issues...
Plumbers deserve higher regard than they're given (all great plumber jokes aside).
That said if the tech could be used to improve the training of specialists in remote areas/ areas that might be short a few journeymen or master tradespersons, or aid in especially complex problems, it could be a huge boon and reduction in cost (eg - travel costs).
Define expensive. 200$? That's the cost of the plumber's time, and now I've got that tool forever. That and I've gained knowledge and know how to fix or build something that I didn't before which is something I take pride in.
In my experience, there's been very few things where it makes more sense long term to just pay someone else to do it so long as you're willing to do a little bit of learning.
I tried to fix numerous issues with my car and in my apartment by following very clear and detailed YouTube videos.
Unfortunately, it's the little things that usually push me to give up and hire a pro - wrong tools, don't know the tricks to get a tight screw loose, etc.
It's not dissimilar to how many non-technical PHBs watch developers typing away, and figure they can just get a random worker for half-price to copy the same code from a book or website. In reality, it's not the actual code - many times which can just be copied - that makes a good developer worthwhile, it's the years of experience to know what to do when something goes wrong.
I'm not allowed to cut a tree in my backyard because it's close to power lines, only licensed arborist. I CAN do it but not allowed, so it's just a legislation not an issue of knowledge.
Trimming trees near power lines is extremely dangerous and can lead to deadly electric shocks even simply operating near power lines. Metal ladders and tools can draw current from lines to ground and to a great deal of damage. Arborists have special training and tools to prevent deadly electric shocks when trimming trees near power lines.
I worked at a startup doing exactly this last year[1], [2], [3]. Unfortunately, the parent company shut us down after we ran out of runway but it was starting to gain traction. One issue we had was ultimately a lot of people wanted someone to come out anyway and to make sure we had the right quality (and so gain customer/brand trust) we had to do this in-house - i.e. hire actual plumbers and handymen to be on call as well as building logistics software to support all of this entirely outside of the video call aspect.
It was more than a bit depressing the parent company pulled the plug because it really did feel like it was about take off. Maybe we could've instead integrated into a set of preferred suppliers cross country as a lead gen service. Though if you read the TrustPilot reviews it was the fact we were the whole package that customers loved.
We started by first charging for calls but in order to grow switched that to free calls with the assumption that people would then book a home visit if needs be. Nobody wanted to pay £10 on a call and find out they needed a plumber to come out. It felt like something that with Uber-style levels of investment (i.e. tons) could be pretty profitable if you owned the sector. To expand on our offerings we would do things like allow people to simply book a handyman for an hour to do whatever - put up a curtain rail, fix that loose light fitting and so on.
People were using the video aspect as a precursor to someone actually coming to do the work so the video bit was never the end of the transaction. As soon as you start needing a team of people to field customer calls, do support and manage your countrywide team of tradesmen it gets expensive.
It definitely did have a lot of value and customers, once they used it, loved it. From perhaps an emergency "this has stopped working" first call out you would have people then asking about exactly the sort of thing you mention with window blinds and become a repeat customer.
One thing we were looking to do was to offer it to companies as an employee perk - so the company would buy a certain amount of hours that could be used. Then staff could have a face to face call with the relevant tradesperson to discuss anything they like. It was too near the end though to get going :(
If you ever revive it, I worked for an insurance company that loves giving those kind of services as add-ons to their homeowners insurance (they're usually little-used and serve as great promotional copy).
Alas Homeserve, the massive insurance company who were the primary investors, took over all the IP and I think they just killed it. They bought CheckATrade [1] around the time we shutdown, so maybe it will see the light of day as part of that someday.
Does every paragraph needs to rephrase that it isn't thanks to Trump? Maybe I'm wrong but lately it seems every US media outlet needs to mention him this way or another in every topic possible (positive or negative light)
I think you may be underestimating the importance of this article to US politics. One of the biggest issues in the 2016 election was stagnating blue-collar wages - it was one of Trump's main platforms, and one of the main factors that made him President. If the economy continues to do well across all income levels, regardless of why, and regardless of how unpopular Trump remains, there is a good chance we will see a second Trump term. As much as I dislike him, Scott Adams made this exact argument recently: http://blog.dilbert.com/2017/10/14/low-public-approval-of-pr...
No. When he let it out that
1. He supports the NRA even after the recent gun violence
2. When he supported Trumps statements during Charlottesville
3. When he keeps saying on Twitter how the alt-right is so correct.
That I understand but in the article there's a clear anti-Trump agenda and it's just I had a higher opinion about the Economist than them pushing their agenda in an article.
It's basically: "The economy is getting better (but not thanks to Trump) and there are more jobs (still not thanks to Trump). There has been an increase in wages (you might think it's thanks to Trump, but it is not)..."
The Economist is strongly pro mass low skill immigration.
One major change in the US has been border enforcement and a promise of deportations instead of amnesty. If that's what's resulting in higher blue collar wages and employment then they have to re-think a large part of their world view.
I don't think Scott Adams is really accurate there. What is going on is that Trump and the Republican Congress have been stupendously ineffective on the legislative level, to the point where this tax reform may be their first major legislative accomplishment.
If the tax reform blows everything up, inflates a bubble, whatever, then they'll take a major electoral hit. If they're not bloody-stupid, they'll let "Obamanomics" slide in the background, and allow the long-awaited comeback from the Great Recession to buoy their approval ratings into continued electoral dominance.
Even 2016 was seeing slight increases in wages. We may now be seeing a period in which investment capital is so cheap, but infrastructure and industries so rotted out and wages so low, that it becomes feasible to re-develop whole areas of the country nearly from scratch.
First, Trump and the Republican party are two different political factions. Trump basically ran on that claim. In history books, I would expect this presidency to be marked with an asterisk as one single party does not really control Congress and the White House.
Second, the White House vs. Congress dynamics have been pretty dysfunctional for quite some time now. When there is single party control over all of the above, it's usually fleeting. And rarely with a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. You need to go back to the Carter and Johnson years to see that.
What's the point? People are getting what they vote for. They pretty much want gridlock on issues, they want "our team" to fight "their team", otherwise we'd see consensus on some issues and bills passing and being signed. The thing that concerns me is that the consensus that does seem to be forming is that more should be done by unelected officials: judges and members of the Something Or The Other Administration.
That is, there's no real interest in making sure legislators actually legislate. The lack of separation of powers will be unhealthy in the long run. Possibly catastrophic.
> Maybe I'm wrong but lately it seems every US media outlet needs to mention him this way or another in every topic possible (positive or negative light)
Yap noticed that as well. It's as if they have to say "Trump" or "Russia" and then get on to the main topic just to get the article approved for publication. I mostly noticed that with NYT, WaPo and HuffPo for example.
Being President means that analysis articles on national political/economic issues tend to mention their relation to your administration and it's policies. This is by no means new with Trump.
I worked with small / medium manufacturers in the prosperous part of the Southeast. Hiring is brutal currently.
Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
Sub $160,000 houses (3-4 bedrooms, land, average schools, 15-30 minute commute) are now selling in 1-3 days, compared with 3-6 months five years ago. There’s definitely a boom getting started here.
No, this is what happens when employers show their workers absolutely no loyalty over decades. If people have no reason to care about their job, they won't care about it. The labor market is tight enough so that they can't just fire everyone who behaves like that, otherwise everyone would quit.
That’s a factor, but the collective dumbing down is as well. We now have a nearly feral workforce and body politic, because contrary to expectations, they’re unpredictable and hard to control.
Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Over 30% of people have Bachelors degrees or higher. Literacy rates are higher than they ever have been.
Our people aren't dumber, they just realize that when the business managers and owners are making millions while they don't get wage increases above inflation, they have no incentive to care.
Would you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News, especially on divisive topics? We eventually ban accounts that do this repeatedly and we've had to ask you before.
It's not about whether they can or can't. It's about the massive liability for the company if they fuck up on the job and cause property damage or bodily injury.
That could be true in a causative sense, but not a correlative* one. Not that it's ethical to do so, but by testing for marijuana smokers, businesses/insurance companies may by proxy be testing for other traits likely to cause accidents
Can someone who smoked a joint a couple days ago be trusted not to smoke one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker smokes a joint just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
> Can someone who drank a beer a couple days ago be trusted not to drink one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker drinks a beer just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
> Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
> Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
So don't give drug tests?
> Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
While I agree that drug tests are a scam as a white collar worker, I do think they're necessary from a liability perspective if you're in construction, manufacturing, or driving a company vehicle.
I fully support the use of recreational drugs on someone's own time, but you have to weed out (forgive the pun) those who are under the influence when loss of life or limb is a risk.
I imagine that there is probably an issue with these workers making half of what software engineers make, but with higher expectation of no drug use. I'd imagine recreational drug use is even greater in lower-waged workers.
Culturally, recreational drug use isn't that big of a deal, at least to millennials. You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
> You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
The problem is one of information from the POV of the employer: they are ultimately responsible for what the worker does on the job.
Even if P(no problem | drug use) = 0.99, the amount of negligent liability they will incur if an accident does occur, the person was intoxicated, and the employer could have checked for drugs, but didn't, is probably so high that they can't take that route.
I would be okay with drug tests that didn't fail you for weed. That can show up on a test weeks after it's been consumed. The drugs that would actually significantly impair you (alcohol, opiates) clear out of your system in hours/days.
There are drug testing companies that exist solely to farm out the work to a lab and remove any marijuana hits from the results. Some companies in places where weed is legal use these.
The thing about manufacturing jobs is that they often involve operating heavy machinery. Drug use and intoxication drastically increases the chance of death or dismemberment - for the inebriated, or often, others around them.
As a pilot, I seriously don’t care if you show up to work high or not - unless you’re doing maintenance on the jet I’m supposed to fly.
But it's the best signal we've got. Ignore it at your peril. Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
Except that's not true. We can actually test for sobriety. And by doing drug testing instead, we're actually using a worse signal in place of a better signal!
> Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
I'm not really sure if there's more than a vague analogy connecting Diamond's hypotheses to drug testing policy. And I don't find that exceptionally vague analogy to be compelling evidence. (And I'm one of those people who doesn't even buy a lot of Diamond's work anyways; in fact, I think I'm in good company on this one among the sober, grown-up anthropologists out there...)
My weathered experience tells me to prefer hard data over vague analogies to pop science writers who are themselves known more for their well-written vague analogies than their well-researched hard science :-)
I'm not suggesting you do (although I know others on this thread are suggesting that).
Administer sobriety tests the same way you currently administer drug tests -- upon application, and randomly. They're a lot cheaper so you can actually get more data for less $/time.
Drug test measure whether you smoked weed anytime last weeks, up to three months if I recall right. It has little to do with whether you are high first day on the job. It has more to do with drug war then with incidents.
No it isn't. You've probably been seen and healed by a great doctor that smokes or has smoked weed recently. There is a good chance your financial advisor, lawyer and/or boss smokes or has smoked weed recently. Most professionals who do certainly don't boast about it with the witch hunting Puritan culture in the US, but there are a lot of them out there, and you've probably never noticed because it's not noticeable.
So if there was a test that could tell if you've eaten chocolate in the last 30 days, then you required applicants to not eat chocolate ever, passing that would be an indicator of a good employee?
Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.
I think it odd that the strongest opposition to testing is from people who clearly don't smoke.
Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
Its not a simple binary "have you been within 10 meters of the devils weed in the past month T/F" question.
To fail a test after 30 days of normal peeing takes something like weeks of Cheech and Chong 2.0 behavior to build up the level of metabolites in the body. There's a whole spectrum of use vs time required to test clean. A buzz a couple days ago will not fail a test. Wake and bake the morning of the test is a fail. The kind of person dumb enough to wake and bake the morning of a pee test is not the kind of person I'd want on a jobsite.
There's also the question of motivation. There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC and there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try.
Responsible intelligent users will not have trouble passing a test. Irresponsible or unintelligent users are doomed, but those are the kind of people that cause workplace fatalities anyway, so no real loss.
This is all aside from unemployment fraud type stuff.
Your first use will usually stay in your system for 5-8 days
If you use cannabis 2-4 times per week and then stop, you’ll test positive for 11-18 days
If you smoke 5-6 times per week, it’ll stay in your urine for 33-48 days
For Medical cannabis patients and people in the #smokeweedeveryday club,
THC-COOH will stay in your urine for 49-63 days
Marijuana, Single Use in urine wears off after 1-7+ days. So no, it is not just that the person baked in the morning. Regular usage, 7-100 days and that is not "going completely stoned every day at that period".
"There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC"
Frankly, there is level of education and willingness to study I don't expect from dude hired for simple construction or retail job and you are quite getting there. For the record, I know construction workers.
"there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try."
I mean, why would he wasted $10 on that? Cheaper to do the test and if you fail then look for job elsewhere. Claim here is that now is a good time for blue collar workers so presumably they can try elsewhere. And maybe they will pee enough from beer they drink more then they smoke in the meantime, so they will pass without really knowing why.
"Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline."
Self introspection and awareness? Yep, there is no difference between that and hypothetical chocolate or sex tests.
I used to approach drug tests with this mentality, but legalization and decriminalization across various states will muddy the picture. There will be a lot more everyday partakers as it starts being sold in safe storefronts, in forms that don't stink or make you hack a lung (cute vaporizer pens, delicious edibles). There will be a lot of middle class, white-collar people that prefer a "feel good" gummy bear after work over a beer.
At that point (and a lot of states are already there!), "Jeez, just don't smoke for a few days" doesn't cut it - 30 days is probably a safe guideline. When it comes to this for a lot of fine prospective employees, I would think it's time to reconsider the value of these tests as a proxy for introspection/awareness/intelligence.
> Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
If that was true it would be more efficient to design a test (assuming such a test is currently possible) to measure self-introspection, awareness, intelligence, and discipline. Oh, wait -- don't many people claim an undergraduate degree is also a signal for those things?
Yeah because you don't have to smoke pot to understand bodily autonomy, you just have to treat people with respect. If you've gotten drunk this month you don't deserve the job you have is basically what you're saying.
So a young person decides to sort themselves out, stops smoking and goes job hunting. They're ready to go! And then? What, wait around for a month with nothing to do? Eventually get bored, hang around with their mates and boom, cycle repeats.
Do you really think that's an appropriate job requirement? Should we also have fasting requirements for our jobs? For context I don't smoke, but I'm also not deluded enough to think that we should be testing arbitrary datapoints about their personal life. If they can do the job, they should get the job, and if they can't then they shouldn't. If you aren't hiring capable workers because of puritanical ideals you're wasting money.
Drug tests are completely arbitrary, unrelated to job performance, and employers who use those drug tests don't deserve any sympathy when it comes to labor shortage.
I know you can get a Secret and I have heard you can get a Top Secret depending on the agency. Though some agencies give random drug tests to people with Top Secret clearances and many contractors also have their own testing policy.
They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.
Id be surprised for TS I looked at a job at Hanslope Park which would have required DV (TS) clearance and you had to have drug tests. Didn't get a second interview was well over qualified - but one has to keep the DHSS happy or id lose my nugatory benefits.
Meh. You have to write down any drug use on your application, and they will most likely ask you about that in the poly. The poly is what busts a lot of people.
It's actually ok to have used drugs in the past, you just have to be honest about it and write a letter saying something about not doing so moving forward (an acquaintance of mine had to do this... not sure what the specifics were).
Once people are have a clearance, most of the tests are decidedly not random. They can be requested for erratic behavior at work (e.g., passing out), but they are especially common for people who are formally busted somehow for illegal drug and/or alcohol abuse. Get a DUI, yeah, you're going to be "randomly" chosen for a test more often than anyone else you know.
If you look at the system holistically with regards to drug testing for folks with clearances, most people would say that the implementation is fairly reasonable. The rules seem incredibly draconian on the surface, but the actual enforcement is decidedly less so.
As I understand it practice the rules can be fairly flexible.
I have also heard they mostly stopped drug testing people as they where having difficulty finding enough competent, honest, non-drug users in technical fields. Or possibly more importantly they did not want discrete drug use to be a means of blackmailing someone.
PS: I can only recommend someone either answers all questions accurately and only those specific questions asked, or discreetly declines an investigation and looks for another line of work.
You actually think potheads will have the self-control not to toke up the night before? And any time they fail a drug test, they totally didn't smoke pot for like a full month bro, it was the poppy seeds in my bagel dude!
LOL. Grow up, get a life, stop smoking pot you lowlife. Weed doesn't make you cool, it just makes you a loser.
It's basically only about weed; pretty much all other "hard drugs" (cocaine, meth, etc) flush out of your system within hours to a few days (assuming you can abstain that long - which isn't a given depending on how far into them you are), while THC and such from weed hang around in the body for about a month (30 days or so), and as you noted - up to 3 months (for a hair sample test).
So you could smoke a joint today (ok, maybe a bit more than a joint), and nothing more - and three months later they take a hair sample and find you a dirty guilty pot smoker. Yer fired! Or not hired in the first place.
Even in the best case scenario, you have to abstain for 30 days; so if you're a regular user of weed, and you want to change jobs, you'll have to plan ahead, or just be out of work for 30 days while you let it get out of your system. Doable if you have savings, I suppose.
As far as "random drug testing", I honestly think its more of a threat to instill fear, than something actually done. Drug testing isn't cheap, and a true random test would test all employees, but due to the expense, only the larger companies could conceivably do it. Smaller organizations would tend to only do testing "after the fact" or if there is credible reason to believe that a certain person is having issues (visibly impaired or something) - then a "targeted test" under the guise of a random test can be done.
Even then, such a test might only be correlative, and not indicate the true cause; someone might, for instance, cause an accident or such due to a heated argument they had just before the incident with a coworker, but they get tested and fail the test because of a party they went to a couple weeks before where they smoked some weed.
My grandpa took a part time job after retiring after 30 years at chevron/ortho. Failed his drug test. Turns out, they lost the sample, and in the testing companies mind, he couldn't be proven to pass, so he failed.
Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift?
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
Other than being extremely complicated to setup, has the ability for people to socially engineer themselves out of it and costing 1 hour of work per day per person yea you could do this .
That could be fought while there is little leeway in terms of fighting "my training and 15 years of experience allowed me to determine that the subject was impaired".
How exactly would an automated sobriety test make use of a qualitative metric?
Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.
That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
Exactly. The only downside I imagine is that it could give false-positives to retarded people. Reaction speed is pretty well correlated with intelligence.
I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.
No one is required to give you a job. The increased cost to do that everyday is not worth it to the company if they can weed out possible irresponsible workers from a drug test. It’s work, not a babysitter.
All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
This whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
I think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours.
Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.
It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.
It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?
You would have to ask a lawyer that specializes in corporate ass-covering. I'm more interested in practical solutions that result in actual safety improvements.
I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.
If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.
A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.
Right... but this thread is about employers complaining that they can't find qualified applicants. They can't have it both ways. If they want to continue to be picky, and carry on with the "No one owes you a job" bs, then they shouldn't be taken seriously when they complain about not being able to find people.
Drug tests don't test for intoxication. They just test test for something that correlates somewhat with having been intoxicated sometime in the recent past.
Better is to use impairment testing. An impairment test is a test of cognitive function, alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and similar objective things that actually correlate well with how well you can do your job now, instead of sometime in the past.
On top of that, impairment testing can catch when you are impaired for reasons OTHER than intoxication. If your aircraft mechanic is not fit to do maintenance on your jet that morning because last night he found his wife sleeping with his best friend, they argued all night, and she announced that morning she is getting a divorce, leaving him a tired, emotional wreck who will make mistakes left and right at work...an impairment test can catch it. A drug test cannot.
In addition, generally there is lag between drug testing and results. Impairment testing can be quick (a few minutes) and cheap so that you can do it to every employee, every day at the start of their shift.
Exactly this. Pot is probably the most common and it stays in your system for 30 days after use (probably the longest that is tested). Essentially the screen will fail a guy who smoked pot two weeks ago, but pass a guy who shot up heroin all last week. Like the polygraph test, they are deeply flawed, in this case, for testing for intoxication.
Also, imagine if drug tests failed an applicant for having a beer in the last 30 days. Like it or not, pot is replacing beer for a large portion of Americans, time to adapt.
That sounds like a much better idea; any reason this hasn't caught on as a replacement for drug testing? It opens up for a lot of good workers who'd otherwise be rejected, and it is more robust against the thing you actually care about preventing.
But what would it have to be about, for employers to consistently turn down an approach that gets them access to a bigger class of labor and better filtering for safety?
Good question, and worth investigation. While you do, please keep in mind that employers are not monolithic, but made up of lots of different humans with their own agendas. (And lots of those agendas include the objective of "cover your ass".)
There's a great book about (what might be) the general problem here: that there are many factors that keep us at a bad equilibrium, where a bunch of people would have to change at once to accomplish anything.
Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."
> I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
I'm not sure exactly what industry the original poster was referring to, but broadly my experience has been that there are many people who are just unreliable. I worked in retail a few years ago, and it was incredible. People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job.
Now, as a developer, I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has shown up too hungover to work, and I can tell you exactly (0) the number of times someone has just flat out failed to show up when they were supposed to be working.
> So don't give drug tests?
For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
> Try paying more?
Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
> People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job... Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
Anecdotally, I know several people who worked retail throughout college and showed up super hung-over basically every weekend, but who are now extremely responsible professionals in software, medicine, etc.
Again, I think salary and a sense of career prospects / something worthwhile to lose are far more important than individual proclivities or responsibility.
People know their retail jobs are bullshit, dead-end positions. There's nothing to lose and 10 more identical jobs waiting for them on the market.
> For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
> Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
But in terms of initial applicants, who may not be as flaky, advertising higher starting salary may bump up the non-flakiness of people showing up for an interview.
Right, people can be flaky, and those that are flaky will continue to be flaky, regardless of the amount paid. But paying more can attract more of the people who aren't flaky.
Those who are good employees are already employed, and probably at a decent compensation level. Whenever this topic comes up, I always ask, "What compelling reason are you giving for people to come work for you?" I never get a satisfactory answer, usually because the people know that they have nothing compelling over the next job.
It's almost as if extended poverty has ruined people's ability to function in a job market that wasn't there for them sooner. Poverty is called a trap for a reason. It's a self-reinforcing cycle as much as it's an income bracket.
This is what's known as a collective action problem. I don't have the answers, and the few people who've actually tried solving it haven't had much luck.
You are right that this is a problem with personal responsibility.
Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics.
IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.
Wouldn't surprise me if this was achieved through apps as much as anything else in the future. Imagine an Uber-style app for odd jobs (lawns, etc) that focused on teen/young workers. The app could have gamification or reminders that if you commit to a job, you go hard and complete it well. If you don't have the energy or ability to keep performing jobs to that level, then take on fewer jobs or use a different app.
Sure, but personal responsibility is learned/cultural. It could take a while for people to break the cycle when they grew up seeing their parents make poor decisions, who also grew up seeing their own parents make poor decisions, etc. Not saying that all poverty is a result of poor decisions but that the two feed on each other
They do--but this (a difficulty in getting lower-paid workers to even show up) is a new phenomenon. We've always had lower-paid workers and poverty, but something else has changed.
My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.
Personally I don't think we should be incentivizing people to show up to work under threat of homelessness/starvation like we did in the past, even if it may be more effective. If people want to live their lives in the "comfort" of SNAP and SSI, I'm personally ok with it. The market will adjust and maybe those blue collar jobs will begin paying even more (or people will adapt)
Nobody questions your personal ability to voluntarily provide for them, though.
The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.
It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.
Well ok, but that's up to our votes to decide. You may vote one way and I will vote my way. If you don't want to provide for these people under these circumstances, vote for someone who will roll back welfare. The system wouldn't work if taxes were voluntary (how many people were poor before welfare when charity was the only way people got help?) so I see no moral hazard in coercing people who don't want to support the poor to do so
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".
I see no moral hazard in coercing people
and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.
I used coercion because I knew that was how libertarians/other people who generally don't agree with me see it. I actually see it in the following way: the world is not a perfect free market, and in many cases letting a free market run its course results in the poor/disabled/children of bad parents needlessly being hurt or dying. I think its more just to pay to feed 20 poor people than to let 1 die due to poverty. Its not like this imposes some seriously constrained living conditions on everybody. I earn income in the highest nominal tax bracket and nobody I know making this much, including myself, is hurting because of our current system
There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money
Coercion isn't immoral any more than breathing is immoral. It's been a part of the human condition since before we were human.
Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.
Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.
We don't know what the circumstances of the interview were, though. It easily could be a minimum wage job, and the other people just found something else.
In those other cases, was the offering better than other companies in the area? Was there a compelling reason to choose that company over the others, and yet a majority of applicants still didn't show up to interviews?
They say "There are no bad dogs, just bad owners." I think the problems are cultural.
(a) Two working parents or a single parent family may result in children "being raised by wolves" to some extent. These are good parents/people but child rearing is a time intensive business.
(b) Lack of jobs for young people. In my neighborhood, a lot of lawn mowing jobs are done by services instead of the neighborhood kid. The "entry level" jobs are often taken by older people who can't afford to retire.
(c) Single child families where parents spoil their children resulting in a sort of learned helplessness. I can't think of anyone of my friends children that mows their parents lawn of shovels the driveway. The dad or mows the lawn and snow blows the driveway. My brothers kids are the exception.
(d) Lack of exposure to real world failure or responsibilities. How many parents are going to let their kids walk to school never mind use a chainsaw or go hunting by themselves?
That's a good list...a lot of it rings true, especially point B. The chances for me to work when I was young were everywhere. I did mow lawns, I raked leaves, painted houses, and every other odd job that a 13 year old would be allowed to do.
Now I imagine explaining to my friends or wife that I hired a 13 year old to paint our house. With 0/0 stars on google, angies list, etc. It's hard for young people to "break in" to something as mundane as yard work and painting.
It's funny- I was an unlicensed grey market house painter for a while in college. I booked most of my jobs while standing on top of a ladder, where somebody would stroll up asking me if I'd do their house next.
Yep. When I was a teenager, I had a job delivering newspapers. I had to get up and out very early in the morning, even in bad weather, and deliver papers on my bike, and collect the payments for them in the evening.
Nowadays, far fewer people get newspapers, and the newspaper deliver jobs are looking for someone with a car. And I assume they pay for them online.
I think it's both the dog and the owner and our culture that looks down on the trades, or blue collar work. Kids are being raised and taught to work hard so they can avoid working with their hands. Trade jobs are almost seen as a punishment and schools do nothing but funnel all students into the college pipeline.
In the vision of life that is projected for students, the trades do not find themselves anywhere in that vision. It should come as no surprise that we have a shortage right now, it should only surprise us that it's not worse. Immigrant labor has long hidden the fact that American's are raising their kids to avoid the trades, and we will all pay the price for it.
For my first job out of highschool I applied to over 40 locations, and finally got an unpaid job tips only as a rickshaw driver. I'm pretty sure it was illegal for them to do that, but I also really needed a job. For context I'm 28 and live in the american south east.
Kids don't walk to school in many modern neighborhoods because they're not designed to be safe for walking, sliced through by wide high-speed arterials that encourage driving at dangerous speeds. I grew up in a 1900-1920s neighborhood and most kids walked to school.
One of my memories of that job was sleeping fully-dressed for work, then leaping out of bed when my alarm goes off. I'd carefully balance on my feet and wait for the tiredness to pass.
That's not sustainable. I can't do that more than a week at a time.
So there's all this anger focused toward people who are genuinely lazy, and it's impossible to separate it from people who have a genuine medical condition. What's the solution?
One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. Recruitment in software has heated up to the point where any small flag against the candidate is enough to pass. No one would voluntarily jump in with someone whose attitude is "Well, I couldn't sleep until 3am because of being wide awake since 10pm, so I'm gonna show up around noon if that's ok."
It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
I still two years later have no idea what to do about this. I'm working remotely part-time, putting in full-time hours, just because I feel lucky to have any sort of job.
The point is, the next time someone posts in a company-wide Slack channel that they're feeling sleepy and will be in later, consider there might be more going on than meets the eye. Relationship problems and medical conditions both need to be concealed, and it takes a toll.
The thing is, it's not up to you to care. We have to deal with it or we're cut. And that's fine. But maybe some context will help, somehow.
> One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work.
It's a medical condition. Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. Are you able to do the job on a slightly shifted schedule? Chances are it's the case.
> It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
Start with putting in an effort with the employer, and your final means would be the justice system. It's the law. But you could start with the manager, move on to HR, move on to the courts if you need to. And don't skip levels. Only elevate as necessary.
This doesn't quite work. The official reason for firing me had nothing to do with my narcolepsy, for example. It would normally be a minor infraction. But when someone wants to get rid of you for showing up late, they can almost always find a way.
And then you're in a situation where you've raised litigation at past employers, and that will follow you around.
The point is, the worst possible situation to be in is that everyone knows you're narcoleptic and knows you're not choosy about raising legal action. No one will touch you. The best option seems to be to conceal it and part ways as amicably as possible.
No employers will not make reasonable accommodations. Business is profit over people, you requiring accommodations means more effort for them. Just try to tell your employer you have depression and see how "reasonably accommodating" they will be.. capitalism is disease
When you graduate, at your first tech job you'll have to sit through various mandatory training. One of those describes the employer's requirements under U.S. (or EU) law.
One of those requirements is "reasonable accommodation," which is a term that means that employers face big lawsuits from the government if they don't reasonably accommodate employee disabilities.
This means that if an employee has a condition that allows them to do the work, but needs special stuff, such as software to allow them to write code while blind, or a wheelchair-accessible entrance, then the company has to provide it. Otherwise, the employee can ask the government to sue the company on her or his behalf.
Yes, those things can happen. Doesn't mean they will. Remember, a large chunk of people in this country are working under at-will employment. That means that if the company doesn't want to accommodate you, they don't have to; they just let you go without saying why. The onus is now on you to prove beyond a reasonable doubt (and spending large amounts of money on legal fees to do so) that you were let go because of that.
Fair enough, the employee will notify their state office that handles ADA complaints.
There's no guarantee for anything in life. There is even a strong likelihood that justice won't be served. But that is a far cry from throwing up our hands and claiming a rigged system. There is a reason why so many malls, stores, and restaurants have disabled-accessible entrances, and it's not wishful thinking. It's enforcement at the state and local level.
Ultimately, my solution was remote work. Interestingly this also solved the problem of high cost of living on the west coast (moved to the Midwest). It also helps distribute economic and social influence across the whole of the country instead of densely packing it into a few privileged areas.
I know a lady who runs a hospital pharmacy. She was telling me that one of her employees has narcolepsy, and about the accomodations they made. It wasn't even that much - supervisors asking the employee if they needed to get up and walk around, and not being surprised if the worker was asleep at their desk.
It's also, if I understand correctly, kind of legally required that they make "reasonable" accomodations. This sounded pretty reasonable to me - they didn't even have to buy any equipment.
Let's define Southeast as below the 36°30' and east of the Mississippi (i.e. we're definitely excluding VA, DC, WV, KY, and anything west of the Mississippi including Louisiana).
Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well.
Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast.
I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time?
The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast.
And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why?
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
It is BS, but I was under the impression it's more a CYA strategy for liability if a worker has an accident that puts the company at risk. IE imagine a roofer drops a shingle on someone's head, accidents happen and the roofer was sober but if they can't pass a drug test the company could be in serious hot water in a negligence lawsuit. BS runs downhill, so to speak.
You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.
You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.
Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?
We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.
If the complaint is that you can't find enough workers because too many are failing drug tests[1], then your hypothetical of having "two job applicants" (for an implicit one spot to be filled) is already moot.
I mean, that's the thing, it's a hypothetical. The non-existence of workers with clean drug tests in the real applicant pool doesn't mean that a failing drug test is less of a risk signal in real applicants.
Remember, new hires are not guaranteed to add value - even if they worked for free, there is always a risk that some will reduce value. If a new hire's inability to show up on time holds up a production line, or a new hire's irresponsibility damages equipment, then you're better off not making the hire, even if you desire, in the abstract, to hire more people and expand your business.
> I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober
Have you ever seen a lathe accident, for example?
You can't spot test for being high on marijuana or pills like you can for drunkenness, so you rely on the urine test to keep everyone on the floor safe from being crushed in a press by a stoned co-worker (or themselves.)
I’ve seen a fair few industrial accidents including amputations and deaths. I don’t think that the injuries we have each seen are very relevant.
The things that are detected and punished are not necessarily the things that cause harm. Smoking pot a week ago isn’t actually a problem. Being tired from watching Netflix all night is far worse, as are a few other things, including drugs which aren’t readily detected. The imperfect system currently used causes one hell of a lot of harm. There needs to be something, but the current system isn’t right.
Basically shit rolls down hill-most of the factories I work with care because of 2 reasons:
1) Contract language that says your workforce has to be drug free (government sourced contracts doubly so)
2) Insurance. If you have a fork lift driver run into a rack of transmissions (or drive your work truck into a building) your insurance is going to demand a urine test. If the urine test comes back unclean they will deny your claim.
stealth intelligence test. For a variety of interesting historical reasons, the government hates intelligence tests as a hiring criteria and this is the blue collar stealth/workaround IQ test. Its the blue collar equivalent of fizzbuzz or a gitlab repo.
Look, you got one task, one task only, it's not even hard to figure out, do not, repeat, do not, get high the week or two before your pee test. That simple. There are human bipeds burning valuable oxygen right now, who can't follow a test that elaborate and complicated. They are literally the kind of people where if you told them not to lick a circuit breaker, would turn around and an hour later electrocute themselves and probably a coworker or two by licking a circuit breaker on the jobsite. Whats the minimum IQ and discipline level necessary to pass a pee test? Not much, but there are failures out there walking around...
Its interesting that as far as I know this is the first strictly chemistry based IQ test. AFAIK there is no "pee in a bottle to determine if you can fizzbuzz" test for code monkey work. No chemical marker that can identify if you know the modulus operator... not yet...
If you are unable to refrain for 2 weeks, then you are not the kind of person who they want to hire, because it means you will also not refrain when you are on duty.
Its a different sort of refrain problem. We expect you'll refrain from activity X when we tell you to for a short reasonable period of time. When X is smoking weed this is seen as a big problem, mostly by weed smokers. When X is applying electrical power to this machine's cabinet someone is working in by hacking around the lockout-tagout locks, this seems a common sense test for a jobsite. We can't test for the latter but we can proactively predict by testing for the former. There are plenty of blue collar jobs where lack of awareness and self control and logical analysis of cause and effect mean someone dies. Weed smoking is a simple test of self awareness and self control and intelligence (WRT understanding the whole problem situation)
My addiction to coffee involved no poor choices, I don’t regret it and it makes me a better person. Lack of it makes my performance much worse, I get a migraine with vertigo and vomiting.
You seem to be confusing physical dependence with addiction. By your definition, you'd be addicted to food, as I'm sure you'd have adverse consequences, including worse performance, in its absence.
Addiction is continued use in the face of adverse consequences. [1] You may have a physical dependence on coffee, but it doesn't sound like you're experiencing negative consequences in your life from its use.
> ...do not, get high the week or two before your pee test.
In case someone is wondering, hair follicle tests are apparently problematic [1]; had to look that up because I remembered correctly that follicle tests can show use over the long-term, but didn't know some of the intrinsic challenges with that method. Come to think of it, I've never been asked to submit a hair sample when I've had to pass FBI interviews and drug tests to gain admittance to extremely-sensitive data centers at some of my clients in the past.
The "week or two" needs contextual guidance. An article on Wikipedia [2] gives a good run down of the detection periods. I would imagine detecting pot is the most common request, so that's about 100 days on the conservative side for a heavy (daily?) user, but apparently three weeks is fine for more casual users (what, once a week?).
I've never had security clearance of any kind. Highlights that all required drug testing were: restaurant national headquarters, towing/insurance national headquarters, theme park, defense contractor for non-secure projects, and a bank.
Though now that I think about it I have technically worked at two companies that didn't drug test: my own, and a small 3-man startup I did some work for.
It's worth mentioning that I live in a red state. I suspect blue states have cultures that are a little more lax on drug testing, though I have no real data to back that up.
I have never had a drug test, and that includes several jobs working for defense contractors. (The law said they had to have a plan for testing anyone they suspected of drug use. It didn't say they had to suspect anyone.)
Here's the sectors I've worked in throughout my career: Insurance, banking, marketing, entertainment (theme park), restaurants, and defense. Every single one of my jobs in those sectors required drug tests prior to employment.
At the very least, it'd be worth contacting the noshows and finding out the reasons, encouraging them to be honest. Work out what it might be -
- got another job but forgot to tell you
- changed my mind
- just too tired or busy
- didn't think I had a real chance, so I didn't bother
- too nervous about the interview
As others have pointed out, wages for these job openings that cannot get people to show up are frequently so low that its not worth showing up for them in the first place. Many of these No-Shows have to prove that they are "actively seeking a job" to continue getting whatever benefit they currently receive. And these people are doing the (short term) math, the wages from the job + a full work week < money they get for free from the government. Brutal problem, but paying wages that are market for the kind of employee you want _should_ change that
Illegal border crossings on the southern border are down 78% and blue collar wages are rising. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but when there are fewer available workers to hire/train and demand remains constant, wages tend to rise.
The gap is closing but it means amenities are getting more expensive and since the people in the middle aren't getting raises it just isn't attractive to work in a smarter role
Hence the growing disdain for globalization. It's a race to the bottom to see what country will provide the lowest wages and quality of life for its workers.
I work at a medium-sized software company. We've had similar problems with younger employees. Guys literally posting in company-wide Slack channels that they're "feeling a little sleepy this morning, gonna be in later."
Can you even imagine somebody saying that to their boss in some black-and-white movie from the 1940s? "Hey, how about instead of coming in later you hit the bricks and never come back?"
Are you against this? Flexible working hours that can bend to accommodate very malleable human lives seems better than rigid adherence to traditional schedules for the sake of it.
If they want me commuting during both morning and evening rush hour, they better pay a premium over companies that let me work around commuting. The extra 30+ minutes per day stuck in traffic or on trains does not come for free.
Yeah, if a person really feels the need to sleep in, I can't imagine their productivity would be much different if you had a culture for pressuring for adhering to schedules.
I think many people to fail to realize that writing software is very unlike producing widgets in a factory line. Some people hit periods of high productivity when they work quietly, alone, for an hour or two. And you might get more in that 1-2 hours than you would all day with the constant distractions in the modern office.
I normally have about a 3-4 hour window in which I can be extremely productive when coding. The rest of the day it's extremely difficult for me to get anything substantial done.
I imagine what dionidium is getting at is the lack of good, reasonable cause to either not show up or be late. For example, I'm fortunate enough to have a high paying job in the finance industry and our office/company is pretty laid back and very good about the work/life balance thing. But managers here would react in two different ways to people being out late drinking and oversleeping vs. there being a massive accident so you decide to turn around and work from home. It basically boils down to responsibility, usually, for most managers. If you are supposed to be somewhere, be there, unless there are truly unforeseen and unusual circumstances. How else will they know if you will make it to a client call early in the morning? Or meet that deadline? The younger crowd seems to be largely detached from the idea of responsibility that was drilled into previous generations.
> The younger crowd seems to be largely detached from the idea of responsibility that was drilled into previous generations.
My father graduated college making $42k/yr. Inflation adjusted, that was about $60k/yr in today's dollars. I just graduated, have experience in the field, and am getting a salary of $35k/yr in today's dollars. Meanwhile, upper management is getting millions.
In that kind of work environment, why _should_ I care? It's not like they're going to fire me.
I'm always kind of fascinated by posts like this on this site. Could I ask what field you're in that pays 35k/yr, apparently in the US, is in the field of your degree, and yet is somewhat related to Hacker News? Or are you not in tech at all and this site is an outside interest? Or maybe you're just in a rural area?
I don't mean this to sound challenging out all, I'm just kind of curious.
I'm not surprised. There are a lot of jobs outside of the main metro areas that don't pay that much. They could be, for example, a DB admin for a non-tech company where their priority is not IT because IT is viewed as a cost center. Or perhaps a third party B2B company that is the low cost solution for a larger, more recognized company. You might be surprised what some people make in those cases.
$35k isn't an unusually low starting salary for lots of tech jobs outside major hubs. IT positions, starting network techs/sysadmins, hacking on PHP/Wordpress, that kind of thing.
Under the broad umbrella of jobs-you-can-land-with-a-degree-containing-the-word-"computer", there are a great many that aren't making Facebook creepier, or making Gmail's interface worse, or other, similar, very high-paying jobs.
There are even, believe it or not, many that don't pay as well as not really understanding how to write code, but nonetheless somehow landing a position writing enterprise Java or DotNet at some boring bigcorp, then never leaving because you never actually get any better at programming than when you started, but these people don't seem to care and there are a few competent people here picking up your slack, so why risk going somewhere else? AKA the broad middle-tier of people working as software developers.
Not OP but I've worked places that in London (not exactly cheap to live), they pay a junior developer £18,000 or so - which is under $23,000. In ad agencies, in particular, this seems quite common. Usually by job hopping said junior can bump that by £10k in one go but it doesn't stop the fact people will try it and see if they can get away with it.
I work IT in Springfield, MO. Most lower level positions here have been outsourced or centralized to a tech hub of the country, so to get an "entry level" position requires a four year degree plus a year or two of experience. IT contracting jobs also just pay $10-12/hr here.
> Or maybe you're just in a rural area?
It's rural compared to the big coastal cities, but is still the third biggest city in my state. IMO, it shouldn't just be giant cities that experience economic growth, it should be everyone. The fact that this hasn't been the case in my area leaves me and many in my area bitter about the state of the economy.
Relocation isn't an option. My family lives here, my wife's family lives here, she has a career started here, and we can't afford the massive amount of instability that a move to a high COL area would bring.
Feel free to ask more questions. The more that rich people hear from folks like me, the more they'll understand the current political climate.
"Relocation isn't an option", well not with that attitude. Your excuse for why doesn't seem very good. In this thread about blue collar jobs, how many blue collar workers are in the US illegally and working their butts off in order to send just about everything they make to their family back across the border? They often have wives, sometimes children, extended family, depending on them. Quite a number of people here legally do the same, too. All relocated despite the same or worse conditions you use as excuses. Maybe they're just not as selfish? Selfishness isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's important to recognize.
Suppose you could find a job elsewhere for $90k+. If you can't, sure, that's a good reason why relocation isn't an option, and finding a job in a location you don't live in is by no means easy. But if you can, then you ought to consider moving, by yourself (since your wife is busy with a career), live in an apartment with one or two other roommates, and live frugally saving/investing as much as you can. Make visits back home when you can, but at $90k+/yr that shouldn't be so hard, depends on how you want to balance your triple sized income. (Higher COL areas will eat into that, but living frugally, not very much.) Do this for 3-4 years, you'll have made more than 10 years at your current location and pay, handwaving away taxes/bonuses/raises/better opportunities. Then quit and relocate back, except now you have a savings cushion and it only cost you another few years of your time.
Telling everyone to just move where the jobs are and live like an immigrant within your own country is why Trump got elected, and will by why similar candidates get elected in the future. Economic growth and development shouldn't be limited to only a handful of cities in the country. It's not good for our workers, society, or culture in general.
Well, if you want, you can live quite better than most immigrants at $90k+, even in the expensive coastal cities, it's just that you're setting yourself up for having to work throughout your 30s and 40s and maybe your 50s. A lot of people are fine with that. But if people took frugality more seriously, they could plan for retirement by their 40s or earlier. Working 3 years out West gives you several years to spend back home with your family without having to work during that time.
Sounds like you want to redistribute the economic gains? Good luck with that, we know where that leads. Economic inequality is fine if people are also raised out of poverty, like over a billion people have been since 1990 while inequality has raised. Inequality can be a good sign. (http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.htmlhttp://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html)
At the very least, America can't have it both ways, being an economic power house and evenly redistributing the fruits internally. You might have a shot if you require Americans roll back into a farming economy where half the population farms for each other and the other half, but you'll have to kill a lot of people and take and salt a lot of land and forbid a lot of machinery to get it done. I don't think that's why Trump got elected. The voters don't tend to want handouts, they just want certain existing handouts to other parties to go away so they can effectively compete again in certain domains. Dissatisfaction with the economy in their area is a big component, sure, and Trump actually cares about making the country's economy better, and he's already done good things to help some areas out, but neither he nor anyone else will ever make e.g. all the state capitals equally economically viable with similar growth rates. Physics is against them, math is against them, human nature is against them, morality is against them. SV and other tech hubs will pass one day, too, just like the ghost towns you can visit all over the western states albeit probably not so dramatically, but that'll just be because the economic centers have moved elsewhere, not because they've been redistributed. Exploit their opportunities while they're there.
Thanks for the response. I was really just curious, I didn't mean to set off a mini-storm. It's just interesting who reads this site, since the topics are pretty highly directed towards startup and developer culture.
IT support in a rural area is more or less what I was suspecting (yes, Springfield is Country). It's ironic that the tech age was supposed to bring in an era of telecommuting, when in fact it's brought in an era of greatly increased centralization. Small towns needed doctors and lawyers, they don't need software developers or high end tech support.
In theory the increase in cloud services could change that, but I don't really see the trend changing.
Not the GP, but I'm not a hacker, not rich, have a marginally IT-related job - but find the non-tech discussion on HN far better than most news/discussion web sites.
I do find it ironic for a commenter to be surprised at a lower-wage worker reading a thread about, per the title, blue collar wages. (And that a thread with such a title inevitably turns into a discussion of programmer wages ;-)
To be fair, it would be fairly unusual for a blue collar worker to be a regular member of a website focused on tech and venture capitalism. I'm sure the primary demographics of this site lean rich and urban.
I'm not sure how someone can just graduate and yet have meaningful experience in the field. Seems like only a very, very select few people can every really say that. Also, it's not clear if you and your father have degrees in the same field. If you do, part of it could easily be a supply/demand issue. I've heard similar stories from lawyers who enter the field and find it very difficult to get anything above 50k for a starting salary unless you went to a top school.
Those issues aside, your answer is basically my entire point:
"why _should_ I care? It's not like they're going to fire me."
I'm not sure why your employer won't fire you. Maybe they have trouble finding decent people to fill positions. I honestly don't know since I don't know what you do or who you work for. But regardless, your comment goes straight to the concept of work ethic.
It sounds like you are throwing work ethic to the wayside simply because you don't feel you get paid enough. That, in my opinion, is not the way to do things. Guess what, a lot of people are underpaid. I also have the viewpoint that you agreed to accepting the salary you are getting paid. They made an offer and you accepted it, presumably because it was the prevailing market rate for your skill set. If you feel that your compensation package is not appropriate then you should have a conversation about that with your manager - and leave the firm if necessary. It wasn't that long ago that I made about 45k. For the first 5 years out of school (starting in 2007) I worked for around that pay level. I did the daily grind and I tried hard to add value to the business where I could, because I wanted to not stagnate and just go through the motions because I viewed that as the worse path to take. I stayed late when necessary. Eventually another firm interviewed a bunch of people in my office, myself included, for a position that paid significantly more because they wanted to poach the right person to take onto their team. Guess who got the job. I even found out about 6 months later when speaking to the MD of my new employer that the CFO called him up and congratulated him on hiring me. I had no idea the CFO of my old company had me on his radar or was the type to make that kind of call. 3 years after that another opportunity presented itself solely because I had a strong reputation. That was another substantial bump on the pay ladder.
My point with the personal story is not to brag at all - hell, I certainly don't have some sort of prestigious job and there are plenty of people on this board alone that make more than I do. My point is that I highly recommend you change your mindset and the way you approach all of this. Ask yourself this. If I didn't work for the man, so to speak, as an underpaid entry level grunt for those 5 years, do you think I would have gotten that other job over my colleagues? That also would have not made the second job change (and pay increase) possible. Bringing it a little closer to home for you...if an employer interviewed you and your colleagues and had a job which paid a lot more, do you think you would get the offer or would someone else? Also, take a look at how someone successful in your line of work operates (a Director or MD, perhaps). Are they the kind of person that would share the same attitude as you? I imagine not. They would most likely either renegotiate their compensation or they would leave. I know that's how the higher ups would act where I am. The idea with all of this is to think and act like a successful person so that you can greatly increase your odds of success. It also has the benefit, in many cases, of also being the "right thing" to do. Contrary to popular belief, being a "company man" is usually still rewarded as long as you work for an employer which has basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale.
And if all of that has not resonated with you at all, then co...
I work because this society threatens us with destitution if we do not. I have plenty of ideas, things to do. I have to put them aside for much of each week because I want to survive.
And? That's true of a lot of people, including myself. Do you think that's a new thing? As if not being a productive member of society leading to poverty is this evil new capitalistic creation? Or that pursuing your own ideas should not include the risk it does? It's amazing to me that you choose to work for someone for an agreed upon salary, providing stability and security to you, and then have an issue with the concept of work ethic because if you don't work for them or someone else you will be poor.
I work on side projects as I can. I don't quit my job because I don't know if I can survive as easily with my other ideas. It's a risky proposition. I choose less risk. You do the same, but seem upset at that concept.
No, but the extreme automation and beginning of human-like skills across all domains of knowledge are a new thing.
With automation of the essentials plus a bit more, we can finally start free ourselves from a lifetime of work. The wealthy already have, and choose what they wish to do. I only want that.
> As if not being a productive member of society leading to poverty is this evil new capitalistic creation?
No. That threat's always been there. But there wasn't a good answer how to fix it. Communism (ala USSR) certainly didn't work. They just changed the owner from a capitalist to a uncaring state. But one thing Marx failed to grasp was that computerization and automation was the way out of both old systems. That way, there's no compulsed labor.
> It's amazing to me that you choose to work for someone for an agreed upon salary, providing stability and security to you, and then have an issue with the concept of work ethic because if you don't work for them or someone else you will be poor.
Because it's not so egalitarian like you put it. You should full realize that there's a tremendous amount of asymmetry - They have the money, the legal, the govt clout. What do you have? Your labor. That's it. And you, the individual are expendable. I mean, who cares about where you sleep, what you eat, and basic necessities of life? I guess sleeping under a bridge is illegal for both the poor as it is the rich.
Unions served as a balance to that implicit, ever present threat. But they've been demonized long enough in this country, that US union membership is what, 15%? And in the tech sector, unions are non-existent. I certainly would want one myself.
I fully believe that the asymmetry that exists is due nearly entirely to government. It's hard to have big business without big government. And many of the regulations and barriers to entry are created at the hands of government. I take issue with that entity before private business in most cases.
Let's also not forget that the government has effectively stolen a large portion of the additional wealth/productivity generated over the past several decades via deficit spending. Mathematically, that's no different than a tax in the end. The only difference is that the tax is not felt immediately.
FWIW - I worked for a union once due to a peculiarity in one of my employer's older business units to which I was lumped purely due to legacy reasons. It was awful. And I wasn't the only one who thought so. It was one of the rare instances that people actually voted out their union. It happened only when we separated from the older business unit and were split into a separate LLC as part of a new business venture. 74% voted the union out. It was glorious.
> It's hard to have big business without big government.
The internet provides the perfect counter example to this. It was (and remains) nearly entirely unregulated. And yet Google and Facebook are monsters with immense anti-competitive power.
The evidence really does not support the idea that big business is entirely the result of big government. Quite the opposite in fact. The last time we had this much concentration of economic power was the gilded age, an age of relatively small government. We had a period of lower wealth/power concentration in the 50s and 60s, but that was linked to strong anti-trust laws (administered by government) and 90% top marginal tax laws. Since then, neoliberal ideology has been used to chip away at the restraints on big business in government and now we currently have the worst of both worlds -- corrupt government beholden to vast concentration of economic power generated by big business.
Personally, I am of the opinion that the only way to avoid this is to look at the core of the systematic issue -- allowing equity financing concentrates wealth. Concentrating wealth concentrates power and naturally causes consolidation and centralization. In a world with equity financing, the only way to keep business small and competitive is with strong anti-trust laws and highly progressive taxation.
I think we could have a world of small government and small business, but only if we universally replace the Stock Corporation with the Worker Cooperative. That, of course, is a novel idea and requires a lot more support than I can put in HN post. Maybe some day I'll get to a point where I can stop developing full time to support myself and write that book...
Worker co-ops in and of themselves aren't a novel idea. Universally replacing the stock corporation (thus doing away with the mechanism of equity financing) in favor of worker co-ops is an idea that seems to be largely absent from our public debate. There are definitely people exploring it, The Next System Project [1], Democracy Collaborative [2], and Foundation for a New Economics [3] have all toyed with it to varying degrees.
But I don't know that I've really seen anyone make a strong case for it (in a way digestible to the layment). Richard Wolff wrote about it in Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism but not in a way that was very digestible for the average reader. Gar Alperovitz has also written about it in What Now Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism, but in both cases he wasn't specifically making the argument for universally replacing the Stock Corporation with Worker Cooperatives, but more generally increasing the prevalence of cooperatives (worker, member, and multi-stakeholder) and decreasing the power of capital.
I'd really like to write a book, digestible by the average American, making the case for the universal replacement of the stock corporation with the worker cooperative and speculating about what impacts that might have on society (using evidence to support the speculation as much as possible).
Thanks for the recommendations. I'll check out these books before the year is out and get back to you. The co-op model is something I've personally thought a lot about as well.
I actually own a valid testing arena even -- a successful restaurant that I've been wanting to convert into some form of co-op at some point.
Personally, I don't think capitalism is going away any time soon, it's just a question of which version of it will be the most effective. Co-ops would need to be able to compete and win against the current shareholder model, without government intervention, which may not be possible.
Anyway, shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss more in a few months.
Another good book, more about the practical realities of creating a worker co-op in the current context, is Companies We Keep: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place by John Abrams[1]. It's more a story about his experience founding and running his construction company as a worker cooperative. It would probably be a lot more relevant to pondering whether and how to form a cooperative business in the current world.
> Contrary to popular belief, being a "company man" is usually still rewarded as long as you work for an employer which has basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale.
It is mind-blowing that anyone could write this summary, expecting it to be generally applicable, when every study of wages shows they have stagnated since the 1970s, and at the same time every study of production through the same time shows it is through the roof.
In short, you advocate enshrining a work ethic, while pretending it's okay for ownership to totally ignore a pay ethic.
It's something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, if you ask me.
I did mention a pay ethic and you even quoted it - "...basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale." I also indicated that if the OP didn't feel they were being fairly compensated they should have a discussion about it and if the outcome is not appropriate that they should leave, presumably because there is either a mismatch of opinion regarding OP's skill set and what it is worth, or that employer is part of the ones that don't have common sense. Employees leaving is one of the natural checks on the power balance between employees and employers in the free market. And in the industry that most here on HN work for, it is easier than most to find a job elsewhere as the tech industry is in high demand for skilled employees.
It's not mind-blowing when you consider that productivity is heavily linked to technological advances. Let's take a historical example - the barcode scanner. Prior to its creation, cashiers had to know the price of all items or check the price tags that were manually stickered onto every item by someone else in the store. Then someone came along and made it possible to have UPC's printed right onto the original packaging and then scanned instantaneously at the register, with essentially no errors ever. That both reduced the skill required by the cashiers as well as boosting (drastically) productivity. Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier. If a tool comes along that makes my job easier and/or more accurate my employer will pay for it, but I'd be really surprised if they suddenly gave me a pay boost because of it.
The other half of this is that welfare programs subsidize the lower income workers. WalMart would not be able to pay <$10 an hour if welfare did not exist. If people didn't have the government as a backstop, you can guarantee they would stand up and demand a higher wage so that they could meet their basic needs.
I think we should not use terms like "common sense" when describing totally uncommon practices.
Wages aren't stagnant by accident -- far from it. The constantly repeated, default decision by boardrooms to unlink compensation from productivity and thereby suppress wages is in fact the overwhelming, prevailing "common sense" of the really existing world. This goes hand in hand with the systematic expropriation by ownership of the surplus value created by workers.
This situation persists because persons with your perspective cheerlead it on, in part by moralizing on worker compensation while totally ignoring the moral calculus of ownership's claim to the surplus value created by workers. That's what you did here:
>Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier [...] [therefore they deserve no share of their expanded productivity]
Fact: if additional effort, creativity and skill was a bona fide prerequisite for receiving expanded compensation linked to productivity, then dividend compensation for nonworking stockholders would never flow -- let alone grow to the astronomic, middle-class-savaging intensity it has today.
I've taken several days to consider your comment. I believe you are largely correct after giving it some thorough thought. Workers should receive additional compensation for increased productivity. Obviously, they would not receive the entire productivity gain, but they should receive some portion of it. If they can use new technology to create an additional $5 an hour in value, maybe they should receive something like $2 in additional compensation.
Where we probably disagree on the reason, though. To me, it comes down to an individual's overall slice of the monetary pie. Since money is just a representation of value, it's basically just a number inside of a larger system that we utilize. All that matters really is your portion of the whole. Let's use GDP as a gauge. The US has ~18.5T in GDP per year. Let's cut off some zeroes (6 of them) to get some more usable numbers. For a person making $10 an hour, that's about 20k a year, or 20,000/18,500,000=0.108%. If GDP increases 4% in 2 years but their wage only goes up 2.5% that would be 20,500/19,240,000=0.1065%. This means that they now have lost some purchasing power relative to everyone else because their share of GDP has decreased.
Now that's a moral argument, to be sure, because there is still supply and demand for labor that is a dominant for in the labor markets. So if someone else is going to work for $9 an hour, that's going to be a problem. There are many factors at at play.
But thanks for getting me to re-think my position on this.
>But thanks for getting me to re-think my position on this.
I'm equally grateful you considered our conversation.
Worker ownership and worker governance of enterprises, in my view, is the general way forward. I suggest to anybody reconsidering commerce under capitalism take a look at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation for a living example of super-productive commerce and industry that employs tens of thousands without the baked-in inequality that drives so many social ills.
If the employee knows that at the time the offer is made, then why would they accept it?
Because it actually is the prevailing market rate for their role and they know that. Also, let's not forget that there is always a large risk when hiring someone, especially as in the OPs case where they are recently graduated. The value can't be certain, so businesses are conservative until it can be proven to be higher. This is logical and expected.
But, they don't. And there's also a large risk when taking a job, especially when one is recently graduated.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy this idea that the business, the entity with all the power in the relationship, is entitled to be conservative but no one else is.
It's another case of "if you want something, you have to pay for it".
The senior executives at my company are very responsible people, however, how could they be irresponsible? They make millions/yr, they have secretaries, and they a lot of autonomy in deciding how they should be judged. It'd be unusual for someone to be irresponsible in those conditions.
Meanwhile, worker bees balance sick kids, uncooperative coworkers, shifting priorities/deadlines, and taking the time to be price-conscious because they can't really afford to waste money. Is it any surprise that sometimes things fall through the cracks?
Sure, there are people who turn up on a tuesday and that's ill-advised. But presumably they're an at-will employee. If it's a problem, replace them with someone better. IF you can't find someone better at the same price, that's your sign that you're not paying enough for what you want. If you like the person, make the investment in their responsibility.
> The younger crowd seems to be largely detached from the idea of responsibility that was drilled into previous generations.
Previous generations had jobs for life. For a while now many companies have proved they don't care about the staff, and so it's not particularly surprising that staff don't care about the work.
I think what dionidium was getting at was he only had about 20% of the story and filled in the rest in an uncharitable way. If dionidium is not the manager of that employee, dionidium does not deserve or require an excuse or explanation. If they are the manager then this complaint shows a lack of management skills and/or poor office culture.
"I'm feeling sleepy and will be in later" is an employee being upfront and direct that they will not be productive and do not want to be the source of waste in the office. This is an employee that should be rewarded and encouraged. An office culture where this type of message is ok should be encouraged.
What you don't want is a toxic culture where everything needs to be explained and justified to an office full of scorekeepers and clock watchers. The people that do care are the ones that shouldn't care and should probably be minding their own business.
In dionidium's scenario it is very possible that employee worked it out with their manager and the message was a courtesy message. It is very possible they are tired from putting in a late night the night before. It is very possible they are tired due to "truly unforeseen and unusual circumstances."
Etc.
> How else will they know if you will make it to a client call early in the morning? Or meet that deadline?
I guess it boils down to a matter of trust. You've hired someone to get a job done. If you don't trust them to do it, fire them and replace them with someone you do trust.
The whole "you need to be in your chair at 9am daily because it's the only way I know you'll show up to client meetings and meet project deadlines" seems bizarre and gaslighty. Why not allow people the autonomy to do their job in a way that best suits them in terms of maximizing productivity? If someone misses a client meeting or deadline, that's the signal that you have a problem.
Maybe there are some engagement issues? Do people feel connected to the work and to their peers?
I've observed increases in this type of behavior when things aren't going so well.
When people feel like they are shipping software that makes a difference, they want to be there. If it's only this individual, then it probably speaks more to their behavior than anything systemic. But if it is others too, I would look more broadly.
Setting aside my particular company, your response is just more evidence of the culture change I'm talking about. Not every job is going to engage you or enable you to make the kind of difference you want to make in the world.
The notion that this is a valid excuse for telling your boss, "hey, pops, I'm not feeling engaged this morning, gonna be in later" is a new one.
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not. But it's definitely a different thing.
I think there is some truth to what we're both saying. At my particular company, the koolaid has always been about how innovate and exciting the work is.
But you get in and spend a lot of your time fixing bugs and working on old, monolithic codebases.
People want to make a difference, employers sell the vision, and then there's this mis-match and you have the disengaged worker.
I think the problem is the reality that most software jobs need skilled workers, but skilled workers are often seeking enough intellectual stimulation from their jobs to make a difference, and a lot of this work isn't the the type of life-changing envisioned.
> the reality that most software jobs need skilled workers
It's not just skill, it's also a level of creativity that one needs to do things like programming. And that creativity is often absent when the work is too boring.
A lot of people reading this have no doubt bought into this (conveniently flattering) idea that they're creative people doing very difficult work -- and surely some of you really are! -- but a lot of us are just connecting databases to javascript front-ends. It's not composing a symphony.
I assure you it can be done at 9AM when you're a little tired.
Whether or not you should have to be at work at 9AM is another matter, but this idea that you can't possibly get anything useful done unless you're in the zone has been oversold.
I think the problem is that starting in the mid-70s, companies have been continuously devaluing their human workers.
Before that, it was possible to take a job after graduation and stay with the same company until retirement. A worker's loyalty to the company was rewarded in kind, with the company's loyalty to the worker. People got raises and promotions. They grew roots.
Now, there is zero corporate loyalty. If you can't predict a profit for this quarter for your specific individual contribution, regardless of how hard you can work, you're fired. But you will come crawling back when we need you again, won't you?
The workers have responded. If the company stops making the work worthwhile, the worker will slack off or jump ship. If the company force-feeds its Flavor-Ade, the employees will just puke it up as soon as it's safe to do so. If the company tells baldfaced lies about itself, the employees smile and nod, while thinking about the rude gestures they would like to be making.
The "lack of engagement" is because the employees know that management cares about them not at all, but the forms must still be honored in order to receive the paycheck. In short, your company is bullshit and the workers hate it; they are just using it to get what they need and will ditch it the instant that a better deal comes along. We are all mercenaries now.
We will disobey whenever it's more convenient for us, and we think we can get away with it. Because the company executives are just our bosses, not our friends or our leaders or our prophets. If they fire us, we move on to the next bosses just like them. We're not going to bust our ass to earn them another dollar. Maybe if we are freshly fallen off the back of the turnip truck, we will go the extra mile, but it doesn't take long for those folks to learn. So the disengaged worker is the default. We learned from our elders, who were forcibly disengaged by their employers.
And since my fortunes are not tied to those of my employer in any meaningful way, I will not stick around to help bail out a sinking ship. If you're going down, I'm not even going to plug the leak and call for help. I'll just grab a lifeboat and be on my way, thanks. It will probably even be an even smoother ride, as I won't have to worry about any rising tides raising my boat.
The thing is, skilled smart people who don't mind spend their time fixing bugs and working on old codebase exist. Especially if the company allows them to have work life balance so that they can have hobbies or spend time with families and what not.
The problem is that a programmer described above would not be hired by your company and simultaneously wont recognize your company as a good place for him from job posting. Even admitting that you dont mind fixing bugs is other peoples code might make you sound as lesser programmer in current culture.
Otherwise said, there is mismatch between what companies need and what they reward.
If I'm cutting pulpwood or stacking boxes in a warehouse, it doesn't really matter whether my brain is engaged or not; it's mechanical labor and damn near mindless anyway[1]. But if I'm writing code and solving problems, and my brain isn't in gear, I can come sit at the desk for eight hours, but I'm not going to get anything accomplished, except building resentment for having to sit there at the desk for eight hours and look busy.
[1] Perversely, I miss burning wood; as a kid I cursed the woodpile, but its good exercise and you can get a lot of thinking done while you do it.
I don't believe I agree completely. While I think that productivity can be lowered substantially while not being engaged by a problem, I do believe one can push through and solve it.
I've worked in jobs I wasn't engaged by, was able to finish university (not fun), and am starting to get bored at my current job, but I can't leave just yet due to external circumstances. I believe character is a big part of it, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm posting to hacker news during work hours.
It's very weak of them to do that, but when HR lackeys pay lip service to 'work life balance' and 'work life integration', it's easy to see where people get the idea.
This is one of my favorite points of tension in business -
1) Businesses want people performing at their highest level
2) Businesses want people to work collaboratively without much latency
3) Businesses want to pay people as little as possible
In these high-concentration jobs, it's not unusual for people to be most productive at night. However, many people don't want to work at night so there's a cost to working with people during the best time for them. And businesses don't want to put up the money for people to justify a radical lifestyle alteration.
So everyone gives and takes and things work suboptimally but well-enough that no one terminates the relationship.
That's a perfectly valid company policy. What I think is different is that it's quickly becoming a cultural expectation in some cohorts, not merely an employee-friendly perk.
Because most companies have to offer that, now. Otherwise, in most cases, we can go somewhere else doing the same kind of stuff, but with a company that does offer that flexibility. As a bonus, I might get a raise for doing so, too.
I think it's more about the attitude of not being prepared. Someone who is prepared will go to bed early enough to allow them to show up on time without being exhausted.
That's just favoring the early birds. Go look at statistics on lack of sleep, and consider the massive health, productivity and creativity implications. Surely, you will not assert that a third of the population lack sleep because of attitude or responsibility issues?
What is an earlybird? Is it someone who is unambiguously physically hardwired to get up early? Or is it someone who has made the choice to implement the sequence of changes in their life necessary to facilitate comfortably getting up early in the morning?
I imagine both sorts of earlybirds exist, and I'd be interested in seeing how common each is.
I'm kind of the first type, I just wake up every day around the same time. I'm always ok in the morning (relatively no difference between getting 3 or 8 hours of sleep), but after lunch there is quite a difference depending on how much sleep I had the previous day. I have to make a decision and go to bed at the right time, otherwise I lose the next day's afternoon.
A bit OT, but I blame artificial lighting and (especially) in-the-home, always-available, on-demand, hyper-stimulating entertainment on glowing screens.
I once spent a couple weeks living only by candlelight after 8:30 or so, no screens. It's hard not to get enough sleep that way. You can still read, play board games/cards, write, study, play or listen to music, prep/cook food, talk(!), and tons of other stuff, but go figure, those things don't tend to keep one from going to sleep at a reasonable hour (you may be surprised at what's a "reasonable hour" for you when literally far more total entertainment than was enjoyed over any entire given year in the Imperial capital of Rome isn't available at your fingertips).
Netflix, cable tv that's on 24/7 (not my thing, but lots of people use their TV that way), video games, news feeds, mindless browsing, "who was that one guy in that one thing? Hold on, I'll look it up", what's Trump up to now? (better check!), a few thousand lumens of artificial lighting after the sun goes down, and so on... you'll put off sleep for those, maybe without realizing it ("it's not like I even feel tired yet", sure, but you would if you hadn't been playing Playstation or watching Netflix or scrolling through Facebook in a bright room for 2 hours straight, and if you didn't have the option of doing the same or similar for another two hours)
I really would like to see red shifted lighting + use of flux (or similar) on all devices compared in efficacy to more extreme no lighting what so ever. I personally have no felt a difference but I am wary of that being wishful thinking on my part as I don't want to cut out computer use.
Sadly, I think screen-focused media are much of the problem. Especially the unprecedented quality and quantity available now, with easier access than ever.
Having a window to all the world, a vast library both greater and with a worse SNR than any that's ever existed, more high-quality, unique audio-visual entertainment options than existed in entire major cities a mere couple of decades ago (let alone 50 years ago), hundreds of immersive video games tuned for "engagement" at best and outright addiction at worst (remember when games would eventually get frustrating/boring enough, or you'd get stuck and have no immediate way of finding a solution, so after an hour or two you'd be sick of playing and just want to ride bikes or something? Those were the days.), a direct line to answer any stupid low-value question that pops in your head, near-instant communication with everyone you know, and so on (mixed in with tons of manipulative advertising and such), all in your house, all of the time, is maybe not healthy for most people.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
I'm no early bird, but I can still keep a schedule if I must. I suffered years of waking up at stupid o'clock for public school, frequently sleep deprived, and that was back when I only knew about caffeine for helping to counteract sleepiness... These days I'm fortunate enough to be working for a geographically distributed team. I'm salaried. I can work from home when I want (and did almost all the time for 2 of my 3.5 years).
I generally come into the office around 10:30am, though sometimes it'll be 8am. I wouldn't mind coming in around 2pm and working into the evening, but I frequently need to work with other employees who have a more normal schedule, and I have an 11am standup so I have to be awake by then anyway. When I know I need to go to sleep, I pop a melatonin tablet and put on a sleep mask to block out light. When I first started, I forced myself to bed before 11 each night and made sure to be at the office before 9 each morning, until I observed that people didn't care about strict schedules.
There's an understanding that as long as I make the meetings I agree to (some are in person and require travel) and management is happy with my output, my schedule can be quite flexible. Some weeks will be less than 40 hours, some weeks will be > 50 because of some deep bug I just want to get over with. Some days I'll spend a bit too much time on HN or taking breaks to the snack kitchen, other days I'll sit down when I arrive in the morning and not stand again until late at night due to focus. It all tends to balance out. In any case when the lines aren't drawn clearly it's important to find out at what point the fuzzy boundary becomes solid. This "cultural shift" that OP was complaining about is just the new generation of employees finding out where the hard borders actually are, and discovering that at many firms they're a lot further back than they used to be and they can be pushed even further with a bit of pressure. I'm waiting to see someone show up to work in a fursuit, and wish there were an old-timer suited IBM employee there to witness it too. Many firms have realized that to a large extent, for many jobs what you wear simply doesn't matter.
At a previous job, I also had a pretty flexible schedule, but we tried to keep it "between 10 and 11" yet I kept coming in closer and closer to 11 all the time until a few times I was in after 11 and more than once I overslept and came in past noon. We changed it to "be here by 10 or we might have to cut ties". No further problems.
There’s a really big difference between providing coverage in an emergency and a butt being in a seat every morning. Every tech company I know of issues laptops that are taken home every night to production support employees for this exact reason.
Most developers are not in position where the client would have slightest idea when developer came in.
If you have regular hours long outages that require specific developer to come in and fix the code asap, you have huge mismanagement problem. The developers coming not in the morning is your least problem. Insufficient testing, apparently badly set up servers+application and most likely general mismanagement are primary problem.
Also, if you are in this situation, then it is reasonable to assume that your developers had to deal with similar outages in the middle of the night or during weekends.
There certainly was an element of punctuality that has been lost, but it goes both ways. Clients don't want to deal with this either: "Sorry it's 5:01pm. The dev will be back tomorrow morning. Enjoy being down for the next 16hrs."
I'm all-in for the kids these days sheesh comments, but if you think 'back in the day' workers had the constant availability expectation that we have in the modern era with cell phones, that's just factually incorrect. It wasn't only employees that reliably adhered to the schedule, it was also management. If that changes, both sides should accept the trade offs, otherwise you are expecting the employee to treat the schedule as sacred, while the employer treats the schedule as something which is changed on a whim.
Lazy unreliable people certainly exist, but they don't usually last that long in any role. Poisonous management practices that set people up for failure have a much longer shelf life and do more damage.
I'm happy to be at work at 9am on the dot, if my boss is happy for me to leave at 5pm on the dot, and not read any email or slack until 9am next morning. In my experience it is basically impossible in modern tech jobs to do that.
Seriously. Some companies want it both ways- constant access via email/slack/on call rotations, but a strict clock-out time of 5pm? "You aren't a team player."
So, so much this. I am really sick of the double-faced bullshit nature of companies extolling their work-life balance and then going nuclear when anyone exercises it. At some of my jobs it really didn't matter how much work you did during the commute or at home - no, what actually mattered was are you at your desk after 7pm showing your "dedication". You could've been literally watching /dev/random on your screen but it counted.
It's a tragedy of the commons, isn't it? If everyone left at 5PM, I'd be pretty tempted to stay till 6, for a chance to bond with management and get promotions faster.
In the 1940s most jobs did depend on coworkers being there. If even one person is missing the entire assembly line is down and nobody can start. As such being a minute late for work affects all your coworkers, it isn't just you have leaves at 5:05 instead of 5:00 it is everybody else you work with. And yes everybody did leave on time (or everybody worked late). Of course that means you hire extra people to cover people who are sick, but lateness cannot be tolerated.
Things are very different. My first meeting is at 9am, and nobody has any reason to care if I work 4am - noon or 9am-5pm, or more likely 8am-5pm with a one hour lunch break.
> Guys literally posting in company-wide Slack channels that they're "feeling a little sleepy this morning, gonna be in later."
That is primary advantage of flexible working time, which is something everyone up to now praised as huge improvement. I dont do that because I have family, but dont see a problem assuming a.) they work full time when you cont worked time and b.) I can come sooner as norm + leave sooner and not be punished for it by management assuming everyone gotta stay late.
> Can you even imagine somebody saying that to their boss in some black-and-white movie from the 1940s?
Movies are not representation of society as it exists. It is not true now and it was not true back then, especially because censorship back then was heavier and because 1940 was second world war time.
Notably, films could only present "correct standards of life" (for the times) unless the plot called for something else. Alcohol consumption, could not be shown unless the plot called for it. The law had to be respected and upheld.
I remember old movies from later eras where both white collar and blue collar dudes drunk on the job and were various grades irresponsible.
It may surprise you that many workplaces (mine included) are not particularly interested in butts-in-seats hours. Obviously you need to show up to your meetings, but if the work is done no one cares whether you work 8-4 or 11-7.
Maybe I'm lucky but that sounds like a bad place to work. I can show up any day or time I want as long as I work the total required hours and don't miss meetings.
Does my job pay me when I figure out a work related problem when I’m in the shower at 6am. Or for reading a random white paper at 2am? I’m not building car parts. My job is thinking and I literally do it every waking hour. I could care less if and when my coworkers show up as long as they’re getting work done.
Probably none [edit: in manufacturing]. Most illegal immigrants don’t work manufacturing. The three most common jobs for illegals around here are construction, yardcare, and building cleaning via nested subcontractors. Manufactures have hard assets they could loose. Sketchy subcontractors can just disappear and rename.
The growth is from the demand side - people are buying more right now.
> Probably none. Most illegal immigrants don’t work manufacturing.
You say that as if the jobs taken by illegals exist in some alternate universe where simple economic principles don't apply.
If an illegal immigrant's job is vacant (because he couldn't enter the country) and a would-be manufacturing worker fills that job, that obviously has a direct impact on the manufacturer's ability to hire that worker. He's no longer looking for a job because he filled a vacancy left by an illegal immigrant.
This makes little sense. Illegal immigrants usually occupy the least qualified and least-paid jobs. Few persons that are qualified to apply for a manufacturing would rather apply for a job that an illegal immigrant could get.
Do the illegal immigrants take those jobs because they pay so little, or do those jobs pay so little because there has always been a steady supply of illegal immigrants desperate to fill them at below-market prices?
If your business model relies on wages being suppressed by those illegal workers, then maybe your business deserves to go bankrupt when the supply dries up and Americans start demanding $15/hour.
First off, these businesses typically don’t “rely on” those wages, the owner is just taking a $20k bonus because they can and they like money.
Undocumented workers take the jobs because there is no financial incentive for an owner to risk breaking the law unless they are getting cash back. The worker is basically paying their employer to break the law.
>In some industries the labour shortage seems acute. Now is not a good time for Americans to remodel their bathrooms: tile and terrazzo contractors earn 11% more per hour than a year ago (and fully one-third more than in 2014).
This is exactly the type of jobs that have been flooded by immigrants from Latin America - both illegal and legal - for decades. I speak Spanish and often talk with immigrants at bars or wherever, and they work in numerous industries.
The one thing that changed my view of the whole system was realizing that absolutely no company gives a shit about the laws. Guys who had been here a year or less, couldn't speak any English, were hired for government contracting jobs on roads and the metro paying tons of overtime at near-union wages.
Also, labor markets are fluid. If a citizen can make more in construction, he might quit his shitty manufacturing job.
But, hey, anything to continue with the absurd narrative that massive immigration hasn't been a very major part of wage destruction for both blue-collar and also white-collar jobs via H1Bs, OPT, L1, etc.
You are right but there are other factors too. We've been pushing mediocre students through colleges at an exorbitant price when 30 years ago a lot of these people would have gone into the trades. Supply and demand plays into it domestically too. I agree that immigrants are filling the gap right now. Nature abhors a vacuum.
Those jobs are unskilled, so they are easy to learn even if you don’t speak or can read the native language.
Most traditional manufacturing jobs require being able to read/write the native language. Also, manufacturing companies are sometimes audited by standard bodies that involve interviews with workers (mainly to see if they understand quality control).
Isn't lower class work interchangeable to some extent ?
Less illegals to do construction means a larger portion of construction it will be done by legal employees, which reduces the available pool for manufacturing.
Construction is not particularly more interchangeable than programming. Inexperienced workers can do some tasks, which have been prepped by more experienced workers. A worker operating out of their depth will cause problems that cost 10x to fix.
In other words: you can fill part of your staff with interchangeable workers, but not all of it.
there is an SSN work-authorization test one has to pass when applying for most jobs. No SSN or SSN not authorized for work (all temp|visitor visas) - gtfo.
Source - been there done that.
The whole immigrant debate is so political now, it's hard to find any trustful source, including the stats put out by USCIS , DOJ, etc.
So if you want to know how the SSN game works for illegal immigrants, find some media who wants to paint it in a positive light, even if they have to admit that millions of workers use fake SSNs: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/undocum...
This comment (not by me; the poster name isn't even visible anymore):
> Illegal border crossings on the southern border are down 78% and blue collar wages are rising. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but when there are fewer available workers to hire/train and demand remains constant, wages tend to rise.
was marked dead. Why? Is the illegal crossing number wrong/fake news?
Whatever the crossing number is I don't believe it. There is too much incentive for the number to be artificially higher or lower. Politicians in border states want it low. Border patrol want it low. Feds want to show marked "improvement".
illegals dont have SSNs. EMployers have to run ssn verification before they hire you. These checks are instant and this will popup immediately. Can they still hire you - well maybe for janitorial -> manufacturing jobs I'd say highly unlikely.
This is definitely not the case. E-Verify has existed for a long time, but is still not mandatory [1].
Employers are supposed to have employees fill out an I-9 form that verifies employment eligibility, but the penalties for noncompliance are at most $1,100 per form -- basically slap on the wrist territory [2].
The irony here is that the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party is now in open conflict with the business wing of the party, which benefits heavily from hiring ineligible workers for low wages.
That comment is naive at best - do you really think that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the US can't find jobs? Why else would they be here, and why would their numbers dwindle during times of high unemployment?
If you really doubt that illegals can work in manufacturing, try googling for 'immigration bust factory', or similar stories.
You're right - you do need a valid name/SSN/birthdate. It doesn't have to be yours. And if a company wants to be disreputable, all they need to do is keep running them until they hit jackpot.
Because then they can claim that the other people were, uhhh, fraudulent. And this person passed their Everify. It's not like there's any proof that the Everify was run 10 times prior, to find a good name/ssn/DoB.
It's probably an overzealous enforcement of the Hacker News Guidelines[1], probably the portion that says "Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say."
With that said, I do feel like it is incredibly relevant to this post. From what I could tell, it's at least not a grossly inaccurate claim[2] and could partially explain the increase in lower class wages.
edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain why? What did I say that was inaccurate?
Given that they’re illegal, how could we ever know if the number is down or if they just found some other way to cross the border?
Also, it would be quite foolish to think there is only a single factor affecting wages. There are a multitude of factors, and a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants might be one of them, although it’s hard to be sure.
Across the entire economy, not blue collar. If you want to compare apples to apples, the data is running right there is the article we are already discussing, no motivated googling necessary :)
> Given that they’re illegal, how could we ever know if the number is down or if they just found some other way to cross the border?
There are surrogate measures that we can use.
Traffic numbers are a good one in Southern California. When there are crackdowns/bad economy, the traffic decreases markedly. Gasoline sales drop. Those are hard numbers that the state collects.
Money transfer services have to report. Those numbers are recorded.
Just because someone is illegal does not mean they have no impact. This cuts both directions: positive and negative.
Well I have something to share precisely about that.
Was in 2001 prior to 9/11 in south Indiana. I applied to a factory. And another one. And another one. Nothing. No bites. I then found work at a gas station Subway across the first factory. Our primary business were the factories.
9/11 happened. Within days, the factories shut down. We at subway were like "WTF happened?" Cause we were staffed like normal for rush.
Then we talked to one of the workers who stayed - there was a huge implicit threat that INS was going to make nationwide sweeps deporting all illegals. So, they left ahead of time. And "gee golly" the factories were now hiring and one said they had better wages.
Again, its correlation kind of.. Well not really. Supply and demand is a pretty hard rule. And when you have undocumented, working for less than minimum wage, and foregoing regulations on employees, is anyone surprised?
I know I understood the blue collar hatred of illegals. I've been on the receiving end of that. Not that its right, mind you- but understanding others viewpoints is the start of fixing them.
What you're talking of is skilled and state certified blue collar. Many in this area have legal government protections to do this work.
There's a whole class of blue collar under that. Line workers, food prep, factory pickers, non-medical health aide, framers, concrete pourers, roofers...
I know when my parents had their current house built, they had a bunch of hispanic people working on the house. When my parents went to take pictures, they beat feet to get out of any photo. My moms pretty sure they said something about INS. But who knows.
My parent's didn't care too much that likely "illegal to work peoples" were building their house. It was cheaper than the other options.
> I know I understood the blue collar hatred of illegals. ... Not that its right, mind you
Honest question: why not? I have a lot of members of extended family who have gone through a LOT of pain to become legal immigrants in the US, and they hate the illegals exactly because illegals have broken the rules that they have payed so hard to follow.
If an agent A sacrifices it's profits to follow the rules and agent B just violates them, why shouldn't A hate B? (You can imagine A and B being the company who sacrifices profits to follow environment regulation and another company who just forges emission tests, for example).
Calling a game "perverse" is a classic tactic too use when you're losing and can't own up to it. There may be "enough" resources – but they aren't yours to go anywhere. And freedom to do whatever you please with the things you own is the most fundamental human right of all.
> Calling a game "perverse" is a classic tactic too use when you're losing and can't own up to it.
Oh please. You damned straight it's perverse.
How is this not perverse when a director of an agency on aging has to tell elderly clients "Sorry, there's no more money for food this week." ?
How is this not perverse when homeless try to get shelter for the night, and are turned away because there's no beds?
How is this not perverse when we train upcoming high school students to agree to crushing scholastic debt with no recourse or bankruptcy protection?
How is this not perverse that we don't have a true medical system across the USA? Instead we tie it to employment, thus continuing the "Work or Die" ideal, quite literally.
> There may be "enough" resources – but they aren't yours to go anywhere. And freedom to do whatever you please with the things you own is the most fundamental human right of all.
Sure, I'll accept that for simple possessions. Clothes, personal effects, lodging, transportation.
But whereas you're talking of personal stuff, I'm talking about the top income whose top 3 people own collectively more than the bottom 50% of the world. I guess when you can afford to amass money, game the system, buy laws/legislators and rig everything, you do end up with more money. But "it was hard earned". Yeah, uh huh. Keep telling yourself that.
Capitalism fails for many. It succeeds for a very few, with most stuck in the cycle of "Work to live, live to work". It's not much different than a slave or indentured servant class where for the necessities of life; Instead of a single owner, I must find an owner who will take me in.
And if you fall through the cracks, it's almost impossible to move back up. I'm sure you can find a Horatio Alger story or 2. They're popular in this country.
Lose your job? You're not guaranteed a job.
Business closes? Too bad.
Area stricken with poverty because industry left? Well, too bad.
> Once again, if you fail, it doesn't mean that the system fails.
And I refuse the very premise you're working with. We're only as strong as the weakest members. And I see those members begging on the streets, or wandering around because of untreated psychiatric issues. Or they're living in tents off in the back part of the city park.
There's always going to be someone with more, for whatever reasons. But there should be nobody homeless. There should be nobody going hungry. There should be nobody without medical treatment.
I'm not going to budge on those issues. Higher rights exist building on TOP of the essentials. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Even YCombinator is doing a program/test on UBI. To pretend it's not an issue is completely absurd.
> The system's goal is not to make your life good. Why would it be?
Because, unless you're independently wealthy and can live on residuals for the rest of your life, you're only a few accidents away from destitution. We live in a world of plenty, but allow monied interests to amass it and control access. Why?
And that money can be used to buy influence and laws to further entrench themselves. That argument is "Its my money and I got it and you cant have it", regardless if it's illegal or paid-off "legal" means. This is the might-makes-right argument and principle. And it's time we re-evaluate if this makes sense. I have a feeling that most people will find it absurd, as I do.
What "we" are you talking about? These members are not my family members or friends; what you're doing is abusing other people's empathy to push your agenda through emotional means instead of rational.
> But there should be nobody homeless. There should be nobody going hungry. There should be nobody without medical treatment.
This is the R-libertarian aspect that uses the refrain of "You cant make me".
And I agree and disagree with you. Yes, we can make you, governmentally speaking. However there is a different way out: automation and robotics.
We could live in a society that we strive to make more and more automated solutions so that all can benefit. Solar means effectively free power. Food generation allows food to be made so cheaply that the cost is inconsequential. Transportation, same thing. (Yeah, you might not "have" a car, but you can summon one whenever you need.)
If you want to rehash old failure modes of capitalism, so be it. It's a 300 year old system that's bursting at the seams with failure modes everywhere. Communism isn't exactly much better - in that system you trade one master for another.
A mix of socialism, capitalism, and a healthy amount of automation would work. And the machines that produce essentials should be owned by all of us, with the benefits from these going to all of us.
That would maintain no forced working by people, maintaining freedom, AND cover the essentials of all citizens. No?
I think the vision you described is already a reality. Thanks to technological advances (incl. automation), a day or two of unskilled labor (in developed countries) earns you enough money to eat for a month. Compare that with the lives of farmers from before the industrial revolution, where they toiled for months and still often didn't produce enough to feed themselves.
>I know I understood the blue collar hatred of illegals. I've been on the receiving end of that. Not that its right, mind you- but understanding others viewpoints is the start of fixing them.
Of course it's right to hate people who have no respect for your country's laws and have a meaningful negative impact on your quality of life. You're trying to make it into a racial issue to excuse people who make life worse for blue collar workers. It's also why they hate politicians: they aren't making decisions that benefit blue collar workers. (Starting with NAFTA.)
> Of course it's right to hate people who have no respect for your
This crosses into political ranting which is definitely not what we want here. Thoughtful discussion, please, or nothing. We've had to warn you about this before.
The best word would be "understandable" instead of "right" because the intent was to explain their political perspective, but I was quoting the parent's matter-of-fact use of "right".
That's a fair point, but the larger issue is that your comment and others you've posted are in the genre of political/ideological battle, which is not what we want here. It destroys good conversation, which is what we do want.
That doesn't mean you can't express your point of view, just that you need to try an order of magnitude or two harder to do it with respect. This means respect for the ones you're talking to, for the ones who have reason to disagree with you, and for the community at large. That takes effort and practice, but it's an effort many of us have made, and it turns out to be pretty satisfying as well as a way to make the community better instead of destroying it.
So maybe the stupid deplorables were not that stupid and were actually acting in their own interest which is only fare. The pressure on wages and work places from the illegal immigration was huge and detrimental for the American working class. The people in coasts didn't care while parading some kind of moral superiority. Turned out Trump was right on the point.
I think the 78% number is dubious, but I've seen numbers in that range. It's based on apprehensions which is a proxy for estimating crossings. It's also been going down steadily for many years and hasn't taken any sharp turn recently. Border crossings also don't reflect total migration via all pathways.
I'd imagine the direct correlation is the ratio of US wages to Mexican wages. US wages have been poor for so long, migrants see less benefit. Migration might go on the upswing as wages rise and jobs are harder to fill.
I keep reading that AI is going to eliminate all the jobs. Yet unemployment is at record lows and wages are rising across the board.
Could it be possible that AI will instead free people to work on new jobs in new industries? Amazing! It’s almost like this time is not any different from any other time.
The last massive shift like this led to multiple world wars. Let's not pretend there aren't legitimate concerns about the impact of AI on society - unemployment numbers are only one part of the story.
There was a long lag between the time when companies invested in hardware and the time when worker productivity started really picking up. And a lot of the job reduction didn't happen in firings, it happened in not replacing retirements.
Unemployment lags behind productivity increases.
Productivity increases lag behind tech adoption.
Tech adoption lags behind innovation.
innovation lags behind technology maturation.
technology maturation lags behind science.
A lot of the transformation automation is in the "science/maturation" or the "innovation" phases.
Gig jobs are fine if people can provide their own emergency fund and pay out of pocket for their own benefits. That is, the difference between "gig job" and a "successful sole proprietorship" is how much money one makes.
Instagram/Square/Yelp/etc are freeing white collar workers to quit their jobs and start new businesses. The businesses add jobs directly, and the quitting creates a vacuum that causes increased job supply at their old wage and below.
AI will accelerate this massively, much faster than automation can take jobs away.
Long term it will lead to a crash in the highest paying jobs, as the market is flooded with workers who have management and tactical experience. Rather than a big spread between $10k-$1m, we’ll see a huge cluster of workers around $100k.
One way that Trump helped is that the illegal migration rate dropped as soon as he came into office. He scared people out of even trying. You've also got his halt to the ever-expanding regulatory environment and his opposition to the TPP.
Not a "dissenter" per se, just a rational human trying to draw connections:
In service positions, I could see a rise in wages attributed to those jobs that might have previously been filled with migrants.
I might see legal immigration also being discouraged, but to be honest that includes tourism from abroad which is shrinking and potentially having a negative impact on the service sector.
The only direct _policy_ link I can see is not a policy but rather a "business friendly" climate that might lead companies to start to invest more, understanding that they probably won't be taxed or regulated more heavily in the next 3 years.
That, plus cheap credit (a big overheat risk IMO) means opportunities for growth.
In terms of actual policy, I'd say not much has happened but rather the economy is now recovering from the housing crisis and growth has picked up again across the board. This was occurring before Trump, and will continue until another systemic issue occurs and people panic I'd imagine.
That said, in my opinion, Presidents rarely have much to do with economic outcomes except to either inject risk / instability with policy initiatives or pronouncements. Some big policies have costs, but most of the day to day impacts are quite spread out. There has been no action yet on health care or taxes that would influence employer direct costs. Perhaps some regulation has not been implemented and some executive orders rolled back, but nothing that would impact markets.
also the massive increase in stock prices, which some attribute to things trump might do. companies do act very differently when their stock is doing well - hire more employees, take on more projects, etc. when stock is down - lay off employees, cut costs
In the US, the president (wrongly) gets evaluated on the economy, as if he were the only one that controls it, and as if it responded almost instantly to his direction. It's false every time, whether praise or blame, whatever the party of the president.
In particular, in this case, the rise started before Trump assumed office, so it seems reasonable to say that no, he didn't cause it.
However, just to show that with the right zoom level, you can make data show you anything, look at 3 year graph, and it shows that up until Nov 2016, the graph was flat-lining, even with some large dips, but then it started going up and has been doing so since. I am sure Trump supporters will say "see, there's your cause!".
And maybe they are right somewhat. This is the stock market, so perceptions, and perceptions of perceptions of future income get folded into the price. So maybe a hope of a more business friendly environment was started to be factored in.
One thing I have little doubt of is that had the market done the opposite and gone down the same amount, every media outlet and Reddit's politics subs would immediately become macroeconomic experts and blame everything on Trump. The reason I say it is because there was a dip the night of the election, and I clearly remember how MSNBC hosts printed out after-hours and Japan stock market results on paper and happily were telling people how their 401k will burn, and jobs will be lost and how they, how had just had a major failure predicting the outcome of the election, had finally validated themselves regarding the stock market crash. But then the very next day the stock market shot up and has been going up since. That's why you don't really find them talking much about the economy. This was one of the surprising articles, and even that from a British company.
yeah i remember that election morning. upset liberals were saying how the market is going to be down 2000 points, etc and pointing to pre-market price changes. having invested before, I know you cant trust pre-market numbers at all, its extremely volatile.
i say that as a fly on the wall. i feel like i am outside some bubble where everyone flips out about the smallest things, and they forget that they did it at all. try asking people about how they flipped out about the premarket trading the day after the election and people are oblivious
No it won't last, because as soon as the wages start coming up then the fed will say "inflation is heating up" and raise interest rates, causing businesses to spend more on debt service and less on employees.
Higher rates only affects new issuances of bonds, rolling over of existing debt, or bank loans (which are a small fraction of the total debt market in developed economies).
The average maturity of a corporate bond is now 15+ years, and most bonds pay a fixed interest rate that doesn't vary due to current rates [1].
That means that any change to rates will not have much of an immediate impact on the interest expense line item. On the other hand, it will actually increase the interest income they receive on their cash balances.
Not to necessarily agree with the OP's prognosis, but the Fed rate also affects inflation which can affect the viability of every contract written in terms of dollars when it strays from where it's expected to be.
I agree that it won’t last, but I think exactly the opposite will happen: with wages going up, people will spend more money, which will increase the profits of businesses, who will use the profits to hire more people to keep up with the increased demand.
Retail shelf space is capital. If consumers empty shelves twice as fast, the return on shelf space-capital will double (assuming the markup doesn’t change). It’s not the Fed raising rates, it’s the market over-bidding the Fed.
If the Fed were able to stop these movements, our economy wouldn’t be as bubbly as it is.
The US has a long-term severe labor shortage that has already begun. There isn't anything that can stop that, including robotics / automation and artificial intelligence. There's nothing that can happen in the next 20 years, except for a protracted recession-like economy (or big crash), that can significantly ease up that labor shortage.
It's a matter of facts. The population growth rate is too low. The rate of retirement is too high (boomers exiting). Immigration is at modest levels versus the total population base. Almost any consistent GDP growth with those factors in play, will generate an extreme labor demand squeeze. It's particularly bad for blue collar jobs; the boomer generation is loaded with blue collar skills / trade persons, and they're exiting in droves.
Major economies with low population growth like Germany are able to maintain perpetually low unemployment with very modest growth. The US routinely grows 3x to 4x faster than Germany, including presently. It's obvious what the consequences of sustained 1.5%-2% (much less higher) GDP growth must have on the US when it comes to labor shortages from this point forward, when all the labor factors are taken into account.
There's a long queue of people around the globe who would be eager to move to the US to participate in the American labour market, if they could. So labour shortages are easy to solve, if there's political will.
I had a long talk with a guy getting his general contractor's license yesterday. He told me that down in San Diego they are continually short on construction workers, so much that one of his friends said that there is 10 years worth of construction that needs to be done and no one to do it. Wages at ~$45/hr, and probably rising, some projects paying perdiems for commutes from Orange County.
I always find it a bit strange when people talk about shortages of non-price-controlled goods and services. When you say that the industry is "short on construction workers", there's an implicit "who will work for what we used to pay them." It seems to me like it's someone who hires in that industry trying to entice more talent to come help lower the price again, rather than an accurate description of the state of the world.
To be sure, bona-fide shortages can occur transiently. For example when a natural disaster happens, it will take time for the local tradesmen to work through the backlog. But at a relatively steady state, it seems silly to talk about a shortage of construction workers. Pay a bit more than the next guy, and my guess is, your shortage will quickly disappear.
You can't just create 100,000 new construction workers in San Diego because you raise wages from $45 to $60 per hour.
Labor availability + skill + time + market awareness = it takes a helluva lot longer than months or 2-3 years to meaningfully boost a skill trade.
Labor availabity means: how many people - heavily influenced by the unemployment rate - are interested in putting in the time to go retrain themselves to do a new job. Many people will not kill themselves to do so, if they're making $45/hour and you tell them the upside is $60/hour. A deep level of comfort sets in for a large percentage of the population once you get to $30-$45 per hour.
Skill means: it takes years to train someone to an appropriate level at being a professional anything, whether we're talking roofing or plumbing.
Time means: well, it simply takes time to rotate large numbers of people into blue collar jobs. The whole process takes a lot of time, from start to finish. There's only so much that can be done to speed that process up.
Market awareness: it can take years for people to believe that blue collar work demand is going to be sustained (history say otherwise, and people know that such work is often inconsistent; and they know that the downturns are brutal). It can take years to get the word out in just a mid-size city like San Diego, that there is high demand. It requires new entrants to take risk, which most people do not like doing. To be convinced to take a life change risk if someone is even remotely comfortable, the reward has to be extreme in most cases.
I believe the trick is the following: if wages increase from 45 to $60/hr, a lot of the planned constructions no longer make sense financially, and are abandoned.
Shortage at what price? There’s always a shortage of bread for people willing to pay 1 cent per loaf, and never a shortage for people willing to pay $10.
One could argue that, while you think you’re experiencing a shortage, reality is that you’re simply not willing to pay enough.
Which gets right to the point. Bread supply is elastic,you could quickly set up shop and produce more bread to satisfy demand whereas skilled labor is highly inelastic. Training, gathering hands-on experience, it's all a time-consuming process so there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it
> there's a long time delay between when demand rises and when supply can rise to meet it
Yes, exactly. The demand curve shifts right and the markets find a new equilibrium (most likely at a higher wage than the old equilibrium), but there’s no “shortage”. It’s just markets clearing at a different price level than what people are used to.
Calling it a “shortage” is like saying every time Starbucks raises their prices there is a shortage of coffee — at the old price, sure, but not in absolute terms. That’s not how equilibriums work.
A. Takes time for new workers to be adequately trained.
B. Takes even longer to get people that have been raised to look down on the trades to change their worldview and all of a sudden consider working with their hands, no matter how much money is involved.
You do not normally get a shortage in the labour market because as price goes up, the appeal of hiring someone goes down. As you would expect, the formal definition of shortage is not "not being able to get what you want", a shortage is defined as "a situation where an external mechanism, like government regulation, prevents price from rising."
There are real cases of shortages in the labour market. Where I live, the law defines a fixed rate for doctors. Even if I had all the money in the world, I could not legally pay more than my neighbour to employ the services of the doctor in town. Here, a shortage is a real possibility as there is no monetary way to decide who gets the appointment with the doctor. But these tend to be exceptional cases.
Without that legal requirement, I could simply offer more than my neighbour to get the appointment and the neighbour would have to choose to go without seeing the doctor. There is not a shortage in that scenario as the neighbour was not in the market to begin with. This is the same reason we don't say there is a shortage of Ferraris, even though the vast majority of people will never be able to get their hands on one, no matter how much they wish they could have one. They are simply unaffordable to most people.
It really doesn't matter how long it takes to train someone. As long as the price is able to rise, the business who really need the existing people will pay more, taking them from the businesses that cannot afford them, until everyone who still needs that service is fulfilled.
But certainly somebody would weld for 10k an hour, and therefore the person willing to pay that will have as much welding labor as they need, and everybody else will have to match that price, bamboozle their workers into taking less, or find some way to complete their project with fewer welds.
If there was a shortage of pilots and you "happily" offered to fly me safely to my destination for $100k, I'd happily ask the security personnel to escort you off the plane. Nobody is flying that day, and your naive idealism can't change that.
If you see two loaves in a store that are basically the same kind, you normally won't think too hard about which one you pick. As mechanical and indifferent as some hiring processes are, they don't approach that level of indifference.
Technically, a shortage is defined as a situation where price is unable to rise due to an external mechanism, such as government setting a price ceiling. As long as you have an opportunity to pay more, there cannot be a shortage. Rather demand for the given product/service shrinks.
That's not a shortage. That's just a time lag. It would be a shortage if nobody trains to become a construction worker because of price controls like minimum wage or maximum wage in an alternate universe.
How is that not a (temporary) shortage? When did it become part of the definition that all shortages must be permanent?
What if nobody trains to become a construction worker (for whatever reason) and then over the next 5-10 years demand goes down because people get used to making do with the buildings that already exist? Is it also not a shortage then?
In my very limited personal experience, it's not that hard to get a worker to come do a job on my house. It is EXTREMELY hard to get someone who actually does quality work and is reliable. You could argue that I'd get better and more reliable people if I paid them more, but the fact is, I pay them what they ask for. I have very low confidence that just offering to pay double would make a bad worker into a good one.
Consumer services aren't really the point being made upthread, it's employers looking for supervised labor who can tolerate some spread in skills.
But you can do this too: call up the elite contractors who you can't schedule because they're "too busy" and give them a big number upfront. "I need my carpets replaced, I figure this will be $30k, does that sound right?". They'll be there.
But you have to do the work to know what the right wages are. Employers already know this stuff, obviously.
If someone called me up and said, "I've got a software development contract opportunity for you in Country X, $1000/hr, job should be about 6 months." My ass would be on a plane that afternoon. So much for the shortage of software developers.
However, there's quite a lot of friction hiring unknown software developers (so I guess that's why I don't get those offers - I'm not actively hunting for them).
I used to hire temporary workers all around the country as part of my job as GM of a small travelling pro sports league.
I always found that there is some "market price" where people are decent and paying less gets you less quality and paying more tends to get you better quality.
Specific example: we needed security guards for an event in Las Vegas circa 2006.
* $150/day got us off duty professional guards who were fantastic
* $125/day got us college kids/retired folks who were pretty good
* <$100/day high school kids or people with questionable backgrounds who were usually terrible
I remember Joel Spolsky saying something like "You don't always get what you pay for but it's true enough of the time to be a useful phrase"
For perspective, the going wage for a skilled (journey level) carpenter in the SF Bay area is essentially the same today as it was in 2005 (the last time I was part of the labor force). This is from a quick survey of Craigslist ads. If anything, the real wage seems to have decreased.
Apart from "packing donuts" type jobs, most jobs require some degree of knowledge and skill. Some jobs have higher knowledge half-life than others. While IT has notoriously short knowledge half-lifes, construction has rather long half lifes.
Suppose that we train x+y construction workers a year, x work in the industry until retirement, y - retrain to different profession. This means that there are y*years dormant specialists that can be brought back to industry.
Construction is becoming more and more specialized. There are many machines that need to be operated, together with regulations it requires high skilled people.
>> "Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all)"
Don't kid yourself. Those new hires are at other jobs making more money. I am booked for a roofer in feb 2018 (fingers crossed - friend of a friend). Blue skills are in extremely high demand. And those guys are working extremely hard making really high incomes (400k+). These guys are highly paid and are not messing around -- most saw 2008. They drive nice trucks, own their company, have rude secretaries and wont look at your email until feb 18 (fingers crossed). Look at a blue collar guys' current circumstance: no competition (know anyone learning HVAC?), a HUGE housing boom in cali, pass through low tax income, 2k homes burned (wtf), no outsourcing (try outsourcing a plumber) -- as my mentor said: "Harvest time".
This reminds me of the observation[1] that most applicants for programming positions can't implement FizzBuzz. This has led some to conclude that the majority of programmers would be stumped by the task, but it is more likely that such programmers are overrepresented in the applicant pool.
This is exactly the issue. It’s not that all $manufacturing_demographic have issues showing up up, working, or are doing drugs, it’s that the pool has been almost picked clean of those who don’t.
So we have filtered 0.5% "elite" passing FizzBuzz, what shall we do now? Those need CV crafted in LaTeX, maintain public repositories, have fluency in latest frameworks and APIs, demand moderate salary... wait... nobody's left. SHORTAGE! Teach EVERYONE programming!
I can't even get companies to send me FizzBuzz or any coding test when applying to remote jobs. I'm not sure they even see my application with the flood of applicants they get.
I always read these ridiculously high salaries and laugh. Your average HVAC worker is not making $400k. I do know people in construction/HVAC/plumbers/electricians and it's the bosses making that money, not the grunt workers. The people on the front lines still make good money, for some easily approaching $100k/year, so there's not really a need for embellishment. That isn't to say that it's unattainable, but it's akin to saying that software developers make $400k/year when it's usually 10-20+ year tenured engineering managers at a few specific companies actually making that much.
That's an even more specific case, because again, most software developers aren't working at Google/FB/Airbnb/Uber/Snap. And those are figures for experienced workers to boot, and "Staff Engineer" is typically a managerial role IMO, if not directly by delegation/HR-type stuff, then in a technical sense.
The total comp is in practice also generally a bit lower because most of those companies backload the vesting
“Staff Engineer” is about halfway up the technical career ladder in many places, with a few possible (but increasingly rare) levels above, and a few levels below. Someone promoted to staff engineer likely has at least 5 years of work experience (probably more) and is self-motivated, good at their job, gets along well with their coworkers, and has some technical vision.
Many of these people might have some quasi-managerial duties (interacting with other parts of the organization, helping with recruiting, ...), get roped into more meetings than they would like, or make high-level technical decisions and delegate work to a handful of more junior engineers, but most of them are sitting at their desks writing code a significant part of the day (or perhaps rewriting the schlocky code that the junior engineers just handed in).
I think it depends on the company. I was extrapolating from my own experience but I realize it may not be the same elsewhere. In my experience Staff Engineers were almost always at least 10 years-experienced. I might be wrong about those companies I mentioned, though, because I've never worked at any of them
Also keep in mind I said "usually" in my original comment. Blue collar labor and software engineering are not directly analogous because yes, there are software developers at the high end that are making a lot of money compared to some of the best blue collar workers. But it's still only a small percentage of them making that much, and I wouldn't mention those figures to someone looking to go into software for that reason
I've worked for 2 well known software companies and what you are describing is a Senior Engineer in both (5-10 years experience).
The place I am now starts fresh grads as Engineer I, then Engineer II, Senior Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect and then Staff Engineer. Each promotion takes about 4-5 years so you aren't reaching Staff until about 20 years. A Staff Engineer is basically fully autonomous and is an IC that reports directly to the executives. They work on what they want and with who they want.
I understand this is different at Google and I guess Staff is the equivalent to a Google Fellow.
I'll never see 400K, not even if I do tons of overtime through my own S-Corp. If you can do that, I'd like to know how. 200K is hard enough and not easy to maintain.
$400k is what senior executives of major multinational companies get paid. It's also what top surgeons get paid.
I highly doubt that blue collar workers get anywhere near that much. If they did, everyone would try to work in that industry because the barrier to entry is comparatively very low.
Senior executives get paid much more than that in stock (which is how these top-paid software people get most of their money too), also $400k is just a slightly above average surgeon, not a top surgeon.
If you read my comment, I'm not really talking about blue collar workers, but more people who used to be bluecollar workers but eventually became small business owners of companies employ blue collar labor. My cousins who used to be electricians can easily make $250k/year by employing a team of <10 electricians to do the manual work. $400k/year doesn't seem out of reach at all, and they might get that just by moving business to a higher CoL area than the suburban South
So you're talking about businessmen, not workers. Businessmen are doing well across the board. It doesn't much matter what they did before they were businessmen.
They absolutely do, but not at entry level. They're the ones who have been doing it for ages, break off to start their own business doing it, and hire people to work for them, and the cycle begins anew. Nobody's doing it because the last 20 years kids have been told that college is the One True Path to being successful and that the trades are for people who can't hack it there. It's hard work and long hours before you really start to get crazy high earnings, but you get there.
Top surgeons? My girlfriend’s cousin is a new doctor in Texas and makes a decent amount >$400k as a brand new doctor at a hospital.
“””
The salary figures fall short of numbers reported by other survey groups: a Medical Group Management Association report using 2010 data, found that the average compensation for radiologists was $471,253 and for pediatricians it was $192,148, Kaiser Health News reports.
“””
No wonder you spend enormous amounts of money on health care in the states. In Norway most doctors makes just above $100,000. I guess this is more or less comparable to the rest of Europe.
Doctor pay has almost nothing to do with the absurd medical costs. With 1.1m doctors in the US, and median pay at 180k, that's $200B. US healthcare spending is 3.2 trillion. Beyond that, I think they deserve that much when factoring in the cost of education, liability of the job, and decrease in years of employment.
- Median doctor salary: They usually earn around 150k total during their residency, and the median is around 180k beyond that (typically age 30+)
- MD lifetime earnings = 150k + 180k*33 = 6.09m.
- MD education debt is typically around 500k, adjusting earnings to 5.59m. Accounting for hours worked, MD equivalent lifetime earnings are 3.72m.
I mean no disrespect to the work ethic of any blue collar job, but do you really believe the guy who cured you of cancer isn't worth the extra 600k over their lifetime compared to the guy who dropped off your replacement phone charger?
Some other data which tells a different story; I wonder how it all reconciles:
In the United States, the richest 1 percent have seen their share of national income roughly double since 1980, to 20 percent in 2014 from 11 percent. ...
No other nation in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is as unequal among those with comparable tax data, and none have experienced such a sharp rise in inequality.
...
Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.
The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians ...
The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately.
Income is not the same as wealth, and income is irrelevant if it doesn't turn into wealth.
My father is a doctor and he finished paying off his education at 48. I make half what he made and finished paying mine off at 28. I'm drastically more wealthy now, and will be wealthier when I retire. This seems strange given the significant difference in income.
1980 is a very peculiar data point to mention. That year is pretty much exactly when minimum wage and tuition suddenly diverged. Between 1965 and 1980, A full time summer job at minimum wage could consistently pay for ~45% of your tuition. In the next 15 years, it dropped to around 20-25%. Running the numbers for 2017-2018, in-state tuition is 20%, out of state is 11%, and private is 8.6%.
The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians ...
With all that in mind, this statement doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If education prices have skyrocketed, shouldn't the career that spends the most in education (both time and cost) be compensated accordingly?
Point being, income is only half of the equation to wealth. That article doesn't bother mentioning debt at all.
If what you're quoting is what you are actually responding to, you've missed the point. That quote is a comparison between a UPS driver and a Doctor, not a Doctor in the US and one in Norway. If you're trying to compare countries, you're not paying twice as much once you account for what goes into achieving that income.
When I search for salary data for tower crane operators online, it says the salary is around $30k per year.
It sounds like you have to network hard and get very lucky to get that 500k per year salary and it probably doesn't last forever.
I've heard several stories from older people who said that they were earning ridiculous amounts at some point in their lives but it only lasted a couple of years and then their salaries dropped back to average ranges once their contract ran out and started working for normal companies again.
Salaries don't necessarily keep going up based on experience.
It’s not all that unusual for the grunt workers to put in their time and become the boss. Out where I live, there are lots of really big houses near the water with vans and dirty pickup trucks out front.
Where can one go to learn these "blue collar" skills? As a recent home owner I'm learning first hand how valuable these skills are by way of my wallet. Seems like most people I meet who do these kinds of jobs were "born into it", and learned by helping a family member who was already in the industry. Are there IIT type schools which teach these kinds of things on a part time basis?
For a great many, youtube is surprisingly awesome. My normal approach to home DIY now is to watch as many youtube videos of the process I want to try as possible, then make a determination if it is something I still want professional help with or can try to do myself.
Agreed, I renovated basically my entire condo using this process, hiring out the jobs that looked unreasonable to try and do myself. I was able to do quite a bit though, youtube is awesome for this.
There is a inverse relationship on youtube DIY remodel videos. The better the video quality, the worse the advice and vice versa. Many of these 'experts' are more interested in video production (and possibly revenue from it) than they are knowing about actual building codes and practices.
YouTube is awesome for DIY, I moved to older house two years ago and with youtube helps I've added crown moldings, repainted all rooms, replaced baseboard, built patio, deck - lots of fun, I think without youtube I wouldn't done any of it, zero experience before. Funny, my dad did a lot of renovations, and a lot of times I'd get more details/better tips on youtube than asking him :)
But youtube is great for common DIY projects - how to add crown molding - tens of really good detailed videos. But if project is less commonly done by DIY folks, not that much info - I've needed to replace exterior window trim - not that much, people usually hire for that.
DIY subreddit is also a good place to search and ask questions.
Would you say, for example, your painting is good as a professionals (e.g., paint lines are straight with respect to adjacent walls / ceiling, etc)? As someone who anticipates being a homeowner in a few years, I wonder if it's possible the first time you learn how to do something (without having the best technique for the skill) to get the best outcome.
I wouldn't want my home improvement projects to look half-assed just because I wasn't experienced or knew the "best practices" for the given home improvement task.
I think you'll find that it varies by the job and your own personal level of "halfassed".
I can do most home maintenance stuff - electrical, most plumbing, fixtures, appliance repair, etc. I pay someone to do drywall work or painting - because I'm pretty picky and I can always see where my work falls short.
I think you'll find for finishing work practice makes perfect and is where professionals shine. You can certainly do professional quality work, but expect a learning curve and to be re-doing sections of projects that don't turn out too well. I know several homeowners who have re-done bathrooms themselves, and only one would I say turned out professional looking in quality. That guy is simply a perfectionist who spent an inordinate amount of time on the project.
Yeah, I'd imagine as a homeowner, I'd want projects (at least those where the outcome matters visually), to have that professionalism.
I kind of would want to be a bit further up the learning curve, but if you only have 1 or 2 bedrooms, you don't have much by way to learn, so it seems like having a professional is probably worth the premium vs. your own labor (if you're like me and highly value the aesthetic end result).
My painting (imho) is better than most professionals. I am not time or quality constrained, as I'm not running a business.
I can buy good paint, brushes, and tape. I can take my time, I can let paint dry over multiple days, do touchups, keep properly mixed cans (mixing two cans of the same color into one).
There are two aspects to being a "professional" tradesman.
1) Do it _better_ than others
2) Do it profitably
#1 is something you as an individual can overcome with practice, #2 is generally a hard constraint which sometimes compromises the goals of #1.
Well it all depends, how good professional is, how much time you spend and how much you care about details.
From my experience comparing to the jobs my nieghbord/friend had done by contractors - I can do better :) Though they didn't hire expensive contractors, I'm sure there professional who can do much better. But as mentioned in other comments, for average contractor time matters and they don't pay attention as much as you can. So if you care about details a lot and can't/don't want to hire expensive contractors, better do yourself.
Painting is especially easy, if you screw up some spot, you can always return and repaint (worst case you'll have to do that couple times :)) Painting equipment is (relatively) cheep, you can cover floors with plastic covers/blue tape and don't worry about screwing floors/doors while you learn :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNagIA8sKY0 watch these videos and you'd be ready to start.
Cutting wall/ceiling line by hand is not that hard (the video has a trick), there're also "helper tools" for cutting lines in home depot/lowes. One trick is that if you go with light color on walls, perfect line with white ceiling doesn't even matter, you won't notice small deviations anyway.
If have doubts in your own skills (I did), try starting with closets and bedrooms. Only then move to living rooms/kitchens. If you screw up closet or your bedroom - it's not that of big deal. Though if watch above video series, it's really hard to screw up too much.
Agreed. I just tore down an old chimney, ripped out the wall, replaced the floor, the wall, put in a big window, fixed the section of the roof, and put in a new wood stove. Just youtube and google search to figure most of it out. I did have to "phone a friend" a few cases, but that could have been done on a forum with greater latency. I figure that I saved a lot of money doing this myself.
Community colleges and stores like Lowe's or Home Depot often have classes like this, but honestly, with the web, it's easier and easier to teach yourself these days. I wouldn't bother paying for instruction unless I was aiming to become a professional.
My suggestion is two fold. First, personal experimentation on an inexpensive basis. You can buy a lot of basic, cheap materials and tools, and practice specific types of work. You can teach yourself very easily with weekly practice, how to do any type of household work, from drywall to plumbing. Most of it is not difficult, it requires practice and mental effort over time. You get better and better at it. The point is to practice on things you can destroy at low cost, rather than feeling intimidated working on your actual property and fearing causing a big bill via error.
The second is, find people you know that do blue collar work, whatever it happens to be (whatever you're wanting to learn). For example, I know a few guys that work as unlicensed handymen, most of them are quite skilled at what they do, they just frequently work under the table. Pay them for their time to speed up your learning process on specific tasks.
Yeah, it's like most things. "Experience is the name we give to our mistakes."
I tend to focus on the types of tasks that I'll have occasion to do many times, such as painting and/or things that may just not look as good as if I hired someone to do them but won't cause any real problems if they're not quite right. I agree that it's mostly just putting the time and effort in--and, of course, there are only so many different things most of us can put our own effort into.
Community college. It's cost effective and a great way to get your feet wet. I took a welding class at my local, and couldn't believe how cheap it was.
Online! We are building Tradeskills.io to make it easier for people to explore and learn trade skills online. I would love to hear more about the types of things you are now interested in learning since purchasing a home! I can be reached at ryan@tradeskills.io
Never do anything by yourself which requires a permit (HVAC, Plumbing/Gas, Electrical), unless w.r.t. electrical it's low voltage boxes covered by standard switchplates with the breaker box off.
Never do anything structural/load-bearing. Avoid touching window-headers/columns, door-headers/columns, that random beam in the middle of your living room, that random pillar that you wish you know what was for, and that really inconvenient wall between your kitchen and your dining room (those are likely "important" points).
Other than that, paint... sheetrock... siding... sheds... trim... cosmetics... run wires... drill (some) holes... attach things to things... it's your house!
I learned the most by watching Income Property and Holmes on Homes.
You can do simple plumbing and electrical stuff yourself. Just shut off the main valve or circuit breaker, change out the fixture (light switch, outlet, lamp, faucet, etc) and turn things back on. As long as you are careful to put wires back in same place it should be fine. And there are plenty of videos on Youtube to guide you.
Pretty sick of this, really. I know it's meant to stop idiots from doing work that could endanger them and others, but I've serviced my own boilers, installed my own sockets for years and even laid out the electrical for a whole house.
Now some dickwad comes and tells me "man, that is illegal". k
No one ever prevents you from doing your own work, it has never been illegal. You just need to get the permits and pass inspections (just like all licensed electricians / plumbers / etc do).
> I know it's meant to stop idiots from doing work that could endanger them and others
Yes, and it's a lot bigger problem than you might think. You know what you are doing, but 99% of people don't, and they will happily murder the next owner / next occupant through their own malpractice, without even thinking once about it. I've seen professional home builders screw this up and fail inspections, multiple times. It's a real and common risk.
Language, please. Also consider the context: "I just bought a home, I don't know what I'm doing!"
That is _not_ the person I want working on a gas line (which is "plubming") on a house I'm going to buy in the future.
I'm sure you're a special little snowflake that's good at everything, but if you don't feel comfortable getting a permit for permit / license-required work, then... um... maybe you shouldn't be doing it? That's the context for the advice I gave to the parent poster.
Easy to do electrical yourself. I guess it depends on where you live but a self-wire permit just needs you to walk through your plan and get a couple inspections. It's intimidating for sure but it was really easy to wire my basement. It might need some years of school/experience to do a whole house but once you do one light/switch/outlet they are pretty much all the same.
You should learn basic plumbing and electrical if you own a home. Not only does it save money, but it gives you freedom and allows you to evaluate the quality of work done by professionals you hire.
If you want to go the low-commitment route, a lot of makerspaces have plenty of equipment for building / making activities and offer classes in subjects as diverse as TIG welding and sewing.
You can get them by watching youtube videos. I re-roofed my own house (I simply couldn't afford to hire a crew). After the job was done I compared to other houses in my neighborhood - my roof had straighter lines and looked better than any roof I could find.
I had two bad experiences hiring contractors. I eventually decided that I could make my own mistakes, cheaper, and actually learn something in the process.
First step is to read What Your Contractor Won't Tell You [WYCWTY] https://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Contractor-Cant-Tell/dp/097... I wish I had this book before I started. Practical advice from a person who has remodeled 100s of houses. With checklists of things I didn't even know to ask about. I now buy this book for everyone I know thinking of having some work done.
By analogy, WYCWTY is like the Rapid Development and Code Complete type books. It covers that middle gray area between code construction and project & product management. Practical methodology, if you will.
Next, buy every book, watch every video. The best construction books (for me) come from Journal of Light Construction. Their field guides are spendy, so I snagged them thru camelcamelcamel. Also buy some fairly recent code books. Just keep reading, watching, experimenting until understanding.
Next, find local tradesmen who are willing to do side work. There are a lot of very qualified people who are happy to do spot work for cash. For the people I hire, I'm their gopher, cleaner, extra pair of hands. They're taking time away from their families, so I try to make it as painless as possible for them to help me.
Yes, the videos are great. But I've learned more from watching and helping. Two recent examples. #1 I had my guy rehang a new door. OMG. When I tried it myself, I had done everything wrong. This pro rehung the door faster and more true than I would have ever figured out on my own. I have 3 more doors to hang and now I know I'll get it right. #2 I also had a pro come in and hang then mud drywall. OMG. I had done everything wrong. This guy had some many tricks of the trade. Despite reading the books and watching the videos, I had never seen drywall hung before. I totally made a hash of it.
Lastly, buy all the tools, same ones contractors use. For example, I had lot of framing to do, so I bought a Hitachi nailer, the recommended compressor, etc. Now when a tradesmen shows up, I have the proper tools (makes everything easier). Plus, when I finish my remodel, I know I can get most of my money back. Overall, cheaper than renting or buying non-pro gear.
You'll waste a lot of time and money doing things yourself. But if you've got the stomach for it, I think you'll come out ahead. Teach a man to fish and all that.
I don't think roofers are good example, not sure where you live, but last summer I got roofers scheduled in a week (Boston area). By locally known construction company, I got estimate and contract by American owner/sales man - he probably does well, but the actual work was done by Brazilian crew, which I'm guessing was mostly illegal immigrants likely paid less than minimum wage. From my observations with neighbors and friends, all roof work done in the area is by Brazilian crews (I don't know why Brazilian specifically, but that how it is). Good luck competing wit them.
Another anecdote example is small framing company owner (originally from Russia), mostly hires illegal Russian immigrants who work for near minimum wage. The owner may do well, but not the rest of the crew.
> the actual work was done by Brazilian crew, which I'm guessing was mostly illegal immigrants likely paid less than minimum wage
There are millions of immigrants in the U.S. who are legal; why would you think these people are not? I guess my point is, it's not a good assumption and has bad consequences: People having their legality questioned based on no evidence.
legality questioned? come on, of course it's not good to assume anything about people, lots of things happen in life. That doesn't mean I had to go ask each of them to show me their documents, so I can make a guess on internet forum.
On one hand, I understand that people don't want to be challenged or to write dissertations for casual conversation. On the other, we know that misinformation spreading through 'internet forums' in the form of 'guesses' is a problem, that HN isn't a typical internet forum, and that 'guesses' are often challenged here.
My step dad was a roofer when I was growing up. He was the one that did the estimates and found the business and he had a crew of immigrants that did most of the work for him. They earned far above minimum wage. They made $15/hr, under the table, in the early 90s when minimum wage was under $5/hr. Even the grunt roofing work is semi-skilled and paying more allowed him to keep the same crew together over multiple years so he didn't have to constantly retrain. Even his supervisor role was backbreaking work that left him exhausted after 12-hour days. His crew would have found other minimum wage grunt work to do if the money wasn't good. Plus, the margins on jobs were so high that it didn't make sense to be chintzy (he'd net around $4k on a week-long job after the cost of labor and materials). But it was seasonal work so he'd only get 10-12 jobs in per year and spent the rest of the year being an artist.
I can't say how many crews are run like his was, but I also don't think it's fair to assume that all those guys are making next to nothing. The roofing season is so short and the money good enough that I'd bet that having someone you trust to move fast while maintaining quality would be worth a significant amount over minimum wage. Having worked with him on my summer breaks in high school, it took me a full season to get to the point where I was even close to keeping up with his regulars. I'd also bet the money being pretty good, not bad, is why you see groups of the same ethnicity working together since they probably recruit and train each other whenever there's a vacancy.
From my anecdotal experience, a lot of recent immigrants (legal or illegal doesn't matter) don't know English and it takes them time (some times many years) before the can work in English speaking environment. Naturally such groups of same ethnicity are formed, and typically are the only work option for new immigrants (who don't speak English). This also means they are paid less, as have limited job options.
I'm not sure if I understood correctly, that your dad's crew was mostly immigrants, why do you think it was like that? If pay was good and semi-skilled (easy to train), why mostly immigrants?
He probably could have found Americans to do the work, but I think he preferred immigrants because they were more willing to get paid under the table. He wasn't trying to dodge taxes, he just hated complexity and filling out forms. He was an artist who learned to see roofs as art and fixed them as a concession to needing money that he never could earn from his painting and photography. I think he was paying enough to find Americans, but not enough to find Americans who would stay with him for years, especially since it was seasonal work and they'd need other work during the rest of the year. Continuity and quality were also really important to him and he wanted people he could trust.
Wow as an engineer with a master's degree in LA you top out at around 100k which after taxes leaves you with barely enough to make rent. Can't be a housing boom here the locals are being displaced at lightening speed. I have 20 years of experience and a master's degree and I struggle to afford both rent and food but I work 100 hours a week for 40 hours pay to not be laid off. These guys could be making 400k in a union job, and not working that hard for it. We build the future but are allowed a life where we barely hang onto survival in California.
As an exception that’s not a counterargument: in the 90’s, the galvanized-to-copper repipe plumber (and helpers including a son) whom did the house I grew up in also did dozens of houses in a wealthy area around SJ/Los Gatos for several years, raking in $200k+ personally for that time and probably later. Mostly referrals. Amazing, prompt, proactive customer service, setting expectations, after support and cool guy.
Professionalism, negotiation skills and quality service encourage referrals in places where friends / neighbors know one-another. That is, towns where customers having fewer friends or acquaintances (like neighbors or social media connections) tend not to scale via referral network effects. Also, a lifestyle business can scale somewhat by adding good employees carefully and encouraging a decency culture with accountability.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15748742 and marked it off-topic. That's not precise, since it's not exactly off-topic, but the subthread went off into arguments about $400k and left the station.
Another key factor is that a lot of baby boomers are reaching retirement age. With every kid being told college is the only path to become "successful," there's going to be a lack of talent in the trades at least in the near term that's going to continue driving wages higher.
And the all-too-common problem is that firms haven't prepared for the necessary knowledge transfer when those boomer workers do retire. If you've got a millwright who's been working in the same plant for forty years since it opened, he'll know every detail of how things work, where things don't match the schematics, what's been tried and how well that worked out. You can't just start that process when they turn in their two-weeks' notice; you've got to have somebody or somebodies working as assistants, and you've got to pay them adequately to keep them around. Nobody wants to do that.
I've been teaching college students at non-elite schools for ten years, and it's obvious to me (and pretty much any intellectually honest person) that college has been oversold; many students floundering in college would be better served by trade schools: http://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boost...
Not everyone should be specializing in abstract symbol manipulation.
If you spend your time around highly-paid software professionals, $30k-$50k may not seem great.
When you consider that the median income in the country is $31,099[1], making more than half the population is pretty great. At the upper end of that range, you are in the top 30%.
it's just a repeat...something goes up and everyone jumps not realizing that the boiling water has already started to simmer...I am referring to the general lack of economic growth per country...the longer that goes on..the worse the boiling water will feel at the end..will we be boiled or will we finally understand our grave future economic peril
It's a labor shortage more than anything else they listed. It's not an energy boom, weak dollar, Trump etc.
The question should be "why is this a surprise?"
Does our culture esteem people that work with their hands?
Do parents encourage their children to aspire to learn trade skills?
Does our educational system encourage students to learn trade skills and explore the trades as highly viable alternatives to going to college?
We've looked down at the trades and blue-collar work for decades. The evidence is everywhere. Of course there is a shortage, students have been listening to the adults in their lives, their peers, media outside of Mike Rowe etc and have heard the message loud and clear.
Solutions; I see two things that need to happen.
First, we need to reach and communicate to students and adults across the country that trade skills are valuable and a career in the trades is an outstanding option.
Create a more efficient, affordable and accessible resources for people to learn trade skills, no matter their location, age, income, nationality etc. We need to make it 10x easier for people to learn the skills that are in demand.
I’m working on both those solutions at Tradeskills.io
Definitely a lot to figure out!
Data Scientist at major company here that was pounding nails in construction circa 2005. This to me is no surprise. At the time I was early 20s and needed that job that would be sort of an apprenticeship. The problem was, these jobs just didn't exist. The young guys (me) got laid of every winter to keep on as many senior crew members as possible and every spring the jobs were less skilled and more labor (think demolition vs. the skills needed for finish work). Young workers need a solid 5-7 years to develop those skills, but from the years 2005 (yea, that early things started slowing down in construction) to 2015 we didn't really train anyone new. My story was a common one; unable to find work in the trades, I eventually gave up and looked for work elsewhere. So there is a gap in the training of skilled labor. How long will it take to recover? Easy, the same 5-10 years we took a break from training new labor.
Your career path (and its determinants) mirror mine to an uncanny degree. Nonetheless, I disagree that there's a long-term shortage of skilled labor in the US in general, or that any short-term shortage has its root cause in underdeveloped supply channels. I saw first hand how easy it was to procure non-union labor, even at the height of construction boom circa 2004 (when I left construction trades) or 2015 (when I left the construction industry as a licensed engineer). Like yourself, I couldn't compete (or refused to put up with) what's essentially become a migrant work force. While it does take about as long to become a skilled carpenter as it takes to become a software developer (and a strikingly similar mindset too), it's infinitely easier to employ migrant skilled workers, the workers are highly mobile, there's a ready supply of them anywhere there's active construction going on, and everyone in the construction business -- from employers to clients -- has de facto acquiesced in the status quo where work permits are not enforced. Union labor is indeed rather inelastic during the periods of boom and bust, but it's also chronically underemployed, historically shrinking and in the big scheme of things a tiny portion of the overall labor.
I agree. The ability to employ people from just about anywhere makes demand very sensitive to any wage increases.
Further, the economy doing well when people see wage increases reinforces that marginal increases in income for the 99% highly benefit the national output.
> While it does take about as long to become a skilled carpenter as it takes to become a software developer (and a strikingly similar mindset too).
Sorry for the non-contributing anecdote but I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Once you start to understand things more clearly as a system and how to work on that system you come to realize it's a lot of tacking things together any way possible.
I was a land surveyor from 2000-2008, it's a subset of civil engineering. But unlike CE, there's a lot of field work and a small amount of office work. In my case I'd say it was anywhere from 80-90% field and 10-20% office. But even though surveying is hardly unskilled labour and usually requires a degree, it was still subject to the same effects the grandparent comment mentions: constant layoffs in winter, culminating in 2008 and the subprime mortgage crash (which, surprisingly to some, affected commercial property) when all 12 staff surveyors at the office where I worked were laid off on the same day for good, with no expectation of being called back ever again.
It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that land surveying is dead now, especially two/three-man team land surveying. Nobody was trained during those "gap" periods, and meanwhile the older generation of baby-boom surveyors (of which there were many) retired. Furthermore, LiDAR, scanning, survey-grade GPS, and robotic total stations meant that some engineering firms cut corners and took a chance by sending CEs out into the field solo to do the field work. That dynamic ensures no training of new surveyors in the field is possible.
So what are you saying? Surveyor pay is booming now, or no surveying is needed any more? ('Needed' as in, people are actually paying to get it done, not 'needed' as in 'people theorize that it would be useful')
The point I'm trying to make is in support of the grandparent comment in this thread: not many young people choose land surveying as a career because even though it's hugely needed and necessary to create the built environment, it's boom or bust. You can't be trained properly and stay in the job if you're getting laid off every winter. And since LS is protected by a guild (professional licensure), this drives prices up.
Yes I got that. My point was: as far as I know, surveyors aren't raking in $250k plus salaries (probably <$100? You probably know better than I do). And also as far as I know, not all building has stopped because of a lack of surveyors. So clearly, there are still enough surveyors, potentially using more productive work methods than they used to to make up for the reduction in labor supply. People in this thread (like GP) are spinning narratives of real 'choke points' in skill supply; for which there is simply no evidence on the ground. Sure, some project managers' lives are harder because they have to account for longer lead times and more uncertainty on resource availability; and costs go up here and there; but in the end, these are simple issues of supply and demand that don't even register over the medium (5-10 year) term.
'Labor shortage' is always 'I can't find people at the price I originally thought I'd have to pay', modulo some time lag dependent on the exact skill set (i.e., training time).
I'm unclear from this article whether wages are going up or costs. Wages are take-home earnings of workers. That is something different than costs to employers. I need clarification as to whether insurance/tax costs are part of this math.
Ideally, in such articles I want to see actual numbers. I want to see "the average wage for a carpenters in 2015 was X, and today is is X+10%". I'm not so sure that those numbers are changing all that much.
When blue collar wages rise it is due to flawed economic policies!
When white collar tech wages rise it is because they are creating an incredible amount of economic value and deserve all of it! It is absolutely all because of their own genius!
If backflipping robots do the easier work, then what is left for humans is the more complex well paying work. When you remove the lower paying jobs from the average calculation, the average will rise. Indeed the article even states that at 89%, male prime-age [labour market] participation remains close to a record low. The article also has an opinion quote stating that some of the recent wage gains are misleading, because they have occurred in industries, such as textile manufacturing, in which employment continues to fall.
That's the point, it will take A LOT longer for the robots to replace these menial jobs. (And they are not all as low-paying.)
I remember articles from one or two decades ago about the attempts to automate a very dangerous and not even low-paying job of window washing in the high rise buildings. It is a real problem, it does not require HAL-9000 grade AI that can analyse Shakespeare, it is economically viable, and neither then nor now it is completely automated. I see that in Australia, window washing jobs are paid as high as low to midrange software development.
I am not even going to mention more complex tasks like a work of a plumber, a gardener, a janitor. Is the work of a janitor the more lucrative occupation?
It takes very long to get from the first demos to a prototype working most of the time, and even longer from the prototype to a system that can be relied upon in a mission critical environment (a category that most applications of robotics fall into). The Silicon Valley prophets got it all backwards.
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[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] threadhttps://bfgblog-a.akamaihd.net/uploads/2015/01/hololens-plum...
(it was faked, the remote guy was drawing with a tablet, but somehow it worked in 3d like tilt brush..)
Source: had to retile a bit of a floor, too small to interest a real tiler. Guess how it looks now?
That part of the business model worked well for Home Depot.
Also, most light everyday home maintenance work like laying tile, building a fence, framing a wall, installing plumbing, etc. is not rocket science. You don't have to be Bob Vila or go to trade school for years to learn how to do it.
I always tell people wanting to do a job themselves that the first time your costs are the same as hiring a pro, but the second time you own the tools and it is just time.
Of course, some things (is the screw really tight?) can't be verified by video only, but possibly one could devise smarter tools like pressure gauges and some such that can be shown over a video call.
An untrained hand takes so much longer to complete a task that a professional is used to regardless of the understanding. Do you want to slog along a journeyman in video conference for 8 hours or hire him for 2? What's your cost going to be with either?
Beyond that a lot of physical tasks can be done blind, does he "see" that you've threaded the hose properly or applied the compound properly when you're doing it by feel as your eyes can't reach behind whatever you're working at?
I like the idea but I always relate back to my own real world experiences and think about how inefficient it is to remotely task with someone. Ever try helping your parents navigate their computer over the phone? Imagine doing that with a professional @ $100/hr or whatever to replace your faucet or wire new fixtures and run cabling to a breaker panel
If the job would take a plumber 30 minutes, it'll take me an hour - so instead of paying a plumber for 30 minutes of work, I'd need to pay him for an hour of supervision; so I'd be paying more for the privilege of doing it myself.
I could see some potential in apprenticeships taking place remotely, though. At least in the latter years of one. And maybe compliance tests, journeyman tests, etc — depending on the nature of the work. And in that case, less Skype, and more AR.
Never mind commercial plumbing! Small business owners trying to sort out a commercial block backup caused by a grease-trap failure could start to turn out a few issues...
Plumbers deserve higher regard than they're given (all great plumber jokes aside).
That said if the tech could be used to improve the training of specialists in remote areas/ areas that might be short a few journeymen or master tradespersons, or aid in especially complex problems, it could be a huge boon and reduction in cost (eg - travel costs).
In my experience, there's been very few things where it makes more sense long term to just pay someone else to do it so long as you're willing to do a little bit of learning.
Unfortunately, it's the little things that usually push me to give up and hire a pro - wrong tools, don't know the tricks to get a tight screw loose, etc.
It's not dissimilar to how many non-technical PHBs watch developers typing away, and figure they can just get a random worker for half-price to copy the same code from a book or website. In reality, it's not the actual code - many times which can just be copied - that makes a good developer worthwhile, it's the years of experience to know what to do when something goes wrong.
It was more than a bit depressing the parent company pulled the plug because it really did feel like it was about take off. Maybe we could've instead integrated into a set of preferred suppliers cross country as a lead gen service. Though if you read the TrustPilot reviews it was the fact we were the whole package that customers loved.
We started by first charging for calls but in order to grow switched that to free calls with the assumption that people would then book a home visit if needs be. Nobody wanted to pay £10 on a call and find out they needed a plumber to come out. It felt like something that with Uber-style levels of investment (i.e. tons) could be pretty profitable if you owned the sector. To expand on our offerings we would do things like allow people to simply book a handyman for an hour to do whatever - put up a curtain rail, fix that loose light fitting and so on.
People were using the video aspect as a precursor to someone actually coming to do the work so the video bit was never the end of the transaction. As soon as you start needing a team of people to field customer calls, do support and manage your countrywide team of tradesmen it gets expensive.
[1] https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/dad.co?page=2
[2] http://www.eu-startups.com/2016/05/london-based-dad-secures-...
[3] https://s3.amazonaws.com/poly-screenshots.angel.co/enhanced_...
I have some exterior window blinds that need fixing, I'd love for someone to see it over a video call and get a quote before them coming.
That startup sounded great, I'm sad it failed :(
One thing we were looking to do was to offer it to companies as an employee perk - so the company would buy a certain amount of hours that could be used. Then staff could have a face to face call with the relevant tradesperson to discuss anything they like. It was too near the end though to get going :(
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/784ae4b6-e9f2-11e6-967b-c88452263...
As Bill Clinton said, "it's the economy, stupid".
His blog stuff comes off as no better informed than a typical cable news watcher
But he makes comic strips that show how everyone else is the idiot so there’s that
So of course he’ll fit right in with the tech crowd
It's basically: "The economy is getting better (but not thanks to Trump) and there are more jobs (still not thanks to Trump). There has been an increase in wages (you might think it's thanks to Trump, but it is not)..."
One major change in the US has been border enforcement and a promise of deportations instead of amnesty. If that's what's resulting in higher blue collar wages and employment then they have to re-think a large part of their world view.
If the tax reform blows everything up, inflates a bubble, whatever, then they'll take a major electoral hit. If they're not bloody-stupid, they'll let "Obamanomics" slide in the background, and allow the long-awaited comeback from the Great Recession to buoy their approval ratings into continued electoral dominance.
Even 2016 was seeing slight increases in wages. We may now be seeing a period in which investment capital is so cheap, but infrastructure and industries so rotted out and wages so low, that it becomes feasible to re-develop whole areas of the country nearly from scratch.
First, Trump and the Republican party are two different political factions. Trump basically ran on that claim. In history books, I would expect this presidency to be marked with an asterisk as one single party does not really control Congress and the White House.
Second, the White House vs. Congress dynamics have been pretty dysfunctional for quite some time now. When there is single party control over all of the above, it's usually fleeting. And rarely with a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. You need to go back to the Carter and Johnson years to see that.
What's the point? People are getting what they vote for. They pretty much want gridlock on issues, they want "our team" to fight "their team", otherwise we'd see consensus on some issues and bills passing and being signed. The thing that concerns me is that the consensus that does seem to be forming is that more should be done by unelected officials: judges and members of the Something Or The Other Administration.
That is, there's no real interest in making sure legislators actually legislate. The lack of separation of powers will be unhealthy in the long run. Possibly catastrophic.
Yap noticed that as well. It's as if they have to say "Trump" or "Russia" and then get on to the main topic just to get the article approved for publication. I mostly noticed that with NYT, WaPo and HuffPo for example.
Last week one company setup interviews with 20 possible new workers. One showed up for his interview, and one wandered in the next day. 18 nonshows.
Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
Sub $160,000 houses (3-4 bedrooms, land, average schools, 15-30 minute commute) are now selling in 1-3 days, compared with 3-6 months five years ago. There’s definitely a boom getting started here.
Graduation rates are are higher than ever. Over 30% of people have Bachelors degrees or higher. Literacy rates are higher than they ever have been.
Our people aren't dumber, they just realize that when the business managers and owners are making millions while they don't get wage increases above inflation, they have no incentive to care.
Producing it seems, graduates unfit for basic employment according to previous posters. Quantity is clearly not quality.
But I imagine if we interviewed 20 people for a position, we would most certainly not have 18 no-shows.
Can someone who smoked a joint a couple days ago be trusted not to smoke one 30 minutes before starting work with the concrete cutters? Trusted enough to bet your company on? (Because you know that if the worker smokes a joint just before working with the concrete cutters, and someone gets injured or killed, the owner loses the company in the lawsuit.)
I bet you'd get approx. 0 noshows if you bumped salary.
> Another local company is seeing 50% of new hires failing their first drug test.
So don't give drug tests?
> Anecdotaly, about 20% of new hires under 30 don’t understand the concept of showing up on time (or at all) even after that’s explained as a part of orientation.
Try paying more?
While I agree that drug tests are a scam as a white collar worker, I do think they're necessary from a liability perspective if you're in construction, manufacturing, or driving a company vehicle.
I fully support the use of recreational drugs on someone's own time, but you have to weed out (forgive the pun) those who are under the influence when loss of life or limb is a risk.
Doesn't that say something about the effectiveness of testing?
Culturally, recreational drug use isn't that big of a deal, at least to millennials. You can completely be responsible enough to enjoy some cannabis on personal time, while also doing your 40 hours productively.
The problem is one of information from the POV of the employer: they are ultimately responsible for what the worker does on the job.
Even if P(no problem | drug use) = 0.99, the amount of negligent liability they will incur if an accident does occur, the person was intoxicated, and the employer could have checked for drugs, but didn't, is probably so high that they can't take that route.
Just not weeks after consumption...
My point is that the test is testing the wrong thing. A sobriety test would be best.
As a pilot, I seriously don’t care if you show up to work high or not - unless you’re doing maintenance on the jet I’m supposed to fly.
But it's the best signal we've got. Ignore it at your peril. Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/science/jared-diamonds-gui...
Except that's not true. We can actually test for sobriety. And by doing drug testing instead, we're actually using a worse signal in place of a better signal!
See e.g., http://www.predictivesafety.com/news/2017/2/6/the-advantages...
> Perhaps you are too young or live in too modern a world to understand how dangerous rare events are. Constructive paranoia has helped select evolutionary survivors for a very long time.
I'm not really sure if there's more than a vague analogy connecting Diamond's hypotheses to drug testing policy. And I don't find that exceptionally vague analogy to be compelling evidence. (And I'm one of those people who doesn't even buy a lot of Diamond's work anyways; in fact, I think I'm in good company on this one among the sober, grown-up anthropologists out there...)
My weathered experience tells me to prefer hard data over vague analogies to pop science writers who are themselves known more for their well-written vague analogies than their well-researched hard science :-)
Administer sobriety tests the same way you currently administer drug tests -- upon application, and randomly. They're a lot cheaper so you can actually get more data for less $/time.
Seems really arbitrary and pointless when you take out all the drug war baggage out of it.
Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline.
Its not a simple binary "have you been within 10 meters of the devils weed in the past month T/F" question.
To fail a test after 30 days of normal peeing takes something like weeks of Cheech and Chong 2.0 behavior to build up the level of metabolites in the body. There's a whole spectrum of use vs time required to test clean. A buzz a couple days ago will not fail a test. Wake and bake the morning of the test is a fail. The kind of person dumb enough to wake and bake the morning of a pee test is not the kind of person I'd want on a jobsite.
There's also the question of motivation. There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC and there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try.
Responsible intelligent users will not have trouble passing a test. Irresponsible or unintelligent users are doomed, but those are the kind of people that cause workplace fatalities anyway, so no real loss.
This is all aside from unemployment fraud type stuff.
I don't think that's true.
https://herb.co/2017/02/09/heres-long-weed-stays-urine/Even if it was true, the fact that it is so easily passible doesn't help the argument that it's not pointless and arbitrary.
"There are supplements which basically make you pee alot to pee out the THC"
Frankly, there is level of education and willingness to study I don't expect from dude hired for simple construction or retail job and you are quite getting there. For the record, I know construction workers.
"there are test kits at walgreens for $10 that are fairly accurate to determine if you pass. To fail a pee test you have to be unmotivated enough to not even try."
I mean, why would he wasted $10 on that? Cheaper to do the test and if you fail then look for job elsewhere. Claim here is that now is a good time for blue collar workers so presumably they can try elsewhere. And maybe they will pee enough from beer they drink more then they smoke in the meantime, so they will pass without really knowing why.
"Its a test of self introspection and awareness and intelligence, not solely discipline."
Self introspection and awareness? Yep, there is no difference between that and hypothetical chocolate or sex tests.
At that point (and a lot of states are already there!), "Jeez, just don't smoke for a few days" doesn't cut it - 30 days is probably a safe guideline. When it comes to this for a lot of fine prospective employees, I would think it's time to reconsider the value of these tests as a proxy for introspection/awareness/intelligence.
If that was true it would be more efficient to design a test (assuming such a test is currently possible) to measure self-introspection, awareness, intelligence, and discipline. Oh, wait -- don't many people claim an undergraduate degree is also a signal for those things?
So a young person decides to sort themselves out, stops smoking and goes job hunting. They're ready to go! And then? What, wait around for a month with nothing to do? Eventually get bored, hang around with their mates and boom, cycle repeats.
If you have that capability you [probably] are also able to make sure it does not negatively impact you.
What point are you trying to make?
Are you implying people can not abstain from sex for a month?
Drug tests are completely arbitrary, unrelated to job performance, and employers who use those drug tests don't deserve any sympathy when it comes to labor shortage.
They do however ask about drug usage both on the application and when doing their investigation.
It's actually ok to have used drugs in the past, you just have to be honest about it and write a letter saying something about not doing so moving forward (an acquaintance of mine had to do this... not sure what the specifics were).
Once people are have a clearance, most of the tests are decidedly not random. They can be requested for erratic behavior at work (e.g., passing out), but they are especially common for people who are formally busted somehow for illegal drug and/or alcohol abuse. Get a DUI, yeah, you're going to be "randomly" chosen for a test more often than anyone else you know.
If you look at the system holistically with regards to drug testing for folks with clearances, most people would say that the implementation is fairly reasonable. The rules seem incredibly draconian on the surface, but the actual enforcement is decidedly less so.
I have also heard they mostly stopped drug testing people as they where having difficulty finding enough competent, honest, non-drug users in technical fields. Or possibly more importantly they did not want discrete drug use to be a means of blackmailing someone.
PS: I can only recommend someone either answers all questions accurately and only those specific questions asked, or discreetly declines an investigation and looks for another line of work.
LOL. Grow up, get a life, stop smoking pot you lowlife. Weed doesn't make you cool, it just makes you a loser.
So you could smoke a joint today (ok, maybe a bit more than a joint), and nothing more - and three months later they take a hair sample and find you a dirty guilty pot smoker. Yer fired! Or not hired in the first place.
Even in the best case scenario, you have to abstain for 30 days; so if you're a regular user of weed, and you want to change jobs, you'll have to plan ahead, or just be out of work for 30 days while you let it get out of your system. Doable if you have savings, I suppose.
As far as "random drug testing", I honestly think its more of a threat to instill fear, than something actually done. Drug testing isn't cheap, and a true random test would test all employees, but due to the expense, only the larger companies could conceivably do it. Smaller organizations would tend to only do testing "after the fact" or if there is credible reason to believe that a certain person is having issues (visibly impaired or something) - then a "targeted test" under the guise of a random test can be done.
Even then, such a test might only be correlative, and not indicate the true cause; someone might, for instance, cause an accident or such due to a heated argument they had just before the incident with a coworker, but they get tested and fail the test because of a party they went to a couple weeks before where they smoked some weed.
Reading a book is the longest lasting. You can also play a videogame to release endorphins if that's what you're looking for.
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
Because they are famous for low specificity and low sensitivity.
Does such a thing exist? Is there any independent evidence that it actually works?
Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.
That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.
All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
Speak for yourself, pothead.
And no one is required to work for you at the wages you can afford to pay...
Want affordable workers? Increase supply or decrease demand. If you can't do the latter, focus on the former.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.
It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.
It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.
If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.
A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.
Better is to use impairment testing. An impairment test is a test of cognitive function, alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination and similar objective things that actually correlate well with how well you can do your job now, instead of sometime in the past.
On top of that, impairment testing can catch when you are impaired for reasons OTHER than intoxication. If your aircraft mechanic is not fit to do maintenance on your jet that morning because last night he found his wife sleeping with his best friend, they argued all night, and she announced that morning she is getting a divorce, leaving him a tired, emotional wreck who will make mistakes left and right at work...an impairment test can catch it. A drug test cannot.
In addition, generally there is lag between drug testing and results. Impairment testing can be quick (a few minutes) and cheap so that you can do it to every employee, every day at the start of their shift.
Exactly this. Pot is probably the most common and it stays in your system for 30 days after use (probably the longest that is tested). Essentially the screen will fail a guy who smoked pot two weeks ago, but pass a guy who shot up heroin all last week. Like the polygraph test, they are deeply flawed, in this case, for testing for intoxication.
Also, imagine if drug tests failed an applicant for having a beer in the last 30 days. Like it or not, pot is replacing beer for a large portion of Americans, time to adapt.
https://equilibriabook.com/toc/
Here, I think it's something like, "insurers move very slowly to new systems, and until this new testing has a lot of data behind it, they won't adjust premium. to account for it being better. Furthermore, juries will continue to give punishingly big damage awards for using it, on the mistaken believe that a toker shouldn't be on the job even if he wasn't high and passed the reaction test."
I'm not sure exactly what industry the original poster was referring to, but broadly my experience has been that there are many people who are just unreliable. I worked in retail a few years ago, and it was incredible. People just don't show up, or show up so intoxicated from the night before that they're not actually capable of doing their job.
Now, as a developer, I think I can count on one hand the number of times someone has shown up too hungover to work, and I can tell you exactly (0) the number of times someone has just flat out failed to show up when they were supposed to be working.
> So don't give drug tests?
For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
> Try paying more?
Again, people are flaky. Suddenly paying someone more isn't going to make them start showing up on time.
Anecdotally, I know several people who worked retail throughout college and showed up super hung-over basically every weekend, but who are now extremely responsible professionals in software, medicine, etc.
Again, I think salary and a sense of career prospects / something worthwhile to lose are far more important than individual proclivities or responsibility.
People know their retail jobs are bullshit, dead-end positions. There's nothing to lose and 10 more identical jobs waiting for them on the market.
> For lots of jobs that may not be an option. Operating heavy machinery puts lots of lives at risk, or it could be an insurance requirement.
Sounds like a policy (law) option to me.
But in terms of initial applicants, who may not be as flaky, advertising higher starting salary may bump up the non-flakiness of people showing up for an interview.
It seems to work for the highly paid developers who have had zero no-shows on your watch.
Otherwise, it appears that you're implying that developers are less flaky than other people.
That's not the objective. Offering more money for the position buys you a better chance of finding someone reliable.
Pay better, and higher quality workers will be applying for your position.
Those who are good employees are already employed, and probably at a decent compensation level. Whenever this topic comes up, I always ask, "What compelling reason are you giving for people to come work for you?" I never get a satisfactory answer, usually because the people know that they have nothing compelling over the next job.
That's both the easiest solution and the one last chosen. Complaining about how shitty the workforce is usually comes first. :)
How can one possibly ever get out of poverty if s/he can't even make it to an interview?
Your parent comment is also right that this lack of personal responsibility is cultivated or exacerbated by poverty. Personal responsibility is as much a skill as it is a trait. Therefore, if one has neither work experience nor a role model for responsibility, one tends not to have good work ethics.
IMO, the solution is thus both to praise personal work ethics and to break the trap through social programs at the same time.
My concern is that the "something else" might be counter-effective but well-intentioned policies intended to help.
The question is how much the rest of us are involuntarily having to provide for them, and more relevantly, whether or not society is even really being improved if the result is an increasing number of people so unable / unwilling to contribute to society that they can't even be bothered to show up for an interview.
It is very easy to spend other people's money supporting people perceived as downtrodden. It just might not be the solution proponents think it is.
"Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. Liberty is a well-armed sheep contesting the outcome".
I see no moral hazard in coercing people
and that's the problem. Coercion is inherently immoral as it denies agency, which is the very essence of humanity. Agency / self-control is the fundamental difference between being a human being, and being a piece of property.
There's also the argument that the money you own isn't truly yours. It's the product of a large amount of investment on behalf of your parents (which varies for everybody) and the government in terms of education (of you and everyone else to create an economy where you're able to perform your current job) and infrastructure, with the end result of you being able to perform your job. So its taxation is not theft because you do owe that money back to the rest of society. I think preventing hunger/homelessness is in general a good way to spend that money
Living in groups--and people are very much social creatures--means there are rules you follow that you didn't necessarily decide on, or ultimately you get kicked out of the group and probably don't continue your genetic line.
Left unqualified, that's kind of a silly claim to make--it sounds good to some but doesn't really get us anywhere.
(a) Two working parents or a single parent family may result in children "being raised by wolves" to some extent. These are good parents/people but child rearing is a time intensive business.
(b) Lack of jobs for young people. In my neighborhood, a lot of lawn mowing jobs are done by services instead of the neighborhood kid. The "entry level" jobs are often taken by older people who can't afford to retire.
(c) Single child families where parents spoil their children resulting in a sort of learned helplessness. I can't think of anyone of my friends children that mows their parents lawn of shovels the driveway. The dad or mows the lawn and snow blows the driveway. My brothers kids are the exception.
(d) Lack of exposure to real world failure or responsibilities. How many parents are going to let their kids walk to school never mind use a chainsaw or go hunting by themselves?
Now I imagine explaining to my friends or wife that I hired a 13 year old to paint our house. With 0/0 stars on google, angies list, etc. It's hard for young people to "break in" to something as mundane as yard work and painting.
Nowadays, far fewer people get newspapers, and the newspaper deliver jobs are looking for someone with a car. And I assume they pay for them online.
In the vision of life that is projected for students, the trades do not find themselves anywhere in that vision. It should come as no surprise that we have a shortage right now, it should only surprise us that it's not worse. Immigrant labor has long hidden the fact that American's are raising their kids to avoid the trades, and we will all pay the price for it.
http://profoundlydisconnected.com/foundation/
In case it's helpful, here's my story from two years ago about living with undiagnosed narcolepsy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478
One of my memories of that job was sleeping fully-dressed for work, then leaping out of bed when my alarm goes off. I'd carefully balance on my feet and wait for the tiredness to pass.
That's not sustainable. I can't do that more than a week at a time.
So there's all this anger focused toward people who are genuinely lazy, and it's impossible to separate it from people who have a genuine medical condition. What's the solution?
One way to handle it is to be upfront with your employer. This tends not to work. Recruitment in software has heated up to the point where any small flag against the candidate is enough to pass. No one would voluntarily jump in with someone whose attitude is "Well, I couldn't sleep until 3am because of being wide awake since 10pm, so I'm gonna show up around noon if that's ok."
It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
I still two years later have no idea what to do about this. I'm working remotely part-time, putting in full-time hours, just because I feel lucky to have any sort of job.
The point is, the next time someone posts in a company-wide Slack channel that they're feeling sleepy and will be in later, consider there might be more going on than meets the eye. Relationship problems and medical conditions both need to be concealed, and it takes a toll.
The thing is, it's not up to you to care. We have to deal with it or we're cut. And that's fine. But maybe some context will help, somehow.
It's a medical condition. Employers need to provide reasonable accommodations if you're able to fulfill the job. Are you able to do the job on a slightly shifted schedule? Chances are it's the case.
> It makes scheduling meetings extremely difficult. Morning standups are out. How many of you have weekly standups?
Could do afternoon standups. Problem solved.
How does an individual make sure that rule is enforced?
And then you're in a situation where you've raised litigation at past employers, and that will follow you around.
The point is, the worst possible situation to be in is that everyone knows you're narcoleptic and knows you're not choosy about raising legal action. No one will touch you. The best option seems to be to conceal it and part ways as amicably as possible.
One of those requirements is "reasonable accommodation," which is a term that means that employers face big lawsuits from the government if they don't reasonably accommodate employee disabilities.
This means that if an employee has a condition that allows them to do the work, but needs special stuff, such as software to allow them to write code while blind, or a wheelchair-accessible entrance, then the company has to provide it. Otherwise, the employee can ask the government to sue the company on her or his behalf.
But yeah, dude, capitalism is a disease.
And beyond that, what guarantees that the EEOC is going to act, and that they'll find in your favor?
There's no guarantee for anything in life. There is even a strong likelihood that justice won't be served. But that is a far cry from throwing up our hands and claiming a rigged system. There is a reason why so many malls, stores, and restaurants have disabled-accessible entrances, and it's not wishful thinking. It's enforcement at the state and local level.
It's also, if I understand correctly, kind of legally required that they make "reasonable" accomodations. This sounded pretty reasonable to me - they didn't even have to buy any equipment.
For those of us who are unfamiliar or ignorant about this, which parts of the Southeast are most prosperous?
Those actively gaining on rankings of 'prosperity' include Nashville, Charlotte, Charleston SC, and Raleigh-Durham [1]. Atlanta has a good amount of preexisting prosperity, though it's not ranking as high now. Greenville has seem a fair bit of growth as well.
Subjectively, you can perceive that these metropolitan areas are doing a lot better than others in the Southeast.
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/research/metro-monitor-2017/
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.
Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?
We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/24/business/economy/drug-tes...
Remember, new hires are not guaranteed to add value - even if they worked for free, there is always a risk that some will reduce value. If a new hire's inability to show up on time holds up a production line, or a new hire's irresponsibility damages equipment, then you're better off not making the hire, even if you desire, in the abstract, to hire more people and expand your business.
Have you ever seen a lathe accident, for example?
You can't spot test for being high on marijuana or pills like you can for drunkenness, so you rely on the urine test to keep everyone on the floor safe from being crushed in a press by a stoned co-worker (or themselves.)
1) Contract language that says your workforce has to be drug free (government sourced contracts doubly so)
2) Insurance. If you have a fork lift driver run into a rack of transmissions (or drive your work truck into a building) your insurance is going to demand a urine test. If the urine test comes back unclean they will deny your claim.
Look, you got one task, one task only, it's not even hard to figure out, do not, repeat, do not, get high the week or two before your pee test. That simple. There are human bipeds burning valuable oxygen right now, who can't follow a test that elaborate and complicated. They are literally the kind of people where if you told them not to lick a circuit breaker, would turn around and an hour later electrocute themselves and probably a coworker or two by licking a circuit breaker on the jobsite. Whats the minimum IQ and discipline level necessary to pass a pee test? Not much, but there are failures out there walking around...
Its interesting that as far as I know this is the first strictly chemistry based IQ test. AFAIK there is no "pee in a bottle to determine if you can fizzbuzz" test for code monkey work. No chemical marker that can identify if you know the modulus operator... not yet...
There's also the possibility that giving up an addiction is not an intellectual activity (if you think about it a little!)
But the process of getting addicted certainly involves making some choices poorly.
Addiction is continued use in the face of adverse consequences. [1] You may have a physical dependence on coffee, but it doesn't sound like you're experiencing negative consequences in your life from its use.
[1] https://www.addictioninfo.org/articles/2216/1/Addiction-Do-Y...
In case someone is wondering, hair follicle tests are apparently problematic [1]; had to look that up because I remembered correctly that follicle tests can show use over the long-term, but didn't know some of the intrinsic challenges with that method. Come to think of it, I've never been asked to submit a hair sample when I've had to pass FBI interviews and drug tests to gain admittance to extremely-sensitive data centers at some of my clients in the past.
The "week or two" needs contextual guidance. An article on Wikipedia [2] gives a good run down of the detection periods. I would imagine detecting pot is the most common request, so that's about 100 days on the conservative side for a heavy (daily?) user, but apparently three weeks is fine for more casual users (what, once a week?).
[1] http://www.fleetowner.com/driver-management-resource-center/...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_test#Detection_periods
Though now that I think about it I have technically worked at two companies that didn't drug test: my own, and a small 3-man startup I did some work for.
It's worth mentioning that I live in a red state. I suspect blue states have cultures that are a little more lax on drug testing, though I have no real data to back that up.
A lot of use huge and dangerous machinery such as forklifts or saws
What do you think, time to build and monetize a solution to solve this problem?
I think I have some ideas to help with this type of worker onboarding and retention, personally.
This is what inflation is. It's all a function of supply and demand.
Can you even imagine somebody saying that to their boss in some black-and-white movie from the 1940s? "Hey, how about instead of coming in later you hit the bricks and never come back?"
The culture has definitely changed. It's wild.
Or businesses can make demands, but in this labor market they'll have to pay for people to meet 'em.
I can promise to be in my chair at 9 am everyday, but I want to leave at 5 and if I'm tired, the business gets to pay for a less than productive day.
I think many people to fail to realize that writing software is very unlike producing widgets in a factory line. Some people hit periods of high productivity when they work quietly, alone, for an hour or two. And you might get more in that 1-2 hours than you would all day with the constant distractions in the modern office.
My father graduated college making $42k/yr. Inflation adjusted, that was about $60k/yr in today's dollars. I just graduated, have experience in the field, and am getting a salary of $35k/yr in today's dollars. Meanwhile, upper management is getting millions.
In that kind of work environment, why _should_ I care? It's not like they're going to fire me.
I don't mean this to sound challenging out all, I'm just kind of curious.
Under the broad umbrella of jobs-you-can-land-with-a-degree-containing-the-word-"computer", there are a great many that aren't making Facebook creepier, or making Gmail's interface worse, or other, similar, very high-paying jobs.
There are even, believe it or not, many that don't pay as well as not really understanding how to write code, but nonetheless somehow landing a position writing enterprise Java or DotNet at some boring bigcorp, then never leaving because you never actually get any better at programming than when you started, but these people don't seem to care and there are a few competent people here picking up your slack, so why risk going somewhere else? AKA the broad middle-tier of people working as software developers.
With the move to digital when rigor and having tech people who really know there shit Is now important they don't want to pay the rate.
> Or maybe you're just in a rural area?
It's rural compared to the big coastal cities, but is still the third biggest city in my state. IMO, it shouldn't just be giant cities that experience economic growth, it should be everyone. The fact that this hasn't been the case in my area leaves me and many in my area bitter about the state of the economy.
Relocation isn't an option. My family lives here, my wife's family lives here, she has a career started here, and we can't afford the massive amount of instability that a move to a high COL area would bring.
Feel free to ask more questions. The more that rich people hear from folks like me, the more they'll understand the current political climate.
Suppose you could find a job elsewhere for $90k+. If you can't, sure, that's a good reason why relocation isn't an option, and finding a job in a location you don't live in is by no means easy. But if you can, then you ought to consider moving, by yourself (since your wife is busy with a career), live in an apartment with one or two other roommates, and live frugally saving/investing as much as you can. Make visits back home when you can, but at $90k+/yr that shouldn't be so hard, depends on how you want to balance your triple sized income. (Higher COL areas will eat into that, but living frugally, not very much.) Do this for 3-4 years, you'll have made more than 10 years at your current location and pay, handwaving away taxes/bonuses/raises/better opportunities. Then quit and relocate back, except now you have a savings cushion and it only cost you another few years of your time.
Sounds like you want to redistribute the economic gains? Good luck with that, we know where that leads. Economic inequality is fine if people are also raised out of poverty, like over a billion people have been since 1990 while inequality has raised. Inequality can be a good sign. (http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ineq.html)
At the very least, America can't have it both ways, being an economic power house and evenly redistributing the fruits internally. You might have a shot if you require Americans roll back into a farming economy where half the population farms for each other and the other half, but you'll have to kill a lot of people and take and salt a lot of land and forbid a lot of machinery to get it done. I don't think that's why Trump got elected. The voters don't tend to want handouts, they just want certain existing handouts to other parties to go away so they can effectively compete again in certain domains. Dissatisfaction with the economy in their area is a big component, sure, and Trump actually cares about making the country's economy better, and he's already done good things to help some areas out, but neither he nor anyone else will ever make e.g. all the state capitals equally economically viable with similar growth rates. Physics is against them, math is against them, human nature is against them, morality is against them. SV and other tech hubs will pass one day, too, just like the ghost towns you can visit all over the western states albeit probably not so dramatically, but that'll just be because the economic centers have moved elsewhere, not because they've been redistributed. Exploit their opportunities while they're there.
IT support in a rural area is more or less what I was suspecting (yes, Springfield is Country). It's ironic that the tech age was supposed to bring in an era of telecommuting, when in fact it's brought in an era of greatly increased centralization. Small towns needed doctors and lawyers, they don't need software developers or high end tech support.
In theory the increase in cloud services could change that, but I don't really see the trend changing.
I do find it ironic for a commenter to be surprised at a lower-wage worker reading a thread about, per the title, blue collar wages. (And that a thread with such a title inevitably turns into a discussion of programmer wages ;-)
Those issues aside, your answer is basically my entire point: "why _should_ I care? It's not like they're going to fire me." I'm not sure why your employer won't fire you. Maybe they have trouble finding decent people to fill positions. I honestly don't know since I don't know what you do or who you work for. But regardless, your comment goes straight to the concept of work ethic.
It sounds like you are throwing work ethic to the wayside simply because you don't feel you get paid enough. That, in my opinion, is not the way to do things. Guess what, a lot of people are underpaid. I also have the viewpoint that you agreed to accepting the salary you are getting paid. They made an offer and you accepted it, presumably because it was the prevailing market rate for your skill set. If you feel that your compensation package is not appropriate then you should have a conversation about that with your manager - and leave the firm if necessary. It wasn't that long ago that I made about 45k. For the first 5 years out of school (starting in 2007) I worked for around that pay level. I did the daily grind and I tried hard to add value to the business where I could, because I wanted to not stagnate and just go through the motions because I viewed that as the worse path to take. I stayed late when necessary. Eventually another firm interviewed a bunch of people in my office, myself included, for a position that paid significantly more because they wanted to poach the right person to take onto their team. Guess who got the job. I even found out about 6 months later when speaking to the MD of my new employer that the CFO called him up and congratulated him on hiring me. I had no idea the CFO of my old company had me on his radar or was the type to make that kind of call. 3 years after that another opportunity presented itself solely because I had a strong reputation. That was another substantial bump on the pay ladder.
My point with the personal story is not to brag at all - hell, I certainly don't have some sort of prestigious job and there are plenty of people on this board alone that make more than I do. My point is that I highly recommend you change your mindset and the way you approach all of this. Ask yourself this. If I didn't work for the man, so to speak, as an underpaid entry level grunt for those 5 years, do you think I would have gotten that other job over my colleagues? That also would have not made the second job change (and pay increase) possible. Bringing it a little closer to home for you...if an employer interviewed you and your colleagues and had a job which paid a lot more, do you think you would get the offer or would someone else? Also, take a look at how someone successful in your line of work operates (a Director or MD, perhaps). Are they the kind of person that would share the same attitude as you? I imagine not. They would most likely either renegotiate their compensation or they would leave. I know that's how the higher ups would act where I am. The idea with all of this is to think and act like a successful person so that you can greatly increase your odds of success. It also has the benefit, in many cases, of also being the "right thing" to do. Contrary to popular belief, being a "company man" is usually still rewarded as long as you work for an employer which has basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale.
And if all of that has not resonated with you at all, then co...
I work because this society threatens us with destitution if we do not. I have plenty of ideas, things to do. I have to put them aside for much of each week because I want to survive.
I work on side projects as I can. I don't quit my job because I don't know if I can survive as easily with my other ideas. It's a risky proposition. I choose less risk. You do the same, but seem upset at that concept.
No, but the extreme automation and beginning of human-like skills across all domains of knowledge are a new thing.
With automation of the essentials plus a bit more, we can finally start free ourselves from a lifetime of work. The wealthy already have, and choose what they wish to do. I only want that.
> As if not being a productive member of society leading to poverty is this evil new capitalistic creation?
No. That threat's always been there. But there wasn't a good answer how to fix it. Communism (ala USSR) certainly didn't work. They just changed the owner from a capitalist to a uncaring state. But one thing Marx failed to grasp was that computerization and automation was the way out of both old systems. That way, there's no compulsed labor.
> It's amazing to me that you choose to work for someone for an agreed upon salary, providing stability and security to you, and then have an issue with the concept of work ethic because if you don't work for them or someone else you will be poor.
Because it's not so egalitarian like you put it. You should full realize that there's a tremendous amount of asymmetry - They have the money, the legal, the govt clout. What do you have? Your labor. That's it. And you, the individual are expendable. I mean, who cares about where you sleep, what you eat, and basic necessities of life? I guess sleeping under a bridge is illegal for both the poor as it is the rich.
Unions served as a balance to that implicit, ever present threat. But they've been demonized long enough in this country, that US union membership is what, 15%? And in the tech sector, unions are non-existent. I certainly would want one myself.
Let's also not forget that the government has effectively stolen a large portion of the additional wealth/productivity generated over the past several decades via deficit spending. Mathematically, that's no different than a tax in the end. The only difference is that the tax is not felt immediately.
FWIW - I worked for a union once due to a peculiarity in one of my employer's older business units to which I was lumped purely due to legacy reasons. It was awful. And I wasn't the only one who thought so. It was one of the rare instances that people actually voted out their union. It happened only when we separated from the older business unit and were split into a separate LLC as part of a new business venture. 74% voted the union out. It was glorious.
http://www.industryweek.com/sites/industryweek.com/files/upl...
Take a close look at what you are cheerleading: Crushing student debt. Opioid abuse. Medical bankruptcy. Social immobility. Poverty.
No, really.
The internet provides the perfect counter example to this. It was (and remains) nearly entirely unregulated. And yet Google and Facebook are monsters with immense anti-competitive power.
The evidence really does not support the idea that big business is entirely the result of big government. Quite the opposite in fact. The last time we had this much concentration of economic power was the gilded age, an age of relatively small government. We had a period of lower wealth/power concentration in the 50s and 60s, but that was linked to strong anti-trust laws (administered by government) and 90% top marginal tax laws. Since then, neoliberal ideology has been used to chip away at the restraints on big business in government and now we currently have the worst of both worlds -- corrupt government beholden to vast concentration of economic power generated by big business.
Personally, I am of the opinion that the only way to avoid this is to look at the core of the systematic issue -- allowing equity financing concentrates wealth. Concentrating wealth concentrates power and naturally causes consolidation and centralization. In a world with equity financing, the only way to keep business small and competitive is with strong anti-trust laws and highly progressive taxation.
I think we could have a world of small government and small business, but only if we universally replace the Stock Corporation with the Worker Cooperative. That, of course, is a novel idea and requires a lot more support than I can put in HN post. Maybe some day I'll get to a point where I can stop developing full time to support myself and write that book...
You know any old LLC can be structured as a co-op with a bit of effort.
But I don't know that I've really seen anyone make a strong case for it (in a way digestible to the layment). Richard Wolff wrote about it in Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism but not in a way that was very digestible for the average reader. Gar Alperovitz has also written about it in What Now Must We Do? and America Beyond Capitalism, but in both cases he wasn't specifically making the argument for universally replacing the Stock Corporation with Worker Cooperatives, but more generally increasing the prevalence of cooperatives (worker, member, and multi-stakeholder) and decreasing the power of capital.
I'd really like to write a book, digestible by the average American, making the case for the universal replacement of the stock corporation with the worker cooperative and speculating about what impacts that might have on society (using evidence to support the speculation as much as possible).
[1] https://thenextsystem.org/ [2] https://democracycollaborative.org/ [3] http://neweconomics.org/
Personally, I don't think capitalism is going away any time soon, it's just a question of which version of it will be the most effective. Co-ops would need to be able to compete and win against the current shareholder model, without government intervention, which may not be possible.
Anyway, shoot me an email if you'd like to discuss more in a few months.
Another good book, more about the practical realities of creating a worker co-op in the current context, is Companies We Keep: Employee Ownership and the Business of Community and Place by John Abrams[1]. It's more a story about his experience founding and running his construction company as a worker cooperative. It would probably be a lot more relevant to pondering whether and how to form a cooperative business in the current world.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Companies-We-Keep-Ownership-Community...
> Contrary to popular belief, being a "company man" is usually still rewarded as long as you work for an employer which has basic common sense when it comes to employee compensation and morale.
It is mind-blowing that anyone could write this summary, expecting it to be generally applicable, when every study of wages shows they have stagnated since the 1970s, and at the same time every study of production through the same time shows it is through the roof.
In short, you advocate enshrining a work ethic, while pretending it's okay for ownership to totally ignore a pay ethic.
It's something akin to Stockholm Syndrome, if you ask me.
It's not mind-blowing when you consider that productivity is heavily linked to technological advances. Let's take a historical example - the barcode scanner. Prior to its creation, cashiers had to know the price of all items or check the price tags that were manually stickered onto every item by someone else in the store. Then someone came along and made it possible to have UPC's printed right onto the original packaging and then scanned instantaneously at the register, with essentially no errors ever. That both reduced the skill required by the cashiers as well as boosting (drastically) productivity. Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier. If a tool comes along that makes my job easier and/or more accurate my employer will pay for it, but I'd be really surprised if they suddenly gave me a pay boost because of it.
The other half of this is that welfare programs subsidize the lower income workers. WalMart would not be able to pay <$10 an hour if welfare did not exist. If people didn't have the government as a backstop, you can guarantee they would stand up and demand a higher wage so that they could meet their basic needs.
Wages aren't stagnant by accident -- far from it. The constantly repeated, default decision by boardrooms to unlink compensation from productivity and thereby suppress wages is in fact the overwhelming, prevailing "common sense" of the really existing world. This goes hand in hand with the systematic expropriation by ownership of the surplus value created by workers.
This situation persists because persons with your perspective cheerlead it on, in part by moralizing on worker compensation while totally ignoring the moral calculus of ownership's claim to the surplus value created by workers. That's what you did here:
>Yet no additional effort, creativity, or skill was required on the part of the cashier [...] [therefore they deserve no share of their expanded productivity]
Fact: if additional effort, creativity and skill was a bona fide prerequisite for receiving expanded compensation linked to productivity, then dividend compensation for nonworking stockholders would never flow -- let alone grow to the astronomic, middle-class-savaging intensity it has today.
Where we probably disagree on the reason, though. To me, it comes down to an individual's overall slice of the monetary pie. Since money is just a representation of value, it's basically just a number inside of a larger system that we utilize. All that matters really is your portion of the whole. Let's use GDP as a gauge. The US has ~18.5T in GDP per year. Let's cut off some zeroes (6 of them) to get some more usable numbers. For a person making $10 an hour, that's about 20k a year, or 20,000/18,500,000=0.108%. If GDP increases 4% in 2 years but their wage only goes up 2.5% that would be 20,500/19,240,000=0.1065%. This means that they now have lost some purchasing power relative to everyone else because their share of GDP has decreased.
Now that's a moral argument, to be sure, because there is still supply and demand for labor that is a dominant for in the labor markets. So if someone else is going to work for $9 an hour, that's going to be a problem. There are many factors at at play.
But thanks for getting me to re-think my position on this.
I'm equally grateful you considered our conversation.
Worker ownership and worker governance of enterprises, in my view, is the general way forward. I suggest to anybody reconsidering commerce under capitalism take a look at the Mondragon Cooperative Corporation for a living example of super-productive commerce and industry that employs tens of thousands without the baked-in inequality that drives so many social ills.
Cheers!
Because it actually is the prevailing market rate for their role and they know that. Also, let's not forget that there is always a large risk when hiring someone, especially as in the OPs case where they are recently graduated. The value can't be certain, so businesses are conservative until it can be proven to be higher. This is logical and expected.
I'm sorry, but I don't buy this idea that the business, the entity with all the power in the relationship, is entitled to be conservative but no one else is.
My mind is blown at reading this sentence.
My 'ethic' cannot be measured (or compensated, or matched) with money, no matter much money is offered; I dearly hope yours' the same.
If I don't think the pay is fair, I will just quit the job. I won't bother with complaining to the employer about money=work ethics.
I will decide what my ethic is, thank you.
Edit: And I am getting down mod for saying my ethics can't be bought. Jesus.
The senior executives at my company are very responsible people, however, how could they be irresponsible? They make millions/yr, they have secretaries, and they a lot of autonomy in deciding how they should be judged. It'd be unusual for someone to be irresponsible in those conditions.
Meanwhile, worker bees balance sick kids, uncooperative coworkers, shifting priorities/deadlines, and taking the time to be price-conscious because they can't really afford to waste money. Is it any surprise that sometimes things fall through the cracks?
Sure, there are people who turn up on a tuesday and that's ill-advised. But presumably they're an at-will employee. If it's a problem, replace them with someone better. IF you can't find someone better at the same price, that's your sign that you're not paying enough for what you want. If you like the person, make the investment in their responsibility.
Previous generations had jobs for life. For a while now many companies have proved they don't care about the staff, and so it's not particularly surprising that staff don't care about the work.
"I'm feeling sleepy and will be in later" is an employee being upfront and direct that they will not be productive and do not want to be the source of waste in the office. This is an employee that should be rewarded and encouraged. An office culture where this type of message is ok should be encouraged.
What you don't want is a toxic culture where everything needs to be explained and justified to an office full of scorekeepers and clock watchers. The people that do care are the ones that shouldn't care and should probably be minding their own business.
In dionidium's scenario it is very possible that employee worked it out with their manager and the message was a courtesy message. It is very possible they are tired from putting in a late night the night before. It is very possible they are tired due to "truly unforeseen and unusual circumstances." Etc.
To me, dionidium is the problem in this scenario.
I might say the same thing for this comment :/
I guess it boils down to a matter of trust. You've hired someone to get a job done. If you don't trust them to do it, fire them and replace them with someone you do trust.
The whole "you need to be in your chair at 9am daily because it's the only way I know you'll show up to client meetings and meet project deadlines" seems bizarre and gaslighty. Why not allow people the autonomy to do their job in a way that best suits them in terms of maximizing productivity? If someone misses a client meeting or deadline, that's the signal that you have a problem.
I've observed increases in this type of behavior when things aren't going so well.
When people feel like they are shipping software that makes a difference, they want to be there. If it's only this individual, then it probably speaks more to their behavior than anything systemic. But if it is others too, I would look more broadly.
The notion that this is a valid excuse for telling your boss, "hey, pops, I'm not feeling engaged this morning, gonna be in later" is a new one.
Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe not. But it's definitely a different thing.
But you get in and spend a lot of your time fixing bugs and working on old, monolithic codebases.
People want to make a difference, employers sell the vision, and then there's this mis-match and you have the disengaged worker.
I think the problem is the reality that most software jobs need skilled workers, but skilled workers are often seeking enough intellectual stimulation from their jobs to make a difference, and a lot of this work isn't the the type of life-changing envisioned.
It's not just skill, it's also a level of creativity that one needs to do things like programming. And that creativity is often absent when the work is too boring.
I assure you it can be done at 9AM when you're a little tired.
Whether or not you should have to be at work at 9AM is another matter, but this idea that you can't possibly get anything useful done unless you're in the zone has been oversold.
Before that, it was possible to take a job after graduation and stay with the same company until retirement. A worker's loyalty to the company was rewarded in kind, with the company's loyalty to the worker. People got raises and promotions. They grew roots.
Now, there is zero corporate loyalty. If you can't predict a profit for this quarter for your specific individual contribution, regardless of how hard you can work, you're fired. But you will come crawling back when we need you again, won't you?
The workers have responded. If the company stops making the work worthwhile, the worker will slack off or jump ship. If the company force-feeds its Flavor-Ade, the employees will just puke it up as soon as it's safe to do so. If the company tells baldfaced lies about itself, the employees smile and nod, while thinking about the rude gestures they would like to be making.
The "lack of engagement" is because the employees know that management cares about them not at all, but the forms must still be honored in order to receive the paycheck. In short, your company is bullshit and the workers hate it; they are just using it to get what they need and will ditch it the instant that a better deal comes along. We are all mercenaries now.
We will disobey whenever it's more convenient for us, and we think we can get away with it. Because the company executives are just our bosses, not our friends or our leaders or our prophets. If they fire us, we move on to the next bosses just like them. We're not going to bust our ass to earn them another dollar. Maybe if we are freshly fallen off the back of the turnip truck, we will go the extra mile, but it doesn't take long for those folks to learn. So the disengaged worker is the default. We learned from our elders, who were forcibly disengaged by their employers.
And since my fortunes are not tied to those of my employer in any meaningful way, I will not stick around to help bail out a sinking ship. If you're going down, I'm not even going to plug the leak and call for help. I'll just grab a lifeboat and be on my way, thanks. It will probably even be an even smoother ride, as I won't have to worry about any rising tides raising my boat.
The problem is that a programmer described above would not be hired by your company and simultaneously wont recognize your company as a good place for him from job posting. Even admitting that you dont mind fixing bugs is other peoples code might make you sound as lesser programmer in current culture.
Otherwise said, there is mismatch between what companies need and what they reward.
[1] Perversely, I miss burning wood; as a kid I cursed the woodpile, but its good exercise and you can get a lot of thinking done while you do it.
I've worked in jobs I wasn't engaged by, was able to finish university (not fun), and am starting to get bored at my current job, but I can't leave just yet due to external circumstances. I believe character is a big part of it, but it doesn't change the fact that I'm posting to hacker news during work hours.
This is one of my favorite points of tension in business -
1) Businesses want people performing at their highest level
2) Businesses want people to work collaboratively without much latency
3) Businesses want to pay people as little as possible
In these high-concentration jobs, it's not unusual for people to be most productive at night. However, many people don't want to work at night so there's a cost to working with people during the best time for them. And businesses don't want to put up the money for people to justify a radical lifestyle alteration.
So everyone gives and takes and things work suboptimally but well-enough that no one terminates the relationship.
I imagine both sorts of earlybirds exist, and I'd be interested in seeing how common each is.
I once spent a couple weeks living only by candlelight after 8:30 or so, no screens. It's hard not to get enough sleep that way. You can still read, play board games/cards, write, study, play or listen to music, prep/cook food, talk(!), and tons of other stuff, but go figure, those things don't tend to keep one from going to sleep at a reasonable hour (you may be surprised at what's a "reasonable hour" for you when literally far more total entertainment than was enjoyed over any entire given year in the Imperial capital of Rome isn't available at your fingertips).
Netflix, cable tv that's on 24/7 (not my thing, but lots of people use their TV that way), video games, news feeds, mindless browsing, "who was that one guy in that one thing? Hold on, I'll look it up", what's Trump up to now? (better check!), a few thousand lumens of artificial lighting after the sun goes down, and so on... you'll put off sleep for those, maybe without realizing it ("it's not like I even feel tired yet", sure, but you would if you hadn't been playing Playstation or watching Netflix or scrolling through Facebook in a bright room for 2 hours straight, and if you didn't have the option of doing the same or similar for another two hours)
Having a window to all the world, a vast library both greater and with a worse SNR than any that's ever existed, more high-quality, unique audio-visual entertainment options than existed in entire major cities a mere couple of decades ago (let alone 50 years ago), hundreds of immersive video games tuned for "engagement" at best and outright addiction at worst (remember when games would eventually get frustrating/boring enough, or you'd get stuck and have no immediate way of finding a solution, so after an hour or two you'd be sick of playing and just want to ride bikes or something? Those were the days.), a direct line to answer any stupid low-value question that pops in your head, near-instant communication with everyone you know, and so on (mixed in with tons of manipulative advertising and such), all in your house, all of the time, is maybe not healthy for most people.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
- Emily Bludworth de Barios
(excerpt, whole thing at http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31)
I generally come into the office around 10:30am, though sometimes it'll be 8am. I wouldn't mind coming in around 2pm and working into the evening, but I frequently need to work with other employees who have a more normal schedule, and I have an 11am standup so I have to be awake by then anyway. When I know I need to go to sleep, I pop a melatonin tablet and put on a sleep mask to block out light. When I first started, I forced myself to bed before 11 each night and made sure to be at the office before 9 each morning, until I observed that people didn't care about strict schedules.
There's an understanding that as long as I make the meetings I agree to (some are in person and require travel) and management is happy with my output, my schedule can be quite flexible. Some weeks will be less than 40 hours, some weeks will be > 50 because of some deep bug I just want to get over with. Some days I'll spend a bit too much time on HN or taking breaks to the snack kitchen, other days I'll sit down when I arrive in the morning and not stand again until late at night due to focus. It all tends to balance out. In any case when the lines aren't drawn clearly it's important to find out at what point the fuzzy boundary becomes solid. This "cultural shift" that OP was complaining about is just the new generation of employees finding out where the hard borders actually are, and discovering that at many firms they're a lot further back than they used to be and they can be pushed even further with a bit of pressure. I'm waiting to see someone show up to work in a fursuit, and wish there were an old-timer suited IBM employee there to witness it too. Many firms have realized that to a large extent, for many jobs what you wear simply doesn't matter.
At a previous job, I also had a pretty flexible schedule, but we tried to keep it "between 10 and 11" yet I kept coming in closer and closer to 11 all the time until a few times I was in after 11 and more than once I overslept and came in past noon. We changed it to "be here by 10 or we might have to cut ties". No further problems.
Most clients don't want to deal with that kind of behavior.
"It's been 3 hours, why is the site still down?"
"The developer isn't in yet to fix it."
Being reliable and showing up to work on time is a job skill as much as good communication, being a hard worker, etc
I realize that you should be flexible with workers' hours but people also need to realize coverage is needed.
If you have regular hours long outages that require specific developer to come in and fix the code asap, you have huge mismanagement problem. The developers coming not in the morning is your least problem. Insufficient testing, apparently badly set up servers+application and most likely general mismanagement are primary problem.
Also, if you are in this situation, then it is reasonable to assume that your developers had to deal with similar outages in the middle of the night or during weekends.
I'm all-in for the kids these days sheesh comments, but if you think 'back in the day' workers had the constant availability expectation that we have in the modern era with cell phones, that's just factually incorrect. It wasn't only employees that reliably adhered to the schedule, it was also management. If that changes, both sides should accept the trade offs, otherwise you are expecting the employee to treat the schedule as sacred, while the employer treats the schedule as something which is changed on a whim.
Lazy unreliable people certainly exist, but they don't usually last that long in any role. Poisonous management practices that set people up for failure have a much longer shelf life and do more damage.
For better or for worse, it's not expected to receive service after hours.
But first thing in morning...
Things are very different. My first meeting is at 9am, and nobody has any reason to care if I work 4am - noon or 9am-5pm, or more likely 8am-5pm with a one hour lunch break.
That is primary advantage of flexible working time, which is something everyone up to now praised as huge improvement. I dont do that because I have family, but dont see a problem assuming a.) they work full time when you cont worked time and b.) I can come sooner as norm + leave sooner and not be punished for it by management assuming everyone gotta stay late.
> Can you even imagine somebody saying that to their boss in some black-and-white movie from the 1940s?
Movies are not representation of society as it exists. It is not true now and it was not true back then, especially because censorship back then was heavier and because 1940 was second world war time.
Notably, films could only present "correct standards of life" (for the times) unless the plot called for something else. Alcohol consumption, could not be shown unless the plot called for it. The law had to be respected and upheld.
I remember old movies from later eras where both white collar and blue collar dudes drunk on the job and were various grades irresponsible.
Quite frankly, they are right. Those that complain are in the wrong.
The growth is from the demand side - people are buying more right now.
You say that as if the jobs taken by illegals exist in some alternate universe where simple economic principles don't apply.
If an illegal immigrant's job is vacant (because he couldn't enter the country) and a would-be manufacturing worker fills that job, that obviously has a direct impact on the manufacturer's ability to hire that worker. He's no longer looking for a job because he filled a vacancy left by an illegal immigrant.
If your business model relies on wages being suppressed by those illegal workers, then maybe your business deserves to go bankrupt when the supply dries up and Americans start demanding $15/hour.
Undocumented workers take the jobs because there is no financial incentive for an owner to risk breaking the law unless they are getting cash back. The worker is basically paying their employer to break the law.
Interesting hypothesis... I was under the impression that many farmers operate on thin margins these days.
>In some industries the labour shortage seems acute. Now is not a good time for Americans to remodel their bathrooms: tile and terrazzo contractors earn 11% more per hour than a year ago (and fully one-third more than in 2014).
This is exactly the type of jobs that have been flooded by immigrants from Latin America - both illegal and legal - for decades. I speak Spanish and often talk with immigrants at bars or wherever, and they work in numerous industries.
The one thing that changed my view of the whole system was realizing that absolutely no company gives a shit about the laws. Guys who had been here a year or less, couldn't speak any English, were hired for government contracting jobs on roads and the metro paying tons of overtime at near-union wages.
Also, labor markets are fluid. If a citizen can make more in construction, he might quit his shitty manufacturing job.
But, hey, anything to continue with the absurd narrative that massive immigration hasn't been a very major part of wage destruction for both blue-collar and also white-collar jobs via H1Bs, OPT, L1, etc.
This breaks the HN guidelines outright. We ban accounts that make a habit of that, so please read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't.
Most traditional manufacturing jobs require being able to read/write the native language. Also, manufacturing companies are sometimes audited by standard bodies that involve interviews with workers (mainly to see if they understand quality control).
In other words: you can fill part of your staff with interchangeable workers, but not all of it.
The whole immigrant debate is so political now, it's hard to find any trustful source, including the stats put out by USCIS , DOJ, etc.
So if you want to know how the SSN game works for illegal immigrants, find some media who wants to paint it in a positive light, even if they have to admit that millions of workers use fake SSNs: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/undocum...
> Illegal border crossings on the southern border are down 78% and blue collar wages are rising. Of course correlation does not equal causation, but when there are fewer available workers to hire/train and demand remains constant, wages tend to rise.
was marked dead. Why? Is the illegal crossing number wrong/fake news?
Employers are supposed to have employees fill out an I-9 form that verifies employment eligibility, but the penalties for noncompliance are at most $1,100 per form -- basically slap on the wrist territory [2].
The irony here is that the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party is now in open conflict with the business wing of the party, which benefits heavily from hiring ineligible workers for low wages.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-Verify#Operations
[2] https://www.thebalance.com/i-9-form-employment-eligibility-v...
If you really doubt that illegals can work in manufacturing, try googling for 'immigration bust factory', or similar stories.
Oh wait...
You're right - you do need a valid name/SSN/birthdate. It doesn't have to be yours. And if a company wants to be disreputable, all they need to do is keep running them until they hit jackpot.
Because then they can claim that the other people were, uhhh, fraudulent. And this person passed their Everify. It's not like there's any proof that the Everify was run 10 times prior, to find a good name/ssn/DoB.
With that said, I do feel like it is incredibly relevant to this post. From what I could tell, it's at least not a grossly inaccurate claim[2] and could partially explain the increase in lower class wages.
edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain why? What did I say that was inaccurate?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/apr/...
Given that they’re illegal, how could we ever know if the number is down or if they just found some other way to cross the border?
Also, it would be quite foolish to think there is only a single factor affecting wages. There are a multitude of factors, and a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants might be one of them, although it’s hard to be sure.
http://www.thehour.com/business/article/Wageless-U-S-recover...
Also, talk and data are different things.
There are surrogate measures that we can use.
Traffic numbers are a good one in Southern California. When there are crackdowns/bad economy, the traffic decreases markedly. Gasoline sales drop. Those are hard numbers that the state collects.
Money transfer services have to report. Those numbers are recorded.
Just because someone is illegal does not mean they have no impact. This cuts both directions: positive and negative.
Was in 2001 prior to 9/11 in south Indiana. I applied to a factory. And another one. And another one. Nothing. No bites. I then found work at a gas station Subway across the first factory. Our primary business were the factories.
9/11 happened. Within days, the factories shut down. We at subway were like "WTF happened?" Cause we were staffed like normal for rush.
Then we talked to one of the workers who stayed - there was a huge implicit threat that INS was going to make nationwide sweeps deporting all illegals. So, they left ahead of time. And "gee golly" the factories were now hiring and one said they had better wages.
Again, its correlation kind of.. Well not really. Supply and demand is a pretty hard rule. And when you have undocumented, working for less than minimum wage, and foregoing regulations on employees, is anyone surprised?
I know I understood the blue collar hatred of illegals. I've been on the receiving end of that. Not that its right, mind you- but understanding others viewpoints is the start of fixing them.
(Fixed spacing, from making comment on phone.)
Or are those jobs just a small part of "blue collar".
There's a whole class of blue collar under that. Line workers, food prep, factory pickers, non-medical health aide, framers, concrete pourers, roofers...
I know when my parents had their current house built, they had a bunch of hispanic people working on the house. When my parents went to take pictures, they beat feet to get out of any photo. My moms pretty sure they said something about INS. But who knows.
My parent's didn't care too much that likely "illegal to work peoples" were building their house. It was cheaper than the other options.
Honest question: why not? I have a lot of members of extended family who have gone through a LOT of pain to become legal immigrants in the US, and they hate the illegals exactly because illegals have broken the rules that they have payed so hard to follow.
If an agent A sacrifices it's profits to follow the rules and agent B just violates them, why shouldn't A hate B? (You can imagine A and B being the company who sacrifices profits to follow environment regulation and another company who just forges emission tests, for example).
I value human rights more than I value state or federal "rights". And in this case, there's more than enough resources to go around.
And a second derivative answer - not everyone who came here had a choice.
Oh please. You damned straight it's perverse.
How is this not perverse when a director of an agency on aging has to tell elderly clients "Sorry, there's no more money for food this week." ?
How is this not perverse when homeless try to get shelter for the night, and are turned away because there's no beds?
How is this not perverse when we train upcoming high school students to agree to crushing scholastic debt with no recourse or bankruptcy protection?
How is this not perverse that we don't have a true medical system across the USA? Instead we tie it to employment, thus continuing the "Work or Die" ideal, quite literally.
> There may be "enough" resources – but they aren't yours to go anywhere. And freedom to do whatever you please with the things you own is the most fundamental human right of all.
Sure, I'll accept that for simple possessions. Clothes, personal effects, lodging, transportation.
But whereas you're talking of personal stuff, I'm talking about the top income whose top 3 people own collectively more than the bottom 50% of the world. I guess when you can afford to amass money, game the system, buy laws/legislators and rig everything, you do end up with more money. But "it was hard earned". Yeah, uh huh. Keep telling yourself that.
Capitalism fails for many. It succeeds for a very few, with most stuck in the cycle of "Work to live, live to work". It's not much different than a slave or indentured servant class where for the necessities of life; Instead of a single owner, I must find an owner who will take me in.
And if you fall through the cracks, it's almost impossible to move back up. I'm sure you can find a Horatio Alger story or 2. They're popular in this country.
Can you elaborate?
> Capitalism fails for many.
Once again, if you fail, it doesn't mean that the system fails. The system's goal is not to make your life good. Why would it be?
And I refuse the very premise you're working with. We're only as strong as the weakest members. And I see those members begging on the streets, or wandering around because of untreated psychiatric issues. Or they're living in tents off in the back part of the city park.
There's always going to be someone with more, for whatever reasons. But there should be nobody homeless. There should be nobody going hungry. There should be nobody without medical treatment.
I'm not going to budge on those issues. Higher rights exist building on TOP of the essentials. Look at Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
Even YCombinator is doing a program/test on UBI. To pretend it's not an issue is completely absurd.
> The system's goal is not to make your life good. Why would it be?
Because, unless you're independently wealthy and can live on residuals for the rest of your life, you're only a few accidents away from destitution. We live in a world of plenty, but allow monied interests to amass it and control access. Why?
And that money can be used to buy influence and laws to further entrench themselves. That argument is "Its my money and I got it and you cant have it", regardless if it's illegal or paid-off "legal" means. This is the might-makes-right argument and principle. And it's time we re-evaluate if this makes sense. I have a feeling that most people will find it absurd, as I do.
What "we" are you talking about? These members are not my family members or friends; what you're doing is abusing other people's empathy to push your agenda through emotional means instead of rational.
> But there should be nobody homeless. There should be nobody going hungry. There should be nobody without medical treatment.
Why on Earth is that an invariant on society?
As long as the goods required to survive (food, housing etc.) don't materialize out of thin air, it makes sense to expect people to work for them.
And I agree and disagree with you. Yes, we can make you, governmentally speaking. However there is a different way out: automation and robotics.
We could live in a society that we strive to make more and more automated solutions so that all can benefit. Solar means effectively free power. Food generation allows food to be made so cheaply that the cost is inconsequential. Transportation, same thing. (Yeah, you might not "have" a car, but you can summon one whenever you need.)
If you want to rehash old failure modes of capitalism, so be it. It's a 300 year old system that's bursting at the seams with failure modes everywhere. Communism isn't exactly much better - in that system you trade one master for another.
A mix of socialism, capitalism, and a healthy amount of automation would work. And the machines that produce essentials should be owned by all of us, with the benefits from these going to all of us.
That would maintain no forced working by people, maintaining freedom, AND cover the essentials of all citizens. No?
Of course it's right to hate people who have no respect for your country's laws and have a meaningful negative impact on your quality of life. You're trying to make it into a racial issue to excuse people who make life worse for blue collar workers. It's also why they hate politicians: they aren't making decisions that benefit blue collar workers. (Starting with NAFTA.)
More than half of immigrants are on welfare: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/09/01/immigr...
Who knows how crazy the expense is for illegals.
People should stop abusing opioids, but we should also make sure they don't cross the border into our country.
This crosses into political ranting which is definitely not what we want here. Thoughtful discussion, please, or nothing. We've had to warn you about this before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That doesn't mean you can't express your point of view, just that you need to try an order of magnitude or two harder to do it with respect. This means respect for the ones you're talking to, for the ones who have reason to disagree with you, and for the community at large. That takes effort and practice, but it's an effort many of us have made, and it turns out to be pretty satisfying as well as a way to make the community better instead of destroying it.
I'd imagine the direct correlation is the ratio of US wages to Mexican wages. US wages have been poor for so long, migrants see less benefit. Migration might go on the upswing as wages rise and jobs are harder to fill.
That comment was killed by software because the commenter was banned (more or less; it's a bit complicated) for having abused HN in the past.
Could it be possible that AI will instead free people to work on new jobs in new industries? Amazing! It’s almost like this time is not any different from any other time.
It’s just that easy!
Unemployment lags behind productivity increases.
Productivity increases lag behind tech adoption.
Tech adoption lags behind innovation.
innovation lags behind technology maturation.
technology maturation lags behind science.
A lot of the transformation automation is in the "science/maturation" or the "innovation" phases.
Gig jobs are fine if people can provide their own emergency fund and pay out of pocket for their own benefits. That is, the difference between "gig job" and a "successful sole proprietorship" is how much money one makes.
AI will accelerate this massively, much faster than automation can take jobs away.
Long term it will lead to a crash in the highest paying jobs, as the market is flooded with workers who have management and tactical experience. Rather than a big spread between $10k-$1m, we’ll see a huge cluster of workers around $100k.
Please, polite answers only. I'm just a foreigner that want to understand a little more.
In service positions, I could see a rise in wages attributed to those jobs that might have previously been filled with migrants.
I might see legal immigration also being discouraged, but to be honest that includes tourism from abroad which is shrinking and potentially having a negative impact on the service sector.
The only direct _policy_ link I can see is not a policy but rather a "business friendly" climate that might lead companies to start to invest more, understanding that they probably won't be taxed or regulated more heavily in the next 3 years.
That, plus cheap credit (a big overheat risk IMO) means opportunities for growth.
In terms of actual policy, I'd say not much has happened but rather the economy is now recovering from the housing crisis and growth has picked up again across the board. This was occurring before Trump, and will continue until another systemic issue occurs and people panic I'd imagine.
That said, in my opinion, Presidents rarely have much to do with economic outcomes except to either inject risk / instability with policy initiatives or pronouncements. Some big policies have costs, but most of the day to day impacts are quite spread out. There has been no action yet on health care or taxes that would influence employer direct costs. Perhaps some regulation has not been implemented and some executive orders rolled back, but nothing that would impact markets.
In particular, in this case, the rise started before Trump assumed office, so it seems reasonable to say that no, he didn't cause it.
http://www.macrotrends.net/1358/dow-jones-industrial-average...
However, just to show that with the right zoom level, you can make data show you anything, look at 3 year graph, and it shows that up until Nov 2016, the graph was flat-lining, even with some large dips, but then it started going up and has been doing so since. I am sure Trump supporters will say "see, there's your cause!".
And maybe they are right somewhat. This is the stock market, so perceptions, and perceptions of perceptions of future income get folded into the price. So maybe a hope of a more business friendly environment was started to be factored in.
One thing I have little doubt of is that had the market done the opposite and gone down the same amount, every media outlet and Reddit's politics subs would immediately become macroeconomic experts and blame everything on Trump. The reason I say it is because there was a dip the night of the election, and I clearly remember how MSNBC hosts printed out after-hours and Japan stock market results on paper and happily were telling people how their 401k will burn, and jobs will be lost and how they, how had just had a major failure predicting the outcome of the election, had finally validated themselves regarding the stock market crash. But then the very next day the stock market shot up and has been going up since. That's why you don't really find them talking much about the economy. This was one of the surprising articles, and even that from a British company.
i say that as a fly on the wall. i feel like i am outside some bubble where everyone flips out about the smallest things, and they forget that they did it at all. try asking people about how they flipped out about the premarket trading the day after the election and people are oblivious
The average maturity of a corporate bond is now 15+ years, and most bonds pay a fixed interest rate that doesn't vary due to current rates [1].
That means that any change to rates will not have much of an immediate impact on the interest expense line item. On the other hand, it will actually increase the interest income they receive on their cash balances.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/41213b02-b87e-11e6-ba85-95d1533d9...
Slightly oversimplified way to think about it: every year companies need to refi only 1/T of their debt, where T is the average maturity.
Retail shelf space is capital. If consumers empty shelves twice as fast, the return on shelf space-capital will double (assuming the markup doesn’t change). It’s not the Fed raising rates, it’s the market over-bidding the Fed.
If the Fed were able to stop these movements, our economy wouldn’t be as bubbly as it is.
It's a matter of facts. The population growth rate is too low. The rate of retirement is too high (boomers exiting). Immigration is at modest levels versus the total population base. Almost any consistent GDP growth with those factors in play, will generate an extreme labor demand squeeze. It's particularly bad for blue collar jobs; the boomer generation is loaded with blue collar skills / trade persons, and they're exiting in droves.
Major economies with low population growth like Germany are able to maintain perpetually low unemployment with very modest growth. The US routinely grows 3x to 4x faster than Germany, including presently. It's obvious what the consequences of sustained 1.5%-2% (much less higher) GDP growth must have on the US when it comes to labor shortages from this point forward, when all the labor factors are taken into account.
Strange.
To be sure, bona-fide shortages can occur transiently. For example when a natural disaster happens, it will take time for the local tradesmen to work through the backlog. But at a relatively steady state, it seems silly to talk about a shortage of construction workers. Pay a bit more than the next guy, and my guess is, your shortage will quickly disappear.
Labor availability + skill + time + market awareness = it takes a helluva lot longer than months or 2-3 years to meaningfully boost a skill trade.
Labor availabity means: how many people - heavily influenced by the unemployment rate - are interested in putting in the time to go retrain themselves to do a new job. Many people will not kill themselves to do so, if they're making $45/hour and you tell them the upside is $60/hour. A deep level of comfort sets in for a large percentage of the population once you get to $30-$45 per hour.
Skill means: it takes years to train someone to an appropriate level at being a professional anything, whether we're talking roofing or plumbing.
Time means: well, it simply takes time to rotate large numbers of people into blue collar jobs. The whole process takes a lot of time, from start to finish. There's only so much that can be done to speed that process up.
Market awareness: it can take years for people to believe that blue collar work demand is going to be sustained (history say otherwise, and people know that such work is often inconsistent; and they know that the downturns are brutal). It can take years to get the word out in just a mid-size city like San Diego, that there is high demand. It requires new entrants to take risk, which most people do not like doing. To be convinced to take a life change risk if someone is even remotely comfortable, the reward has to be extreme in most cases.
That means you're not paying enough.
One could argue that, while you think you’re experiencing a shortage, reality is that you’re simply not willing to pay enough.
But I will happily bake you a loaf of bread for $10,000 each. In fact, I’d quit my day job to do that. That shortage wouldn’t last long.
Yes, exactly. The demand curve shifts right and the markets find a new equilibrium (most likely at a higher wage than the old equilibrium), but there’s no “shortage”. It’s just markets clearing at a different price level than what people are used to.
Calling it a “shortage” is like saying every time Starbucks raises their prices there is a shortage of coffee — at the old price, sure, but not in absolute terms. That’s not how equilibriums work.
A. Takes time for new workers to be adequately trained.
B. Takes even longer to get people that have been raised to look down on the trades to change their worldview and all of a sudden consider working with their hands, no matter how much money is involved.
There are real cases of shortages in the labour market. Where I live, the law defines a fixed rate for doctors. Even if I had all the money in the world, I could not legally pay more than my neighbour to employ the services of the doctor in town. Here, a shortage is a real possibility as there is no monetary way to decide who gets the appointment with the doctor. But these tend to be exceptional cases.
Without that legal requirement, I could simply offer more than my neighbour to get the appointment and the neighbour would have to choose to go without seeing the doctor. There is not a shortage in that scenario as the neighbour was not in the market to begin with. This is the same reason we don't say there is a shortage of Ferraris, even though the vast majority of people will never be able to get their hands on one, no matter how much they wish they could have one. They are simply unaffordable to most people.
It really doesn't matter how long it takes to train someone. As long as the price is able to rise, the business who really need the existing people will pay more, taking them from the businesses that cannot afford them, until everyone who still needs that service is fulfilled.
In what society?
But you've added the qualifiers 'in a store' and 'basically the same kind', and it's still not really describing fungibility, is it?
you've never heard of billionaires huh?
Bill Gates can do nothing right now and his net worth would still increase.
What if nobody trains to become a construction worker (for whatever reason) and then over the next 5-10 years demand goes down because people get used to making do with the buildings that already exist? Is it also not a shortage then?
But you can do this too: call up the elite contractors who you can't schedule because they're "too busy" and give them a big number upfront. "I need my carpets replaced, I figure this will be $30k, does that sound right?". They'll be there.
But you have to do the work to know what the right wages are. Employers already know this stuff, obviously.
However, there's quite a lot of friction hiring unknown software developers (so I guess that's why I don't get those offers - I'm not actively hunting for them).
I always found that there is some "market price" where people are decent and paying less gets you less quality and paying more tends to get you better quality.
Specific example: we needed security guards for an event in Las Vegas circa 2006.
I remember Joel Spolsky saying something like "You don't always get what you pay for but it's true enough of the time to be a useful phrase"Suppose that we train x+y construction workers a year, x work in the industry until retirement, y - retrain to different profession. This means that there are y*years dormant specialists that can be brought back to industry.
Don't kid yourself. Those new hires are at other jobs making more money. I am booked for a roofer in feb 2018 (fingers crossed - friend of a friend). Blue skills are in extremely high demand. And those guys are working extremely hard making really high incomes (400k+). These guys are highly paid and are not messing around -- most saw 2008. They drive nice trucks, own their company, have rude secretaries and wont look at your email until feb 18 (fingers crossed). Look at a blue collar guys' current circumstance: no competition (know anyone learning HVAC?), a HUGE housing boom in cali, pass through low tax income, 2k homes burned (wtf), no outsourcing (try outsourcing a plumber) -- as my mentor said: "Harvest time".
1. http://wiki.c2.com/?FizzBuzzTest
I'm not a top-shelf engineer, but I'm perfectly capable of working on a team and producing good work. Finding jobs is an extremely difficult process.
http://thestartupconference.com/2017/03/25/the-350k-google-s...
The total comp is in practice also generally a bit lower because most of those companies backload the vesting
Many of these people might have some quasi-managerial duties (interacting with other parts of the organization, helping with recruiting, ...), get roped into more meetings than they would like, or make high-level technical decisions and delegate work to a handful of more junior engineers, but most of them are sitting at their desks writing code a significant part of the day (or perhaps rewriting the schlocky code that the junior engineers just handed in).
Also keep in mind I said "usually" in my original comment. Blue collar labor and software engineering are not directly analogous because yes, there are software developers at the high end that are making a lot of money compared to some of the best blue collar workers. But it's still only a small percentage of them making that much, and I wouldn't mention those figures to someone looking to go into software for that reason
The place I am now starts fresh grads as Engineer I, then Engineer II, Senior Engineer, Principal Engineer, Architect and then Staff Engineer. Each promotion takes about 4-5 years so you aren't reaching Staff until about 20 years. A Staff Engineer is basically fully autonomous and is an IC that reports directly to the executives. They work on what they want and with who they want.
I understand this is different at Google and I guess Staff is the equivalent to a Google Fellow.
That's why you said:
"when it's usually 10-20+ year tenured engineering managers at a few specific companies"
right?
I highly doubt that blue collar workers get anywhere near that much. If they did, everyone would try to work in that industry because the barrier to entry is comparatively very low.
If you read my comment, I'm not really talking about blue collar workers, but more people who used to be bluecollar workers but eventually became small business owners of companies employ blue collar labor. My cousins who used to be electricians can easily make $250k/year by employing a team of <10 electricians to do the manual work. $400k/year doesn't seem out of reach at all, and they might get that just by moving business to a higher CoL area than the suburban South
That's an old joke:
Surgeon to plumber: "You are charging higher prices than I get for performing surgery!"
Plumber: "Yeah, I make more money now than when I was a surgeon, too."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2013/10/04/why-shoul...
Yes, these are blue collar workers.
“”” The salary figures fall short of numbers reported by other survey groups: a Medical Group Management Association report using 2010 data, found that the average compensation for radiologists was $471,253 and for pediatricians it was $192,148, Kaiser Health News reports. “””
http://time.com/4408807/surgeon-salary-how-much-doctors-make...
Here's some math:
- median age of retirement: 63.
- median UPS salary over lifetime: $70k.
- UPS driver lifetime earnings = 70k * (63-18) = $3.15m
- Median doctor salary: They usually earn around 150k total during their residency, and the median is around 180k beyond that (typically age 30+)
- MD lifetime earnings = 150k + 180k*33 = 6.09m.
- MD education debt is typically around 500k, adjusting earnings to 5.59m. Accounting for hours worked, MD equivalent lifetime earnings are 3.72m.
I mean no disrespect to the work ethic of any blue collar job, but do you really believe the guy who cured you of cancer isn't worth the extra 600k over their lifetime compared to the guy who dropped off your replacement phone charger?
In the United States, the richest 1 percent have seen their share of national income roughly double since 1980, to 20 percent in 2014 from 11 percent. ...
No other nation in the 35-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is as unequal among those with comparable tax data, and none have experienced such a sharp rise in inequality.
...
Almost all of the growth in top American earners has come from just three economic sectors: professional services, finance and insurance, and health care, groups that tend to benefit from regulatory barriers that shelter them from competition.
The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians ...
The United States also stands out in terms of how much money its elite professionals earn relative to the median worker. Workers at the 90th percentile of the income distribution for professionals make 3.5 times the earnings of the typical (median) worker in all occupations in the United States. Only Mexico and Israel, which have very high inequality, compensate professionals so disproportionately.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/17/upshot/income-inequality-...
My father is a doctor and he finished paying off his education at 48. I make half what he made and finished paying mine off at 28. I'm drastically more wealthy now, and will be wealthier when I retire. This seems strange given the significant difference in income.
1980 is a very peculiar data point to mention. That year is pretty much exactly when minimum wage and tuition suddenly diverged. Between 1965 and 1980, A full time summer job at minimum wage could consistently pay for ~45% of your tuition. In the next 15 years, it dropped to around 20-25%. Running the numbers for 2017-2018, in-state tuition is 20%, out of state is 11%, and private is 8.6%.
The groups that have contributed the most people to the 1 percent since 1980 are: physicians ...
With all that in mind, this statement doesn't seem unreasonable to me. If education prices have skyrocketed, shouldn't the career that spends the most in education (both time and cost) be compensated accordingly?
Point being, income is only half of the equation to wealth. That article doesn't bother mentioning debt at all.
Relevant assumptions/data:
Summer job: 14 weeks @ 40hrs per week
Tuition costs 2017: https://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tabl...
Older tuition costs: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=76
Minimum wage: https://www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/chart.htm
Do you really think you should pay twice as much in the US compared to other countries with equal quality?
https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...
(Also on HN today)
To get in, yes there is no barrier to entry, just find a trade school or union to accept you for training.
However, the program and training is no joke. You have to have the aptitude and dexterity to do the job and complete the training.
400k is seen quite often e.g. here: http://www.gaswork.com/search/Anesthesiologist/Job/All
So it would seem one just needs to choose the right niche, and doesn't even need to be the top.
The barrier to entry is not low though, it's incredibly hard to become a crane operator due to the unions.
It sounds like you have to network hard and get very lucky to get that 500k per year salary and it probably doesn't last forever.
I've heard several stories from older people who said that they were earning ridiculous amounts at some point in their lives but it only lasted a couple of years and then their salaries dropped back to average ranges once their contract ran out and started working for normal companies again.
Salaries don't necessarily keep going up based on experience.
DIY subreddit is also a good place to search and ask questions.
I wouldn't want my home improvement projects to look half-assed just because I wasn't experienced or knew the "best practices" for the given home improvement task.
I can do most home maintenance stuff - electrical, most plumbing, fixtures, appliance repair, etc. I pay someone to do drywall work or painting - because I'm pretty picky and I can always see where my work falls short.
I think you'll find for finishing work practice makes perfect and is where professionals shine. You can certainly do professional quality work, but expect a learning curve and to be re-doing sections of projects that don't turn out too well. I know several homeowners who have re-done bathrooms themselves, and only one would I say turned out professional looking in quality. That guy is simply a perfectionist who spent an inordinate amount of time on the project.
I kind of would want to be a bit further up the learning curve, but if you only have 1 or 2 bedrooms, you don't have much by way to learn, so it seems like having a professional is probably worth the premium vs. your own labor (if you're like me and highly value the aesthetic end result).
I can buy good paint, brushes, and tape. I can take my time, I can let paint dry over multiple days, do touchups, keep properly mixed cans (mixing two cans of the same color into one).
There are two aspects to being a "professional" tradesman.
1) Do it _better_ than others
2) Do it profitably
#1 is something you as an individual can overcome with practice, #2 is generally a hard constraint which sometimes compromises the goals of #1.
Painting is especially easy, if you screw up some spot, you can always return and repaint (worst case you'll have to do that couple times :)) Painting equipment is (relatively) cheep, you can cover floors with plastic covers/blue tape and don't worry about screwing floors/doors while you learn :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNagIA8sKY0 watch these videos and you'd be ready to start. Cutting wall/ceiling line by hand is not that hard (the video has a trick), there're also "helper tools" for cutting lines in home depot/lowes. One trick is that if you go with light color on walls, perfect line with white ceiling doesn't even matter, you won't notice small deviations anyway.
If have doubts in your own skills (I did), try starting with closets and bedrooms. Only then move to living rooms/kitchens. If you screw up closet or your bedroom - it's not that of big deal. Though if watch above video series, it's really hard to screw up too much.
The second is, find people you know that do blue collar work, whatever it happens to be (whatever you're wanting to learn). For example, I know a few guys that work as unlicensed handymen, most of them are quite skilled at what they do, they just frequently work under the table. Pay them for their time to speed up your learning process on specific tasks.
I tend to focus on the types of tasks that I'll have occasion to do many times, such as painting and/or things that may just not look as good as if I hired someone to do them but won't cause any real problems if they're not quite right. I agree that it's mostly just putting the time and effort in--and, of course, there are only so many different things most of us can put our own effort into.
Never do anything structural/load-bearing. Avoid touching window-headers/columns, door-headers/columns, that random beam in the middle of your living room, that random pillar that you wish you know what was for, and that really inconvenient wall between your kitchen and your dining room (those are likely "important" points).
Other than that, paint... sheetrock... siding... sheds... trim... cosmetics... run wires... drill (some) holes... attach things to things... it's your house!
I learned the most by watching Income Property and Holmes on Homes.
http://www.diynetwork.com/shows/income-property
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes_on_Homes
Now some dickwad comes and tells me "man, that is illegal". k
> I know it's meant to stop idiots from doing work that could endanger them and others
Yes, and it's a lot bigger problem than you might think. You know what you are doing, but 99% of people don't, and they will happily murder the next owner / next occupant through their own malpractice, without even thinking once about it. I've seen professional home builders screw this up and fail inspections, multiple times. It's a real and common risk.
That is _not_ the person I want working on a gas line (which is "plubming") on a house I'm going to buy in the future.
I'm sure you're a special little snowflake that's good at everything, but if you don't feel comfortable getting a permit for permit / license-required work, then... um... maybe you shouldn't be doing it? That's the context for the advice I gave to the parent poster.
First step is to read What Your Contractor Won't Tell You [WYCWTY] https://www.amazon.com/What-Your-Contractor-Cant-Tell/dp/097... I wish I had this book before I started. Practical advice from a person who has remodeled 100s of houses. With checklists of things I didn't even know to ask about. I now buy this book for everyone I know thinking of having some work done.
By analogy, WYCWTY is like the Rapid Development and Code Complete type books. It covers that middle gray area between code construction and project & product management. Practical methodology, if you will.
Next, buy every book, watch every video. The best construction books (for me) come from Journal of Light Construction. Their field guides are spendy, so I snagged them thru camelcamelcamel. Also buy some fairly recent code books. Just keep reading, watching, experimenting until understanding.
Next, find local tradesmen who are willing to do side work. There are a lot of very qualified people who are happy to do spot work for cash. For the people I hire, I'm their gopher, cleaner, extra pair of hands. They're taking time away from their families, so I try to make it as painless as possible for them to help me.
Yes, the videos are great. But I've learned more from watching and helping. Two recent examples. #1 I had my guy rehang a new door. OMG. When I tried it myself, I had done everything wrong. This pro rehung the door faster and more true than I would have ever figured out on my own. I have 3 more doors to hang and now I know I'll get it right. #2 I also had a pro come in and hang then mud drywall. OMG. I had done everything wrong. This guy had some many tricks of the trade. Despite reading the books and watching the videos, I had never seen drywall hung before. I totally made a hash of it.
Lastly, buy all the tools, same ones contractors use. For example, I had lot of framing to do, so I bought a Hitachi nailer, the recommended compressor, etc. Now when a tradesmen shows up, I have the proper tools (makes everything easier). Plus, when I finish my remodel, I know I can get most of my money back. Overall, cheaper than renting or buying non-pro gear.
You'll waste a lot of time and money doing things yourself. But if you've got the stomach for it, I think you'll come out ahead. Teach a man to fish and all that.
Just to make sure I understand you correctly, you mean by selling the equipment you bought, right?
There are millions of immigrants in the U.S. who are legal; why would you think these people are not? I guess my point is, it's not a good assumption and has bad consequences: People having their legality questioned based on no evidence.
On one hand, I understand that people don't want to be challenged or to write dissertations for casual conversation. On the other, we know that misinformation spreading through 'internet forums' in the form of 'guesses' is a problem, that HN isn't a typical internet forum, and that 'guesses' are often challenged here.
I can't say how many crews are run like his was, but I also don't think it's fair to assume that all those guys are making next to nothing. The roofing season is so short and the money good enough that I'd bet that having someone you trust to move fast while maintaining quality would be worth a significant amount over minimum wage. Having worked with him on my summer breaks in high school, it took me a full season to get to the point where I was even close to keeping up with his regulars. I'd also bet the money being pretty good, not bad, is why you see groups of the same ethnicity working together since they probably recruit and train each other whenever there's a vacancy.
I'm not sure if I understood correctly, that your dad's crew was mostly immigrants, why do you think it was like that? If pay was good and semi-skilled (easy to train), why mostly immigrants?
Professionalism, negotiation skills and quality service encourage referrals in places where friends / neighbors know one-another. That is, towns where customers having fewer friends or acquaintances (like neighbors or social media connections) tend not to scale via referral network effects. Also, a lifestyle business can scale somewhat by adding good employees carefully and encouraging a decency culture with accountability.
TL;DR - better companies need better cultures; keep superconnector customers insanely happy
Not everyone should be specializing in abstract symbol manipulation.
When you consider that the median income in the country is $31,099[1], making more than half the population is pretty great. At the upper end of that range, you are in the top 30%.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
The question should be "why is this a surprise?"
Does our culture esteem people that work with their hands? Do parents encourage their children to aspire to learn trade skills? Does our educational system encourage students to learn trade skills and explore the trades as highly viable alternatives to going to college?
We've looked down at the trades and blue-collar work for decades. The evidence is everywhere. Of course there is a shortage, students have been listening to the adults in their lives, their peers, media outside of Mike Rowe etc and have heard the message loud and clear.
Solutions; I see two things that need to happen.
First, we need to reach and communicate to students and adults across the country that trade skills are valuable and a career in the trades is an outstanding option.
Create a more efficient, affordable and accessible resources for people to learn trade skills, no matter their location, age, income, nationality etc. We need to make it 10x easier for people to learn the skills that are in demand.
I’m working on both those solutions at Tradeskills.io Definitely a lot to figure out!
Further, the economy doing well when people see wage increases reinforces that marginal increases in income for the 99% highly benefit the national output.
Sorry for the non-contributing anecdote but I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. Once you start to understand things more clearly as a system and how to work on that system you come to realize it's a lot of tacking things together any way possible.
It will be no surprise to anyone reading this that land surveying is dead now, especially two/three-man team land surveying. Nobody was trained during those "gap" periods, and meanwhile the older generation of baby-boom surveyors (of which there were many) retired. Furthermore, LiDAR, scanning, survey-grade GPS, and robotic total stations meant that some engineering firms cut corners and took a chance by sending CEs out into the field solo to do the field work. That dynamic ensures no training of new surveyors in the field is possible.
EDIT: I'm a developer now.
'Labor shortage' is always 'I can't find people at the price I originally thought I'd have to pay', modulo some time lag dependent on the exact skill set (i.e., training time).
Ideally, in such articles I want to see actual numbers. I want to see "the average wage for a carpenters in 2015 was X, and today is is X+10%". I'm not so sure that those numbers are changing all that much.
When white collar tech wages rise it is because they are creating an incredible amount of economic value and deserve all of it! It is absolutely all because of their own genius!
I remember articles from one or two decades ago about the attempts to automate a very dangerous and not even low-paying job of window washing in the high rise buildings. It is a real problem, it does not require HAL-9000 grade AI that can analyse Shakespeare, it is economically viable, and neither then nor now it is completely automated. I see that in Australia, window washing jobs are paid as high as low to midrange software development.
I am not even going to mention more complex tasks like a work of a plumber, a gardener, a janitor. Is the work of a janitor the more lucrative occupation?
It takes very long to get from the first demos to a prototype working most of the time, and even longer from the prototype to a system that can be relied upon in a mission critical environment (a category that most applications of robotics fall into). The Silicon Valley prophets got it all backwards.