I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie.
Just because the economic system we have has always been shitty for a high percentage of our neighbors doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Other top economic countries being similar doesn’t excuse it.
The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.
There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides.
"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
> If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.
I'm asking how come is that not a revelation, your answer is primarily that it's fallacious numbers for the headline.
You may be right, but reality is the majority of people take the official unemployment rate without even understanding what qualifies as unemployed.
Even commenters on hackernews, that I would say are far from being the least educated in the U.S are asking, despite the article explaining it, what counts as unemployed.
The article is educational, and revealing. What we make of it is up to us, if you deem the less than 10% employment rate more accurate, you are free to believe that. Even when it defies the common sense of many.
It’s not revealing at all because unemployment numbers are directional and only useful in terms of comparison to prior years. The actual headline number is arbitrary and pretty much any metric you want to track already exists but is less popular. The only thing that matters is the methodology stays the same over the long term.
It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.
Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.
For comparative tracking we do need to stick to the same criteria, I'm with you.
I also agree some political factions, in particular those not in control, favour higher numbers. Those in place would rather minimise it.
The stance to use criteria that exclude people who would gladly work, if decent opportunities were available to them, to me is dishonest.
I don't know if the numbers this article proposes, based on a very inclusive criteria is more honest, but at least it tells us what the ratio looks like if we included more segments. Nobody would argue against the fact a good part is effectively not working, thus technically "unemployed".
State level minimum wages were much less common in 1995, so it was easier for workers to be below their poverty threshold. Even though the federal wage got stuck, in many states today, the minimum wage is high enough that it's not possible for a full time worker to make less than $26,000 in a year.
This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1].
there is a cliff, such that a the 2 adults, 2 children on 22,500 gross income may have access to $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [linked in other comment].
However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 110 extra pre-tax dollar per week across both adult earners, and so just about 1.35 an hour raise for each adult, or 2.70 for either one of them is a real loss of over 12,000 dollars. It takes nearly $5 an hour raise for BOTH adults at the 22,500 to become even minimally better than the loss of those transfers.
There is a significant number of households in the second quartile (at or slightly above 36.4K) than in the bottom quartile, and yet those are living on less than what has been defined as the 'survivable wage' by the 48.7K number
So yes, the "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is even higher than the number of households earning 26K would reveal.
And much of that assistance is not a guarantee: they'll have to jump through a number of hoops to get it, and making a single mistake on a single form, or having one non-liquid asset that's too valuable on paper, may mean they get disqualified. At best that means they need to start the process again; at worst it's all over and they cannot be considered, at least for a certain time period.
It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Additionally, people aren't stupid. That guy with a 22.5 HHI is actually working for cash on a concrete crew all summer, dealing weed, running scrap or some other source of under the table income that makes people above a certain tax bracket clutch their pearls. You often lose the ability to be competitive at such gigs when you take the time commitment of a "real job" even if only part time so there's that cliff too.
"Additionally, people aren't stupid." < We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. I tend to agree with George Carlin on this particular point: “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Your example being, at least in my book, a counter example of your premise.
Working all summer on a concrete crew for cash seems like a good idea until an on-the job injury without workman's comp changes the way he walks for the rest of his life. Dealing weed doesn't have the profitability these days with legal dispensaries in many states and mandatory sentencing in the others. Running scrap is somewhat 'grand larceny adjacent', and again prone to an uninsured skill-saw event. Remember to wear eye protection when using a power tool.
So, returning to the two adults, two children exemplar household, it seems reasonable to expect that in general these people exhibit a lower incidence of these behaviours. If one or both of those children are still young enough to require round the clock supervision there is a significant limit on the couple's available working hours every week. That would make a similar 'hard to commit' to a higher paying full time job, for at least one parent.
I mean, the two kids really cut into the time flexibility necessary to participate in the grey-to-outright criminal economy, so I posit that people who report as earning the bottom quartile who also undergo the stringent documentation requirements necessary to receive benefits are more likely to be actually living on what they legally declare, than are somehow working, stealing benefits AND making substantially more through grift or crime.
I admit this may be my own biased observation, but the single 'smaht guy' with 22.5k household income and the criminal gig enterprise seems very unlikely to be filing a tax return or receiving any other support. So that case is interesting, but not very applicable in this equation: he's living on whatever he has this week or this month with very little long term benefit from earnings he cannot use to build a credit score, secure stable housing or invest in a future.
Significantly less. Wanted a job? Walk through any neighborhood being built with a tape measure in your pocket. You'd have a job doing something before you made it past the 4th house. Had a car? Delivering food paid enough to afford a modest apartment.
"would like" is pretty wild in this context. The number of individuals who have had a job they truly enjoyed is a rounding error in recorded history. I'll save us both the indignity of repeating tired boomer tropes around modern attitudes towards work.
It really would, most boomers seem to also think living alone while not having a girlfriend is very odd and shocking (still). Most worldviews do not and will not add up to reality.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
Job and slavery are two very different things. I love free markets too but not to the level of autism (for lack of better word) and ignoring how things actually work in the physical world. Shallow economic theory doesn't create happy and functional families. Economic theory that is mostly rigged to serve the rich, entrenched, and powerful anyways.
I'm saying that the "low paying jobs" have never been included in "unemployment." That is not how academics define "unemployment" nor how the term is colloquially used.
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
> there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr.
But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
One really nice economic factor of the dole is that it disappears at a rate of 50c for each $1 of earnings above $150 and at 60c above $256, so there's no welfare cliff.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
Right, unless this is counting some broad definition of "underemployed" its obviously off by a large multiple.
What is interesting though is that, despite whatever they are trying to convey about how high their made up rate is.. we are at a lower rate of unemployment than the entirety of 1995-2019?
Their definition is clearly stated in the first paragraph:
Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes.
If you include all the stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day, you reach those 30% easily. Add to that the students who only work part time.
> stay-at-home wives that do nothing but watch TV all day
> include pensioners, kids
The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.
Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.
> the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
Property doesn't produce anything. If I buy a house for $500K and sell it a year later for $600K, that extra $100K hasn't been added to the economy. Something else had to make that money. It's just speculation.
Whereas if I invested that $500K in a company, the company makes things or provides services that add value. If the company grows to make my investment worth $600K a year later, that has actually been added to the economy.
Note that I'm defining property to not include construction, which is a separate thing, that does add value.
While I struggle to see the value here, I dont trust the official numbers and applaud their efforts to come up with alternatives.
However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.
Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.
A lot of smaller companies over-hire part-time labor to minimize cost of overtime, medical benefit support, and mandatory wage increases. In general, employee-at-will and dependent-contractor status is only popular in the USA, and often is outright illegal for good reason in most other countries.
Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative.
I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
I my country you have to regularly check in with the bureau for unemployment to be included in the stats, even though that bureau hadn’t found a job for anyone ever.
I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.
Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
So EU/Eurostat has surveys, Serbia does too (I’m from Serbia).
However most countries have also national way of determining the rate that works how I described, and they may differ quite a lot from Eurostat.
I guess EU introduced surveys with Eurostat so countries don’t juke the stats.
For example
- Denmark computes net unemployment straight from benefit and PES registers — administrative coverage is complete enough to do it without asking anyone. It still runs an LFS for the ILO figure.
- Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia, Spain publish monthly registered counts that dominate domestic debate, exactly the way NSZ figures circulate in Serbia. Each uses its own national definition, so none is comparable across borders.
- Finland keeps a register series noticeably above its LFS count, similar in shape to the NSZ/ARS gap.
I do not think so. Ok, from the polls. But in the polls, it seem, I've quickly googled, if you've worked 1 h/week, they will not count you as unemployed. It is a different statistics. The registration in labor office, it is official employement, paid not less than min. wage, you can afford healthcare, etc. While the second poll does not care if you can afford healthcare or not.
"Full stop"? So you don't want to hear other arguments?
The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited and explicitly "encompasses all persons not employed and who are actively looking for and available for work, regardless of whether they are registered with a regional placement office. "
The fact that they would rather try to win an internet argument by showing indifference to what others have to say than learn something might hint at traits that keep them unemployed. Harsh but maybe this helps changing their mindset.
> The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited
What do the ILO-based statistics have to do with original comment[0] that they are in Switzerland, unemployed, don't collect unemployment, and don't count towards Switzerland's specific-statistics as a result?
The connection is that www.bfs.admin.ch itself will tell you that there are multiple sources for unemployment statistics in Switzerland, ILO-based being one of them. Picking only the one that supports your argument after being pointed out that there are others indicates unwillingnes to engage in a good faith argument. Since your tone is repeatedly condescending in addition to that, I'll end my engagement in this particular line of discussion.
> The connection is that www.bfs.admin.ch itself will tell you...
You mean the same exact domain in the first link I gave, which doesn't mention ILO, whatsoever? That `www.bfs.admin.ch`?
> Picking only the one that supports your argument...
It literally supports the argument for the original comment's statement. It's from the official governing body. What are you on about? If your complaint is that it disproves the statement, and they officially use ILO (doubtful but allowing for a comedy of errors) for their own statistics, your argument is with the governing body - not me. Correct?
Speaking of bad faith, why not show a modicum of effort on your part to reference any official documentation that Switzerland DOES use ILO in their own statistics? It comes across as the same specious approach used by vaccine conspiracy theorists, "...just trust me, bro, do your own research, you'll see...".
"Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them."
Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
> Then maybe it's time you look up how unemployment statistics are calculated in Switzerland and you will be surprised that you counted into them.
First off the sentence simply doesn't make sense. Specifically 'you will be surprised that you counted into them.' I assume the commenter meant something like 'you will be surprised that you were included in those statistics. But it's highly ambiguous since 'you counted into them' isn't sensical.
Trying to parse it from context, they could be suggesting a reader would be surprised at how the statistics are calculated, at who is included, at who is not included, or at how similarly they are calculated when compared to other countries.
Always, but perhaps not in this case. I wasn't correcting spelling, but coherence. The comment I replied to includes a sentence that is both ambiguous and non-nonsensical. It doesn't seem to be issue of grammar, but rather clarity of thought.
For this reason I use the employment rate instead. The unemployment rate, as you've correctly pointed out, is very narrowly defined. Obviously so as to trick voters into thinking that everything is fine. The employment rate can't really be gamed like that.
The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortunately this isn't solved by using the employment rate. There are various ways to measure this but they all contain some measure of subjectivity.
Well, about 40 percent of unemployed people (i.e. receiving benefits) are employed in Germany.
And in the other direction, not receiving benefits meaning "not unemployed", and "in re-trainings", or sometimes "too old" means not calculated in, either.
The problem is that different unemployment statistics measure different things, and the headline number often gets interpreted as "everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one"
Why? Here, being registered has significant benefits (direct benefits and health insurance paid by state) and minimal costs (once a month visiting labor bureau, doing some minimal effort) that only people i know that are unemployed and not being registered are ones with psychiatric conditions.
From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics.
In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:
> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.
The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.
> From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
Agree. Add to that that usually those ideological metrics have some telling blindspots.
In the case of their white paper, while being very thorough in defining which workers should be deducted from the workforce bucket, they have no adjustment towards when someone should be eligible for this triage in the first place.
Students for example.
Who studies out of virtue, and who just because the job market is still closed off to him?
Specifically urban governments use this statistical trick to downplay youth-unemployment for decades while also benefiting itself with providing employment for their political base. Funnily though, these social-worker-slash-educator jobs are often themselves not viable enough to make it into the „true“ workforce bucket
Time series also show a slanted worldview that real unemployment was worse in 90s. Have they not adjusted for dollar inflation? 1999 is really suspicious: Normally at 30-40% unemployment you fear for public unrest and uprising, did I miss an important piece of world history there?
I am curious as to why the TRU is not adopted as a standard metric.
1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it.
2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase).
3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality.
It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people?
I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.
I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.
The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.
And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.
So what do people actually do?
[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
This seems like the opposite from what the OP is describing. There is a lot of affordable expertise going around, you just have to find it.
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with some help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
I think you're making my point though, all of those connections required "knowing a guy", and the odds that for all the problems you might need expertise for, you won't know enough guys.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
Great points. I have the same problem. I often end up throwing things away or doing work myself when I would be happy to pay the right people to do it. The classical response is that this is a failure of marketing, but marketing is no longer about connecting the right customer with the right business. It's about tricking people into buying things they don't need or want.
I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.
FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
Search optimisation is deterministic. The algorithms are quite sophisticated but even an older LLM can easily work around them right now. There will be some kind of AI arms race but I think the net effect of that will destroy search as a platform. What arises from the ashes? I can only speculate. Possibly distributed search. Possibly something like torrent swarms. uTorrent's distributed search has been available for decades and it's surprisingly resilient. Possibly something like I2P or Tor. Possibly AI agents creating amorphous and transient search tasks/communities. Even in these early days it's possible to cobble together hobby search engines using various sources for cheap/free.
I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.
Generative engine optimisation is a separate field. Websites that are SEO aren't necessarily GEO, they're having to be reoptimized for that. One strategy is to post fake conversations onto Reddit, where one bot how to do something, and another bot says the best way is with the product being optimised.
LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
> LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
I think this sounds much worse than it is. LLMs reason. They don't have an "opinion" about the truth. Meaning that the harness/prompt/tooling/data, determines the quality of the output. Using an LLM to navigate the truth is surprisingly effective right now with the right inputs and constraints.
For how much I dislike social media, for many such topics what could help is getting into the right Facebook or Discord groups and asking - either local for big cities, specialized topics, or just congregating a lot of people.
You're quite literally asking a billion dollar question. And a deeply-rooted reason on why the larger job market was so easy to break. Feed into that distrust, and no one gets hired, at all. Though the difference is that a reasonable company can bear a bad hire for a few months (or years) and not be in the red. You probably cannot.
So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.
After that:
- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).
- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).
- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).
- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).
None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
We seem to have gotten very good at building marketplaces for standardized things and surprisingly bad at matching people when competence is hard to measure in advance
I think the thing is it’s no easier to hire someone to do a job you need done outside of work (at least the first time you need that job done) than it is to hire someone for a job at your workplace.
Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.
Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
Not really because it works if candidates are trustworthy and you can evaluate the candidate without "hidden issues".
Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.
The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.
I think people have mentioned this, but I haven't seen an answer: why not ask friends and neighbours? That's what I do, and I've had success with it (though I'm more frequently the person that neighbours and friends ask for professional contacts). When no one knows of anyone, you search and call people and evaluate/assess. It's not _easy_, but it doesn't seem like such a big problem.
Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
Well yes. I for one won't sign up for an odd one-off job for a stranger because it more often than not ends up in a quagmire of unfulfilled miscommunicated expectations. It's not fraud per se, it's just.. a wrong approach.
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.
And this is why I'm irritated whenever a comment just thoughtlessly answer "Just raise your offer bro". There might be some transaction barriers that make paying a service no longer worth it, one of them is the amount of fraud like you mentioned, another is societal problem that reduces people's competency as a whole so competent people becomes too few to search.
Most of the time, I don't hire for one off little jobs proactively.
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
I had a female friend who moved to San Francisco and lived alone without a vehicle. So if she needed some handyman work, she would summon a Taskrabbit from the app. I found Thumbtack to be a decent equivalent of this, and I tried it once.
All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.
So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.
Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.
So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.
My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.
That's a very complex result of the collapsing employment and skills market in the US of late, as viewed in miniature. My own situation being not much different, without the 'disposable income' factor. I was starting at a position with the potential to establish an investments portfolio layer for myself right when 2020 hit and hollowed out the global travel component that was the core of the new job. Being in that 'red flag' age has kept my household running on fumes ever since. But that's not an answer to the point.
I think for specific specialty work the focus might need to shift to a 'craftsmanship' approach, finding someone who doesn't actually advertise or propose to perform the work for hire, but who is similarly semi to fully retired and does the tasks you are needing as a hobby or one project at a time casual contractor.
There's not likely to be a shop 'fixing gadgets' in the retail mall anymore that has the actual skills necessary to satisfy your requirements, nor is there likely to be a 'mail us a gadget' and we'll fix it service that you can count on. But for the case of some gadgets, there might be a STEM club or class at one of your local schools with an instructor who is: 1 underpaid and underappreciated, 2 more likely to have some individual competency with a soldering iron AND flashing firmware, 3 in a proven position of trustworthiness having the public facing position of a classroom instructor ~ less likely to just rip you off and disappear.
Once upon a time I was a local PC repair store - there was me, a returns clerk and a series of part-time student interns - for about half of the Big Island, Hawai'i. I fielded gadget repair for a great number of strange things from digital projectors to hydrophones. The most satisfying of which was when a customer who was a retired biochemistry researcher asked me: "You don't happen to know how to repair the control circuitry for an electric kiln?" and my immediate response was, "If it's a Kress then sure." The look on her face, the smile as she practically hopped because it was a Kress was just a real kick. I guess the point im getting at is somehow find a way to make connections with people who are skilled in a variety of related and unrelated fields, and then ask what they can do that no-one might guess that they know. I have traded PC and other gadget repair for training towards a Coast Guard certification, for a sizeable amount of raw honey and later for beehive nucleus, and for a coolers full of fresh caught icy tuna. Sometimes the best work you might ever get could come in a trade for something that's more important and less impersonal than plain old cash.
As for how to find both ethical and effective niche skilled services in the continental US, today? Wow. I don't think that is in plentiful supply anymore.
183 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 52.7 ms ] thread"Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.
You may be right, but reality is the majority of people take the official unemployment rate without even understanding what qualifies as unemployed.
Even commenters on hackernews, that I would say are far from being the least educated in the U.S are asking, despite the article explaining it, what counts as unemployed.
The article is educational, and revealing. What we make of it is up to us, if you deem the less than 10% employment rate more accurate, you are free to believe that. Even when it defies the common sense of many.
It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.
Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.
I also agree some political factions, in particular those not in control, favour higher numbers. Those in place would rather minimise it.
The stance to use criteria that exclude people who would gladly work, if decent opportunities were available to them, to me is dishonest.
I don't know if the numbers this article proposes, based on a very inclusive criteria is more honest, but at least it tells us what the ratio looks like if we included more segments. Nobody would argue against the fact a good part is effectively not working, thus technically "unemployed".
I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street.
The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
However if that same household earns just $5,600 more annually nearly all of those transfers cease to be available and the total income accessible becomes $36,400. It really is a case where making more is too expensive. That's less than 110 extra pre-tax dollar per week across both adult earners, and so just about 1.35 an hour raise for each adult, or 2.70 for either one of them is a real loss of over 12,000 dollars. It takes nearly $5 an hour raise for BOTH adults at the 22,500 to become even minimally better than the loss of those transfers.
There is a significant number of households in the second quartile (at or slightly above 36.4K) than in the bottom quartile, and yet those are living on less than what has been defined as the 'survivable wage' by the 48.7K number
So yes, the "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is even higher than the number of households earning 26K would reveal.
It is, simultaneously, important to know about that cliff, because it's real and it causes untold hardship, and really, really dangerous to view poverty as a road to "easy money" in the way your first sentence (likely inadvertently) implies.
I didn't mean to paper over the time and organizational cost of accessing those transfers, there is a real burden and the system is inherently opaque to the people who need it the most.
My first sentence was a pure statement of 'best case' scenario if everything goes perfectly correct and completely misses the time lag for most of those benefits. Specifically any tax rebates are significantly 'after the fact' as in the middle of next year, and that is 'funds not in hand' with various for fee services offering early or accelerated access to these tax refnds, and also other short term financing 'payday loans' and 'buy now pay later' at significant costs which are unfairly borne by the group of people least able to bear those costs.
The cliff is even steeper for the condition where the low income household's housing costs are capped and subsidised until the houshold crosses a threshold and then must absorb moving, first and last month's rents plus security deposit at local market rate. It takes almost nothing in terms of a minor hourly raise to functionally destroy these households monthly available cash reserves, and this discussion doesn't even touch on what happens if anything which is unavoidably expensive arises; like an automobile breakdown or serious non-covered medical event.
The reality of the US in real today terms is that for the 2 adults, 2 children model household anything below about 100k is still precipitously risky in many ways. What might have looked 'doable' with a family on 50k even five years ago is nothing like the current conditions for most of the nation.
Your example being, at least in my book, a counter example of your premise.
Working all summer on a concrete crew for cash seems like a good idea until an on-the job injury without workman's comp changes the way he walks for the rest of his life. Dealing weed doesn't have the profitability these days with legal dispensaries in many states and mandatory sentencing in the others. Running scrap is somewhat 'grand larceny adjacent', and again prone to an uninsured skill-saw event. Remember to wear eye protection when using a power tool.
So, returning to the two adults, two children exemplar household, it seems reasonable to expect that in general these people exhibit a lower incidence of these behaviours. If one or both of those children are still young enough to require round the clock supervision there is a significant limit on the couple's available working hours every week. That would make a similar 'hard to commit' to a higher paying full time job, for at least one parent.
I mean, the two kids really cut into the time flexibility necessary to participate in the grey-to-outright criminal economy, so I posit that people who report as earning the bottom quartile who also undergo the stringent documentation requirements necessary to receive benefits are more likely to be actually living on what they legally declare, than are somehow working, stealing benefits AND making substantially more through grift or crime.
I admit this may be my own biased observation, but the single 'smaht guy' with 22.5k household income and the criminal gig enterprise seems very unlikely to be filing a tax return or receiving any other support. So that case is interesting, but not very applicable in this equation: he's living on whatever he has this week or this month with very little long term benefit from earnings he cannot use to build a credit score, secure stable housing or invest in a future.
I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
1999 was basically ~full employment in the US. Most people who wanted to work had a job.
I know this is argued as a reason for high unemployment on the internet, but it does not match my experience in the real world at all. Having a job that pays a little is more income than no job at all. People stuck with low paying jobs often have multiple jobs as a result.
So "not enough to live on" often means, it does not even pay job related expenses!
My partner had a good job offer, but is at home! Buying extra car, petrol, child care... We would loose 150euro a month...
Having to work to survive is not slavery.
Slavery is a really bad thing. Equating it to having to get a job is really gross and downplays the severity of actual slavery.
The OP is trying to change the definition of "unemployment," and it's a fool's errand because then you have to explain that oh no, I mean people are employed but not in the manner I think they should be.
(That latter part, even if I personally agree with, makes the argument very weak. The former part makes discussing this very confusing.)
Would be more useful to just say that lots of jobs do not pay enough. Simple, true, easy to understand.
That may be the case in the US, but not so in other countries.
For example in Australia minimum wage is $26.44/hr. But If you don’t have a job, you can get between $740 and $1047 every two weeks as welfare, forever.
Employers know this. Employees know this. So a job has to pay decently more than that or else nobody will do it.
This does mean that you're effectively only earning 40c for every $1 you earn in that middle band, but that's still less of a disincentive than just taking the whole payment away above a certain threshold.
The subhead from the post: "The percentage of the U.S. labor force that is functionally unemployed"
What is interesting though is that, despite whatever they are trying to convey about how high their made up rate is.. we are at a lower rate of unemployment than the entirety of 1995-2019?
Their definition is clearly stated in the first paragraph:
> include pensioners, kids
The word "unemployment" has academic and colloquial meanings that overlap in places and diverge in other places. Neither of those include a person who is happily living their life, not looking for a job.
Nobody considers a 2-year-old "unemployed" but the Heritage foundation, certain eugenics groups, and people on HN. It's a fringe view.
Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is
# unemployed/# employed
where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers.
We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed.
It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
Why?
Whereas if I invested that $500K in a company, the company makes things or provides services that add value. If the company grows to make my investment worth $600K a year later, that has actually been added to the economy.
Note that I'm defining property to not include construction, which is a separate thing, that does add value.
What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful.
Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
https://www.aerotek.com/en
It is a firm that helped place a few friends over the years. Good luck =3
I assume that’s how it works in many other countries.
Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
So EU/Eurostat has surveys, Serbia does too (I’m from Serbia).
However most countries have also national way of determining the rate that works how I described, and they may differ quite a lot from Eurostat.
I guess EU introduced surveys with Eurostat so countries don’t juke the stats.
For example
- Denmark computes net unemployment straight from benefit and PES registers — administrative coverage is complete enough to do it without asking anyone. It still runs an LFS for the ILO figure. - Germany, Austria, Poland, Czechia, Spain publish monthly registered counts that dominate domestic debate, exactly the way NSZ figures circulate in Serbia. Each uses its own national definition, so none is comparable across borders. - Finland keeps a register series noticeably above its LFS count, similar in shape to the NSZ/ARS gap.
It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Because a "University Education" doesn't shield one from being ill informed, or simply wrong about a topic.
I mean, did you get 100% on every test? Well, then...
Goes to show why he was unemployed for a year after graduation.
and
> It's unclear to me how folks with a university education can make such simplistic statements.
Do you even fact-check yourself before making specious claims[0][1]? You HAVE to be registered via RAV to be counted. Full stop.
0 - https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/...
1 - https://switzerlandhandbook.com/rav-and-unemployment-benefit...
The ILO-based statistics differ from what you cited and explicitly "encompasses all persons not employed and who are actively looking for and available for work, regardless of whether they are registered with a regional placement office. "
That doesn't match your definition and that's ok.
What do the ILO-based statistics have to do with original comment[0] that they are in Switzerland, unemployed, don't collect unemployment, and don't count towards Switzerland's specific-statistics as a result?
0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49532179
You mean the same exact domain in the first link I gave, which doesn't mention ILO, whatsoever? That `www.bfs.admin.ch`?
> Picking only the one that supports your argument...
It literally supports the argument for the original comment's statement. It's from the official governing body. What are you on about? If your complaint is that it disproves the statement, and they officially use ILO (doubtful but allowing for a comedy of errors) for their own statistics, your argument is with the governing body - not me. Correct?
Speaking of bad faith, why not show a modicum of effort on your part to reference any official documentation that Switzerland DOES use ILO in their own statistics? It comes across as the same specious approach used by vaccine conspiracy theorists, "...just trust me, bro, do your own research, you'll see...".
Not to criticise, but just to point out that this sentence doesn't quite make sense in English, and it's not immediately apparent what you mean. The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a98091f-9550-83eb-b17e-c636ac3441...
First off the sentence simply doesn't make sense. Specifically 'you will be surprised that you counted into them.' I assume the commenter meant something like 'you will be surprised that you were included in those statistics. But it's highly ambiguous since 'you counted into them' isn't sensical.
Trying to parse it from context, they could be suggesting a reader would be surprised at how the statistics are calculated, at who is included, at who is not included, or at how similarly they are calculated when compared to other countries.
> The sentence has to precisely opposed interpretations.
Muphry's Law still holds true.
The second major issue is under-employment. You could have a PhD in AI and as long as you're working 20 years a week at a pizza place, you're "employed." Unfortunately this isn't solved by using the employment rate. There are various ways to measure this but they all contain some measure of subjectivity.
I would hope that someone who can work 20 years a week gets paid a lot, even if they work at a pizza place!
And in the other direction, not receiving benefits meaning "not unemployed", and "in re-trainings", or sometimes "too old" means not calculated in, either.
In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization:
> LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars.
The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy.
FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig.
But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
In the case of their white paper, while being very thorough in defining which workers should be deducted from the workforce bucket, they have no adjustment towards when someone should be eligible for this triage in the first place.
Students for example.
Who studies out of virtue, and who just because the job market is still closed off to him?
Specifically urban governments use this statistical trick to downplay youth-unemployment for decades while also benefiting itself with providing employment for their political base. Funnily though, these social-worker-slash-educator jobs are often themselves not viable enough to make it into the „true“ workforce bucket
1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it.
2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase).
3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality.
It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do.
I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday.
The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job?
The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail.
The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself.
And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved.
So what do people actually do?
[1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent.
So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
Almost by accident we found out there's a fantastic seamstress living near us, who does it just as a hobby while attending college. She can fix almost any item of clothing for barely any money.
A friend of mine is a woodwind instrument repairman, and no worries if your 1920 flute is missing a key, because he's a wizard with a lathe and will create an exact replica. Musicians typically aren't rich, so he has to keep things affordable.
When renovating our house, we had an arched doorway made by a bricklayer with some help from his extremely experienced retired father in law who was up for a bit of fun.
Then there's repair cafés, where somehow there always seems to be someone around with the extremely niche skill of repairing a broken vacuum cleaner.
And so on. But if you don't know these people or these places, you might pay x5 or x10 for the same service, if you can even find someone to take on the job.
And it sounds like they did the work 'under market' which implies they don't do very much of it.
For your experience to be generally available for all people and all skills, I think you need a market.
I think AI will solve this in the future. It's already been super helpful to me at scouring the internet for well reviewed products and services. It will only get better as its parametric knowledge improves, its ability to statistically analyse businesses and "reviews" and exclude the fakes, malicious, or predatory, and its ability to problem solve laterally or in unexpected ways.
FYI there are already handyman sites like Taskrabbit in the US which help connect you with people who can do these odd jobs. They have review systems as well. But I don't know if many of them cater to electronic or more skilled repair.
I think Google sees the writing on the wall, which is why they're trying to turn Google search into an AI chatbot.
LLMs have no connection to ground truth. It won't matter how many or how cleverly you network them to each other, they still can't tell the difference between real users saying a product is good and good spammers saying a product is good.
I think this sounds much worse than it is. LLMs reason. They don't have an "opinion" about the truth. Meaning that the harness/prompt/tooling/data, determines the quality of the output. Using an LLM to navigate the truth is surprisingly effective right now with the right inputs and constraints.
I follow a couple electronics repair YouTubers, and I imagine they would be interested.
So there's no "good" answer. But "what people actually do"? Ask people they know and trust already, or indirectly know. or give chances to relatives and people they care about. So we just reverse engineered referrals and nepotism.
After that:
- look at a resume/portfolio and then have a short talk with them to validate that. Maybe a small trial/test (We just reverse engineered interviews).
- Maybe go through a middleman to do that work for you (we reverse engineered recruiting companies).
- Maybe we have some middleman site where other previous clients can rate the potential hire on their work (we just reverse engineered fiverr/upwork/other freelancing job matchers).
- At some point, you look for other organizations or institutions that test and ensure some level of quality with any potential candidate (we reverse engineered licenses/certifications/accreditation).
None of this is novel, and not a very satisfying answer. But I'm just listing the very logical path towards solving these problems, and how easy it is to come into what already happens today. The solution isn't easy, and I think at some point it just comes down to "do the above, but actually good". Because as you said, there is no true incentive for any of the later parts of this chain to be the best recruiter or best examination. There needs to be some trust or the whole thing falls apart.
Genuinely qualified candidates are hard to find, nearly half of candidates are worse than average, and there are still skilled bullshitters aplenty.
Oh, and people who are good still cost real money.
In the ancient times you'd ask your friends and neighbors for referrals, but nowadays we don't have friends and we don't talk to our neighbors, and even if we did, they don't know shit.
Related issue
Once you get all those applicants are good on the paper there might be one trustworthy, there might be one that if hired makes everything worse even though looked good on paper that's just not useful stopping algorithm.
The applicants, if all seen together, can be ranked from best to worst unambiguously.
Am I missing something, here? Is your device something that only 100 people in the world know about? :D
Join a community first, ask for help after that.
Worst part is that even if YOU are willing to pay more to really have it done well, only thing that is going to happen is that you will be ripped off, as you mention that company you find will just pocket your money and get you someone not up to par for the job.
I am so annoyed by that fact.
I have a list of things like this. Occasionally when I do meet someone or some company that seems to send the right signals, I give them one of the things from my list.
Occasionally, I've met people who are good at something and then it's as easy as picking up the phone whenever a job for them comes up.
Regarding explaining things and conveying what needs to be done, it comes back to delegation. This is part of the "cost" of delegating the work. For many things, the cost is big and it does not make sense to do it.
1. Those who have so much money they pay whatever is needed, getting screwed by countless middlemen.
2. Those who do everything by themselves full time and overtime.
3. Those who have lots of broken equipment, unfinished projects, and house or apartment waiting to be refurbished.
2.5, somewhere between 2 and 3.
Isn’t the hard drive of the average software engineer full of half finished projects?
All I needed was to swap two large pieces of furniture. I had a 4-drawer file cabinet and a full-size folding bed. All I wanted was to put the bed in the other room and the file cabinet where the bed used to be.
So I wrote up the job on Thumbtack and connected with a seemingly professional service who could send a guy out. The guy appeared at my door and immediately launched into a sob story: he had a flat tire and his truck needed repair and oh god things were just terrible, and he had a slovenly, unkempt appearance, no uniform or livery, and he was toting a home-made furniture dolly with casters on it.
Okay, so he got inside and he was perfectly competent to move the furniture around as requested, and when he finished the job, I told him that his company would be paid in the Thumbtack app. And he cast his eyes about the room, saying "well people usually pay me in cash..." and I could smell the scam powerfully by then. So I opened the app before his eyes and showed him how I sent payment in full, so he would not be leaving without proof. And later, I sent another $25 and I contacted the company to say he did a good job and please make sure he receives this gratuity.
So Taskrabbit or Thumbtack may work for you, depending on your negotiation skills. But I was put off, by the way they sent a lone dude trying to collect cash off me at home.
My church bulletin often has handyman listings in the advertisements. I don't know if they are well-vetted either, but it is something worth checking in your local rags and craigslist.
I think for specific specialty work the focus might need to shift to a 'craftsmanship' approach, finding someone who doesn't actually advertise or propose to perform the work for hire, but who is similarly semi to fully retired and does the tasks you are needing as a hobby or one project at a time casual contractor.
There's not likely to be a shop 'fixing gadgets' in the retail mall anymore that has the actual skills necessary to satisfy your requirements, nor is there likely to be a 'mail us a gadget' and we'll fix it service that you can count on. But for the case of some gadgets, there might be a STEM club or class at one of your local schools with an instructor who is: 1 underpaid and underappreciated, 2 more likely to have some individual competency with a soldering iron AND flashing firmware, 3 in a proven position of trustworthiness having the public facing position of a classroom instructor ~ less likely to just rip you off and disappear.
Once upon a time I was a local PC repair store - there was me, a returns clerk and a series of part-time student interns - for about half of the Big Island, Hawai'i. I fielded gadget repair for a great number of strange things from digital projectors to hydrophones. The most satisfying of which was when a customer who was a retired biochemistry researcher asked me: "You don't happen to know how to repair the control circuitry for an electric kiln?" and my immediate response was, "If it's a Kress then sure." The look on her face, the smile as she practically hopped because it was a Kress was just a real kick. I guess the point im getting at is somehow find a way to make connections with people who are skilled in a variety of related and unrelated fields, and then ask what they can do that no-one might guess that they know. I have traded PC and other gadget repair for training towards a Coast Guard certification, for a sizeable amount of raw honey and later for beehive nucleus, and for a coolers full of fresh caught icy tuna. Sometimes the best work you might ever get could come in a trade for something that's more important and less impersonal than plain old cash.
As for how to find both ethical and effective niche skilled services in the continental US, today? Wow. I don't think that is in plentiful supply anymore.