the one thing that was befuddling to me, is that there wasn't a single smart company during the mist of the great recession (as far as I could tell) .
What I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. This gives other companies insight into what you have left, and they can now poach your best. likewise if you don't lay off, you dont convey that data to competitors.
If I were CEO during such a recession, I'd hire, not fire.
Very similar to equities purchases. You want to be buying “when there’s blood in the streets” (heavily distressed markets) not at the market peak.
This takes enough management savvy and foresight to manage your cash flow and reserves to enable absorbing talent from disadvantaged firms during times of economic uncertainty.
Christmas Eve was the exact best day to buy. It looks like the rocket is taking off again and for real this time. Market has been very good the past few days and there’s a bunch of catalysts this week and earnings season coming up that could sustain the action. I opened positions again last week and am already up 12.8% with my portfolio. Good luck to all.
"This gives other companies insight into what you have left"
I don't really understand... surely, you know exactly who the best employees in your competitors are just by searching for senior positions in Linkedin?
I don't think that's a safe presumption, especially in the case of mass layoffs. Often every team will have to shed people, so if a whole team is made up of high performers they'll still have to get rid of good people. Then you've got the cost cutting nature of laying people off, sometimes the highest paid will be the ones with a target on their back.
The high performers are often on duties that have them directing the future of the company, things like planning to upgrade/rewrite that old legacy system. When it comes to layoffs they'll be let go while poorer performers maintaining the old system will be kept because they're needed for immediate operations.
Companies will layoff anyone not involved with "keeping the light's on", that doesn't correlate with individual performance.
There are a lot of factors that go into layoff calculations, and often it isn't performance. In fact it can perversely be the opposite. Finished your project early? You're not doing anything now so you're expendable, bye! Or maybe you got into one too many heated arguments with your boss because you knew you were right and he was wrong.
And if you are bought by a PE it is often some guys spreadsheet that does the cutting. And many times that spreadsheet is total BS and used just because it seemed to work that one time they used it before.
"What I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. "
That's typically not how it's done. Most layoffs are by department or division and there is not much consideration for individual performance. Some people with a good network may be able to jump to a safe position.
Yep. In 2009 I was temping at a large textbook publisher until they laid off the entire copyediting department. curiosly, not so many cuts in upper management.
A lot of times the people being kept around are those cheapest to keep, or those lucky enough to have been placed on a well-performing project at the company.
The company may want to keep its best employees, but those employees are by definition the best equipped to leave, the most likely to have experienced lay-offs before, the most expensive, and the most knowledgeable about the financial state of the company. Most of them are going to hop on LinkedIn the moment lay-offs are announced.
when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees
That is not how it works. Firstly positions are made redundant, not people. If the company is closing the widget factory, it doesn’t matter who is the best or the worst widget-wrangler, those positions simply don’t exist anymore.
Secondly you can’t hire wranglers just for the sake of it, you need demand for widgets in the market, and if there is such demand why did your competitor close the factory?
Developers often joke about job ads that require "5 or more years of experience" in about 10 different technologies. I once calculated the probability of a real person matching such a description and came to something like 1 out 500 trillion people. Unless the job ad is published to the entire Virgo Galactic Supercluster, they won't likely get a match.
There are rumors such ads are written so companies can officially reject citizens for H1B visa workers. However, Hanlon's Razor could be at play.
There is also the classic "need X years of experience with Y technology" but Y technology has only been in existence for <X years. I love HR departments.
Saw one last year that required enough Android experience that only the guys who were acquired by Google would be able to fulfill the requirement. It was for a mundane geeks-for-hire type company that churn out template type apps so probably didn't need anywhere near that level of experience.
I was at an interview for a job ad that had similar illogical requirements. When it was clear I wasn't getting the job for other reasons, I pointed out their error. They got all huffy. My doing that is a bad practice people-skill-wise, but it sure felt good getting deserving fools to eat their own cat-food.
I could imagine it might sometimes be the H1B thing, but more common are hyper-precise lists of technologies needed, when they already know the candidate they want but have a legal or administrative requirement to post the job.
Also, I get the impression hiring managers start with what they would like, and out of a long-bred instinct to have an opening bargaining position that's more than they actually want, they put down too many things.
Of course, if no offers come in, and they don't actually have an H1B or other candidate in mind, then maybe they go back and reduce what they're asking for, which would lead directly to this article's conclusion.
Immigration related jobs ads will have these qualities:
a) a very specific list of requirements, that just happens to match a specific person. Definitely not any choices of language in the list, but possibly degree or equivalent experience if necessary.
b) be posted in a newspaper and on their main jobs page, but not widely elsewhere
c) ask for submissions by mail only, by a certain date
B and C are more telling than A though, because a weird list of requirements could be just someone weird, but narrowly posting and requiring applications by mail are part of exactly following the rules for demonstrating lack of candidates.
This is what happens when you over regulate hiring practices in the name of inclusion, fairness, and fighting bias. I've seen numerous issues with this in academia as well where someone will be a proven candidate who you know will excel at the job but you can't simply hire them because it's against the rules. You have to spend ages interviewing all of these unproven alternative candidates with focuses on minorities etc. If you reject all the alternative candidates arbitrarily and go with who you wanted in the first place then you risk getting slapped with a lawsuit. So instead we have to go through this huge song and dance where we write these fake job descriptions which as you say are obviously only written for one person, waste everyone's time, and flood the market with fake hiring opportunities. I've been on both sides of this process and it's very aggravating.
Even worse, sometimes orgs will set up basically fake interviews where they bring people in with no intention of hiring them just to put on a show to avoid a lawsuit.
What's an example of where the interviews are audited or inspected for "inclusion"? I've rarely heard about that. Usually if an org gets in trouble for alleged "inclusion" problems, it's because of who they actually do hire, not interview. Interview process auditing may be a side-effect of such claims, I suppose. And I would hope the inspectors study the actual job requirements and compare them to the job ad. Thus, putting bogus job requirements in the ad should be penalized. Job ads should match the actual job, not the person(s) one is trying to favor.
I can't point to specific suits off the top of my head, but I've seen a few from inside my former employer and heard my friends tell of instances where someone wasn't granted a position and sued on the basis of descrimination.
The issue is generally not that an org is descriminating, it's actually generally the exact opposite. The org is trying to institute policy which protects them from these suits and "standardizes" the hiring process. It's typically subunits or managers in the org who get fed up with the process because they can't hire who they want to efficiently, and circumvent it by writing these job descriptions. HR audits these employment calls and has no clue what half the words in the description mean or what the position actually entails, so it is not flagged.
They show that even within a specific (job-title, company, state) tuple, higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way.
That doesn't mean the skills gap is a lie, or any other nefarious bad behavior on the company's part. The study doesn't go into that.
I knew as soon as I saw the source, this would be the case....Matt Yglesias isn't exactly...honest. He has a history of false claims and or really bad ideas. More of a commentator than a journalist, though somehow he is treated as one by Vox.
What amazes me if that Vox has a show on Netflix that is supposed to explain things when their organization is notorious for getting basic things wrong. Look, everyone gets something wrong, but they sometimes do so with intent to mislead.
I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary.
I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.
Agreed on Vox and Fox. The thing I find most stunning when people bring Fox up is they still think it’s 2008 it seems. Fox News isn’t bad, Fox Opinion isn’t good, but it’s more fair than it was... largely because GOP-Actual doesn’t like and didn’t want Trump.
I suppose it’s a bit funny to me that Vox articles often make it to the front page of HN, but FoxNews just don’t. But yea, Vox is worse.
I think the fact that he deleted almost all of his past tweets because they came under fire...including one that stated that the Nazis had some good ideas, is a solid example. He often strips things from MMFA and Think Progress (which he used to writer for!) without fact checking them at all. He helped perpetuate the idea that cross hairs on a map caused violence. When Obama was in office he falsely lowered the national debt by trillions of dollars to make things not sound so bad. So, so many examples. Don't even get me started on the "Voxsplainers."
On Twitter he is basically considered a joke on both sides of the aisle.
Who is not considered a joke by many people on both sides of the aisle?
He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.
If that's what you want to believe, but it's not true. He is not really respected by anyone except the people that he brought over from Think Progress. Not sure what's respectable about things he's said in the past or continues to say. He deletes them...because he knows they were dumb. One of his "expert" economic reports was that the US should simply print its way out of debt, raise the minimum wage to $100 and let the Fed figure it out...all of which are laughable to any actual economist, yes including left wing economists, because it would actually impoverish the poor even more. His platform is to rile people up, not actually convey real ideas or solutions. That is why he's a running meme on both sides of the aisle and his flippant regard for facts has more than carried over to Vox.
Yes it does: people were positing that high unemployment was due to structural frictions not macroeconomic problems. Then the macroeconomic problems got better, no effort was made to solve the structural frictions, and employers got less choosy.
"higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way."
Can you explain the causal bit?
The sneaky detail that stands out to me is that this is the 'share' or '%' of jobs with high skills went down, but not necessarily the absolute number of high skills jobs.
So during a recession, there are not a lot of low-end jobs available. As things warm up, more Ops. needed, so more jobs.
But the 'long term view' R&D jobs may have always been there in absolute terms. They might have only changed in relative terms because of the number of regular jobs going up and down.
It implies more causality between 'regular jobs' and 'the economy' but maybe less so between 'high end jobs' and 'the economy'.
Ergo, the 'skills' gap still exists - companies still want high end folks and can't find them. Which makes sense as well because I believe one could crudely say there is a 'skills gap' - anyone hiring high-end people can feel this.
So, you'd probably be better off skimming the paper for the details, but the gist is that they estimate the effect of unemployment on skills requirements in a few ways, and the results all come out about the same. They use state-to-state variation to take out some of the bigger macroeconomic factors. They use the return of a huge number of troops when we pull out of Afghanistan for another change that is mostly uncorrelated with economic conditions and do some other clever stats to make that assumption more solid. (I briefly skimmed it hours ago when I made the parent comment, so I might be a bit off now, but that's the gist of what stood out to me).
Showing causality is generally about finding apples-to-apples comparisons and finding sources of randomness causally upstream of what you want to measure the effect of, to get a kind of mini-experiment. They do this. It's not proof, but it's some decent evidence.
------------
On your question about percent vs absolute:
Your idea is totally plausible and doesn't contradict the study, as far as my skimming goes. There's no answer to to "why" just a decent argument if I suddenly made unemployment higher, more of the job postings you see would have higher skill requirements. My pet theory on "why" is that filtering out the noise gets really hard when tons of people start applying, so they up the bar.
> companies still want high end folks and can't find them
Companies will always want the highest end folks, as it makes them more competitive and productive. The question is are they willing to pay competitively for that talent. More often than not, the answer is no.
I feel that the 'skills gap' was just a convenient excuse during the recession. Companies and hiring managers will always want the best bang for their buck, so when unemployment is high, they aimed higher but still complained they weren't getting what they wanted. And now that unemployment is low, they are just blaming their hiring woes on that.
This is just an anecdote, but during the depths of the recession, the company I worked for was hiring folks with PhDs for low level admin jobs. And at the same time we were 'struggling' to fill some of our technical roles because we couldn't find folks with the 'right skills'. The funny thing was, I had got hired into that technical role with absolutely no experience, fresh out of college, right before the recession started.
[edit]: To be fair, I think it was partly done to help filter out resumes, as each job posting would get a TON of responses. And there was another issue (if I re-call correctly) where the rate of people changing jobs also dropped pretty dramatically (probably for job security reasons), so the job market for mid-level folks was pretty illiquid at the time. So combine those two things, and that could lead to the perception that there was a skills gap.
Factfullness, one of the best books on Bill Gates summer reading list covers "the gap instinct"
Factfulness is . . . recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.
What good is lower unemployment if no one can live from their job?
I know it's a problem in Germany, but from what I've heard it's a lot worse in the US, with people working 2 or more jobs...
48 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 101 ms ] threadWhat I mean by that is, when a company has massive layoffs, presumably they keep their best employees. This gives other companies insight into what you have left, and they can now poach your best. likewise if you don't lay off, you dont convey that data to competitors.
If I were CEO during such a recession, I'd hire, not fire.
This takes enough management savvy and foresight to manage your cash flow and reserves to enable absorbing talent from disadvantaged firms during times of economic uncertainty.
I don't really understand... surely, you know exactly who the best employees in your competitors are just by searching for senior positions in Linkedin?
I don't think that's a safe presumption, especially in the case of mass layoffs. Often every team will have to shed people, so if a whole team is made up of high performers they'll still have to get rid of good people. Then you've got the cost cutting nature of laying people off, sometimes the highest paid will be the ones with a target on their back.
The high performers are often on duties that have them directing the future of the company, things like planning to upgrade/rewrite that old legacy system. When it comes to layoffs they'll be let go while poorer performers maintaining the old system will be kept because they're needed for immediate operations.
Companies will layoff anyone not involved with "keeping the light's on", that doesn't correlate with individual performance.
That's typically not how it's done. Most layoffs are by department or division and there is not much consideration for individual performance. Some people with a good network may be able to jump to a safe position.
That is not how it works. Firstly positions are made redundant, not people. If the company is closing the widget factory, it doesn’t matter who is the best or the worst widget-wrangler, those positions simply don’t exist anymore.
Secondly you can’t hire wranglers just for the sake of it, you need demand for widgets in the market, and if there is such demand why did your competitor close the factory?
There are rumors such ads are written so companies can officially reject citizens for H1B visa workers. However, Hanlon's Razor could be at play.
Also, I get the impression hiring managers start with what they would like, and out of a long-bred instinct to have an opening bargaining position that's more than they actually want, they put down too many things.
Of course, if no offers come in, and they don't actually have an H1B or other candidate in mind, then maybe they go back and reduce what they're asking for, which would lead directly to this article's conclusion.
a) a very specific list of requirements, that just happens to match a specific person. Definitely not any choices of language in the list, but possibly degree or equivalent experience if necessary.
b) be posted in a newspaper and on their main jobs page, but not widely elsewhere
c) ask for submissions by mail only, by a certain date
B and C are more telling than A though, because a weird list of requirements could be just someone weird, but narrowly posting and requiring applications by mail are part of exactly following the rules for demonstrating lack of candidates.
Even worse, sometimes orgs will set up basically fake interviews where they bring people in with no intention of hiring them just to put on a show to avoid a lawsuit.
The issue is generally not that an org is descriminating, it's actually generally the exact opposite. The org is trying to institute policy which protects them from these suits and "standardizes" the hiring process. It's typically subunits or managers in the org who get fed up with the process because they can't hire who they want to efficiently, and circumvent it by writing these job descriptions. HR audits these employment calls and has no clue what half the words in the description mean or what the position actually entails, so it is not flagged.
They show that even within a specific (job-title, company, state) tuple, higher unemployment led to higher skills requirements, in a probably-causal way.
That doesn't mean the skills gap is a lie, or any other nefarious bad behavior on the company's part. The study doesn't go into that.
I'd say they are worse than Fox News. Fox News gets a lot wrong, yes, but also everyone knows their entire prime time lineup is opinion...Vox makes no such distinction. If you're pretending to be straight news but you're opinion...that's a big problem to me and worse than misleading commentary that you know is commentary.
I've seen Matt literally copy something straight from MMFA (a liberal news watcher) and Think Progress (a liberal think-tank) and treat it as news...not commentary.
I suppose it’s a bit funny to me that Vox articles often make it to the front page of HN, but FoxNews just don’t. But yea, Vox is worse.
On Twitter he is basically considered a joke on both sides of the aisle.
He seems to be considered highly reputable by many on both sides of the aisle as well. Certainly more reputable than an hacker news commenter making misleading insinuations as to why somebody might want to delete tweets, and overconfident, baseless proclamations of who is and is not considered a joke by the world at large.
Can you explain the causal bit?
The sneaky detail that stands out to me is that this is the 'share' or '%' of jobs with high skills went down, but not necessarily the absolute number of high skills jobs.
So during a recession, there are not a lot of low-end jobs available. As things warm up, more Ops. needed, so more jobs.
But the 'long term view' R&D jobs may have always been there in absolute terms. They might have only changed in relative terms because of the number of regular jobs going up and down.
It implies more causality between 'regular jobs' and 'the economy' but maybe less so between 'high end jobs' and 'the economy'.
Ergo, the 'skills' gap still exists - companies still want high end folks and can't find them. Which makes sense as well because I believe one could crudely say there is a 'skills gap' - anyone hiring high-end people can feel this.
So, you'd probably be better off skimming the paper for the details, but the gist is that they estimate the effect of unemployment on skills requirements in a few ways, and the results all come out about the same. They use state-to-state variation to take out some of the bigger macroeconomic factors. They use the return of a huge number of troops when we pull out of Afghanistan for another change that is mostly uncorrelated with economic conditions and do some other clever stats to make that assumption more solid. (I briefly skimmed it hours ago when I made the parent comment, so I might be a bit off now, but that's the gist of what stood out to me).
Showing causality is generally about finding apples-to-apples comparisons and finding sources of randomness causally upstream of what you want to measure the effect of, to get a kind of mini-experiment. They do this. It's not proof, but it's some decent evidence.
------------
On your question about percent vs absolute:
Your idea is totally plausible and doesn't contradict the study, as far as my skimming goes. There's no answer to to "why" just a decent argument if I suddenly made unemployment higher, more of the job postings you see would have higher skill requirements. My pet theory on "why" is that filtering out the noise gets really hard when tons of people start applying, so they up the bar.
Companies will always want the highest end folks, as it makes them more competitive and productive. The question is are they willing to pay competitively for that talent. More often than not, the answer is no.
I feel that the 'skills gap' was just a convenient excuse during the recession. Companies and hiring managers will always want the best bang for their buck, so when unemployment is high, they aimed higher but still complained they weren't getting what they wanted. And now that unemployment is low, they are just blaming their hiring woes on that.
This is just an anecdote, but during the depths of the recession, the company I worked for was hiring folks with PhDs for low level admin jobs. And at the same time we were 'struggling' to fill some of our technical roles because we couldn't find folks with the 'right skills'. The funny thing was, I had got hired into that technical role with absolutely no experience, fresh out of college, right before the recession started.
[edit]: To be fair, I think it was partly done to help filter out resumes, as each job posting would get a TON of responses. And there was another issue (if I re-call correctly) where the rate of people changing jobs also dropped pretty dramatically (probably for job security reasons), so the job market for mid-level folks was pretty illiquid at the time. So combine those two things, and that could lead to the perception that there was a skills gap.
What is presented here, that employers have the luxury of choosiness when unemployment is high, makes perfect sense.
Factfulness is . . . recognizing when a story talks about a gap, and remembering that this paints a picture of two separate groups, with a gap in between. The reality is often not polarized at all. Usually the majority is right there in the middle, where the gap is supposed to be.
To control the gap instinct, look for the majority.
Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.
Beware comparisons of extremes. In all groups, of countries or people, there are some at the top and some at the bottom. The difference is sometimes extremely unfair. But even then the majority is usually somewhere in between, right where the gap is supposed to be.
The view from up here. Remember, looking down from above distorts the view. Everything else looks equally short, but it’s not.