Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/opinion/workers-wages-recovery.html

by wombatmobile • 5 years ago

55 33 5 years ago

jleyank• 5 years ago

People have wanted boomers to get out of the way for years, and with COVID, many of them might have done so. This opens up positions at the upper end of the tech ladder as well as thinning out the herd of part-time workers. Coupled with COVID concern, going (back) to school, moving and child care issues it’s not surprising there’s fewer bodies out there to hire.

UncleOxidant4• 5 years ago

Assuming the labor shortage is also there in tech - I suspect there are shortages in some areas of tech, but not all - how are tech employers adapting? Are they willing to dispense with multi-stage, multi-day Byzantine interviewing? Such as the old: phone screen -> take home exam of some sort -> all day onsite interviews (including several whiteboard technical interviews) -> sometimes extended interview days -> followed by a few weeks before a decision is made. I just don't think a lot of job seekers want to put up with that anymore.

MatteoFrigo4• 5 years ago

The path of least resistance is to expand the labor pool by opening or growing a new office in another region or country.

cableshaft3• 5 years ago

Mostly no, judging by my most recent job search. It seems to have been adjusted to have less contact with the company, though, at least upfront. This was pretty common for me: Recruiter Call, one of the following: 60 minute logic/psychological test, 60-120 minute website coding assessment, 90+ minute system architecture design, or a video interview where you answer questions recorded by a website, and the website might use A.I. to analyze how nervous and how good you are at eye contact and then uses your video as training data in the future.

Get past that, and then you might hear back from the company finally, and have 2-5 Zoom/Teams/Webex interviews, which also might have a live coding exercise included, which you mostly have to schedule individually and during the work day, and then hopefully hear back one way or another from a recruiter.

So for the most part you're doing 1.5-2 hours worth of effort before the company makes any effort on their part.

eropple• 5 years ago

This is pretty unlike what I've ever seen at a company of any kind, and not what I've seen us do at Mux (oblig: we're hiring remotely--email's in my profile!).

ETA: Like a take-home test or whatever, that happens--I personally elect not to do them, but they do--but a psych test or whatnot creeps me out a lot.

There are plenty of companies out there who recognize that a developer's time is valuable, and while if you're very early in your career maybe you have to bite the bullet and put up with some garbage, there's value in dumping those sorts of orgs out of your inbox once you're safe to do so.

gsibble5• 5 years ago

Yep. Just got my new job a few weeks ago and this was what the past few months of my life were like.

Interestingly, we recognize there is a massive shortage of senior talent and are adjusting our recruiting strategy accordingly.

nostromo• 5 years ago

The labor shortage in tech doesn't exist. I know of so many very good engineers that were rejected by massive corporations that have gone on to do great things.

Google and other big employers will even brag publicly about how they reject the majority of great candidates because they are more afraid of false positives than false negatives. But then they'll turn right around and tell the government and universities that there is a tech talent shortage.

UncleOxidant4• 5 years ago

I think for the most part you're right. When companies start hiring people who have adjacent skills (instead of exact skills) and a growth mindset then you'll know they're really facing a shortage of talent. In the 80s & 90s there was much less nit-pickiness on the part of companies trying to find people with some exact exhaustive list of skills that must be complete in order for the candidate to even be considered - there was a an acceptance of the idea that people could learn on the job and grow into it. Hiring decisions were made a lot more quickly back then in my experience. It seems like they realized that it was better to get someone on the team and get them started towards getting up-to-speed than to wait around 6+ months or more trying to find some kind of exact perfect match.

planet-and-halo2• 5 years ago

This is my sense. Most companies are just bad at hiring, so they hire a bunch of bad engineers and then go "there's a shortage of good engineers!" No, you're just bad at attracting and selecting a good distribution.

gsibble5• 5 years ago

My sense is that there is a drain on experienced engineers at the moment. There are an awful lot of coding camp engineers that can't cut it as managers.

nine_zeros• 5 years ago

Anecdotally my company removed take home exams for employees below senior.

Seniors still need to do it. But they didn't reduce a coding round for seniors. So continue to struggle with hiring

aerosmile4• 5 years ago

It would have been helpful to understand if the labor shortage is happening at the top or the bottom end of the career ladder. I always heard about it in the latter context - eg: restaurants struggling to find waiters, as opposed to unicorn startups struggling to hire their next head of marketing.

The author rushes to conclusion that the labor shortage is in the worker cohort that has the financial freedom to take a pay cut. It would have been nice to back that up with some data, especially since he did back up other parts of his essay - it's just that the conclusion comes out of the blue and with no supporting evidence.

MatteoFrigo4• 5 years ago

The author links to FRED data that measure a 5% drop in workforce participation in the 55+ cohort. This is at least some evidence that older workers are taking it easy so far. (See https://fred.stlouisfed.org/ if you have not heard of FRED before.)

aerosmile4• 5 years ago

For visibility, this is the graph we're discussing: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=Gh7k

I think we all know why the 55+ year olds are seeing a dip - they have an exponentially higher chance of dying of Covid. A bit weird for such an obvious fact to not have been verbalized in the article. If anything, the graph above actually contradicts the title of the article - from what I can tell, all other age groups seem way more employed than I would have expected given the logistical and health concerns that the pandemic threw at us.

shkkmo• 5 years ago

I don't think this is just boomers or just service / hospitality workers.

I think that there has been a fundemental shift in how many people view / think about work and how it relates to society. I doubt we'll have a good grasp of what that shift consists of until years from now.

dang• 5 years ago

Submitters: please post the original source so people know the site the article is coming from, and for the sake of the archives here. Archive links are only ok as a top-level submission if the original source is no longer accessible. They're fine in the comments of course.

(We've changed the URL now from https://archive.ph/WR2LA to the original source.)

ernestoperez• 5 years ago

My anecdotal evidence, is that this pandemic has made me think what it important for my family and me, and working 80+ hours a week, even if very well paid, is not something I want to keep doing in my mid fifties.

I am leaving a job abroad where I have been for 25 years, and returning home, to do some remote work. It may not work out, but I need to try.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

Multiple people have mentioned that the pandemic was a profound period of self-reflection. Massive remote work coupled with a removal of distractions caused many people to change their future outlooks. I think it will be reflected in more things than just employment

voicedYoda• 5 years ago

Can we add that this is an opinion piece?

mabbo• 5 years ago

I spent 7 years taking the Toronto subway to and from work every day, thinking nothing of it. 45 minutes each way, and I considered it a great commute.

After 18 months of remote work, my team decided to do an in-person meetup. Morning in the office, afternoon doing a team event.

It was a great day, but I was blown away by how much I hated the commute. For the entire pandemic, I've been cooking great, healthy dinners starting at 5:30 every night. I got home after 6 that day and was too exhausted to do anything more than order in.

I'm not going back to that every day. My employer can make their decisions, but I've made mine.

cableshaft3• 5 years ago

Yep. I don't mind making the trip to the office from time to time (once every 1-2 months maybe), but I can't see myself agreeing to showing up every day ever again. Unless I'm working on actual hardware maybe, like a job in robotics or something, and even then I'd try to stay home as much as possible.

randomopining• 5 years ago

Yeah tbh 1-2 months would be ideal. Touch base, hit some stuff, grab a beer after work. But if we are just chugging along adding features and refining... why do you need to be in the office?

Maybe for a period of heavy design work... but wth.

Workers don’t want their old jobs on the old terms

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