First it was funny, then sad…

oh no, that em dash..

Its more than that; companies also continuously propagate the message of "shortage of workers" while continuing to raise the requirements for entry level positions more and more. It reaches a point where "entry level" is not attainable for most fresh grads to get experience, and keeps their starting wages (and continuing wages) very well depressed due to the high supply.

Its a very targeted campaign to make sure educated workers are oversupplied, tied down with student debt, and don't get too many ideas of independence in their heads.

It's not just that. HR departments (who, let's be honest, were never exactly super-clear on what tech roles are or do because they're busy with everything else) have been infected by AI to the point that no one can just see a job and apply for it unless they rearrange everything in the resume to match the job posting verbiage exactly.

Everyone who makes it past that hurdle are sorted lowest-to-highest salary requirements. Oh you have seventeen years experience? Fuck you. Everyone after that is sorted by age/race/ whatever. It's the perfect system for fucking up tech hiring.

Unless you rebrand everything you do as AI. Then you'll get 100 million dollars from Zuckabug. (It used to be "cloud" but that was a long time ago now). So the tech manager who knows what they're looking for gets a bunch of applications from newbies who talk like AI is everything and they don't want that.

It's super fucked.

And this is why I'm not worried about my job, but I do recommend people stay away unless they really like it. I've interviewed far too many people who just can't hack it, yet they have multiple relevant jobs on their resume.

(...) I never once worked anywhere that there was a glut of jobs and “not enough bodies” to fill them.

I have. My first job wasn't the worst at this but it happened to some extent. My last company had such a huge disparity between work and employees that every single one of their IT projects (dunno about the rest) was in constant state of delays, hotfixing and putting out fires. Things were so bad people were moved between projects on daily basis and at one point management decided to throw everyone in the department (including folks who just joined the company and newbies with little to no programming experience) to triage one of them.

That's not to mention poaching team members from projects they promised more bodies to (only informing the client about the latter decision) and many other issues. They absolutely needed more people but the way the company is run does little to help with that.

The worst party? They're still growing as a company while their burnout rate stays unchanged. So yeah, it's a thing.

How much is it that these companies don't want to train. I have a hard time believing your job is so advanced and technical you couldn't find someone qualified at any point.

This is SO true. I'm hiring for a software engineer position right now. We've been looking for MONTHS. Recently, we've finally managed to fill the first head.

So many applicants just can't even code. My company is not a place where you learn how to code, it's a place where you learn all the stuff which you didn't think you'd have to do as a software engineer.

We still have a qualified applicants shortage.

Job shortage? Or too low pay?

a large number of people who want the money but aren’t qualified do what we’re looking for.

Sounds like these businesses should be training their employees instead of expecting the employees to train themselves.

College is a great scam because it puts the onus of training onto the worker, not the business. And like good useful idiots, the average person feels pride in being taken advantage of in this way.

That was from December of '21. It would be $15.69 now.

I'm not sure that works. There were 20 shillings to the pound.

So £0.75 a week.

This inflation calculator:

https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator

£75 in 1843 is equivalent to £8,310.96

So 15s then is equivalent to £83.11 a week, £4321.72 a year.

40 hour week (which is implied to be too low). ~£2.08 an hour

So if he worked over 40 hours you're talking a sub £2/hour wage. Around $2.70 in US money.

I suspect the stat relies on converting to dollars before applying inflation as GBP to USD was about 1 to 5 then instead of about 1 to 1.33

It's fun but I wouldn't want to denigrate Dickens by saying he got poverty wrong to make a political point.

I know a guy with three degrees and decades of experience on a resume littered with well-known companies and astounding projects.

2.5 years out of work.

This is the guy who should be fixing slopper code and he's working volunteers and startups so his resume isn't toxic from an Uber or Amazon gig.

This has why I’m happy to work in public service. It’s very stable but the salaries aren’t as high.

Did I apply to your position as that sounds like me. Just passed the one year point.

On the flipside, we had a senior position open for something like 2 years before we finally got someone we're happy with. We fired two before we found someone would would actually do work and not cuss out our external partners.

We're still having trouble hiring mid-levels. Most of the candidates are surprised when we ask them questions about React when the job position clearly states it's for React, and they're also surprised when we ask them to write a few lines of code in an interview (nothing crazy, should take a competent dev 5-10 min, and a nervous one 15, so we allocate 20 min). I don't think our expectations are unreasonable, here's how we delineate between tiers:

• junior - needs help from a mentor to deliver feature work
• mid-level - needs direction on larger features, but can deliver independently
• senior - manages larger features, consults w/ architect on high-level design considerations

But all the senior applicants are mid-level at best, mid-level applicants are recent college grads, and junior applicants just finished a coding bootcamp and think they're hot stuff because they built a rails app by following step-by-step instructions.

We're not a flashy tech company, we manufacture niche products for a niche field, and our software does simulations and reports. It's a complicated product, and we're totally willing to train people, we just want people who can demonstrate that they can ask proper questions and translate that into easy to understand code. The interview questions aren't hard, but they are intentionally incomplete because we're not testing coding ability but instead the ability to recognize vagueness and ask clarifying questions (i.e. ask before you assume).

We're not anyone's top pick, but we do have a lot of interesting problems to solve and people tend to really like it here. So the candidates we tend to get are desperate people who aren't getting bites at the flashier companies, which often means they're not all that competent. During COVID, we'd get maybe 5 applicants for a role after it has been open for a month, and now we're getting 200-300 in the first few days of the position being open. A lot of those applicants are incompetent and I'm surprised they were offered their previous role, but there are some diamonds in the rough.

Do you mean to tell me it wasn't a quick get-rich scheme and people who aren't interested in the field will have issues after doing math puzzles 8 hours a day in front of a monitor before going home to do more on github?

But the rich non-programmer guy told me so!

Yea bro that’s what they do. See you making a living wage, then flood the labor pool. Welcome back to the barrel Mon crab

Maybe if the field hadn't pushed everyone else out of business...

And that is why we need unions in tech. Tech is a cost center for most companies. It’s a space to beat down as much as possible to get margins up, just the same as the guys working on the line making the thing.

That's not how companies work. The CEO has a fiduciary duty to maximize company gains, so they have to invest in AI, because it's more profitable. They don't even have a choice, if they want to keep their job.

The current crisis has nothing to do with the individual decisions of a single CEO. It's a legal issue, i.e. CEOs could only act differently if there was a significant and serious change in the way that the law requires them to operate. Which, all things considered, is unreasonable in this case.