
Skills Don’t Pay the Bills - timr
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/25/magazine/skills-dont-pay-the-bills.html?pagewanted=all
======
zmmmmm
I see a similar problem even in software jobs. Employers frequently advertise
for highly specific skill sets that almost nobody has. Then when nobody or
only fraudulent people apply, they reject them all and claim a skills
shortage. The problem seems to be a basic misconception about how transferable
software skills are. An excellent programmer with no experience in Python will
be out performing a poor Python programmer in a matter of weeks, even though
they have had to learn an entirely new language. This idea, however, seems
entirely lost on most HR departments, and the result is an almost entirely
"fake" skills shortage.

~~~
mseebach
It's not just HR. I did an interview with a YC startup that obsessed over my
lack of Rails experience. I have several years of industry relevant
professional experience in Java, Python and PHP, but only ever dabbled in Ruby
and Rails. Their offer (which did come through, grudgingly, through many
repetitions of "so will you commit to teaching yourself rails before
starting?" (No, I won't.) was quite a bit on the low end, but I'd probably
have turned it down anyway for that strange lack of comprehension of
programming skills.

~~~
codewright
I've had a lot of encounters with YC founders, most of them negative.

This anecdote well encapsulates the impression I had of a lot of them.

I'd really like to meet the better of the crop, because I can't imagine PG and
Jessica (she's usually the expert on character and personality in YC
interviews) are intentionally picking petty people.

I'm not the only person in the startup industry who's had this impression
either. They remind me a lot of underqualified legacy Harvard kids who think
they're god's gift because they snagged a status symbol.

Maybe the better founders are too busy shipping product to run into me :)

~~~
moultano
I can imagine that for a company with a runway measured in months, immediate
skills might be more important than for a well established company.

~~~
yummyfajitas
I'm not sure about this.

When I was at my startup, I hired a guy with no Django experience and minimal
python. He made his first bug fix within 24 hours of showing up and was
productive within a week.

Maybe RoR has a much steeper learning curve, or maybe the people doing the
hiring just don't get it.

~~~
codewright
>When I was at my startup, I hired a guy with no Django experience and minimal
python. He made his first bug fix within 24 hours of showing up and was
productive within a week.

I had the same experience with Django walking in with the same repertoire
(minimal Python, no Django) back when I lived in NYC.

I don't do Django anymore, but it taught me a lot about trusting people to
pick things up on the fly. Especially with the right person and environment.

------
chrismealy
Economist Dean Baker comments on this: That Shortage of Skilled Manufacturing
Workers is Really a Shortage of Employers Willing to Pay the Market Wage

 _News stories have been filled with reports of managers of manufacturing
companies insisting that they have jobs open that they can't fill because
there are no qualified workers. Adam Davidson at the NYT looked at this more
closely and found that the real problem is that the managers don't seem to be
interested in paying for the high level of skills that they claim they need.

Many of the positions that are going unfilled pay in the range of $15-$20 an
hour. This is not a pay level that would be associated with a job that
requires a high degree of skill. As Davidson points out, low level managers at
a fast-food restaurant can make comparable pay.

It should not be surprising that the workers who have these skills expect
higher pay and workers without the skills will not invest the time and money
to acquire them for such a small reward. If these factories want to get highly
skilled workers, they will have to offer a wage that is in line with the skill
level that they expect._

[http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/that-
shor...](http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/that-shortage-of-
skilled-manufacturing-workers-is-really-a-shortage-of-employers-willing-to-
pay-the-market-wage)

~~~
clarkm
I think it is important to note that the fast-food jobs with comparable pay
are low level _managerial positions_ , not entry level ones. You can start
working for minimum wage at a fast-food job without any previous experience
and/or skills. These jobs require very little training, and allow employees to
add value almost immediately (and well before promotion to the $15-$20 an hour
positions).

Contrast this to the skilled manufacturing jobs which require up front
experience. Though many blue collar fields offer entry-level positions with on
the job training, apprenticeships, and opportunity for advancement, this
doesn't appear to be common practice in manufacturing. Why not? I think the
main reason is that it is very hard for a low skill worker to add value to a
manufacturing company. There aren't any comparable entry-level positions that
allow the employee to learn while still being productive.

Because of this, hiring an unskilled employee for the purpose of training them
is a huge risk, since it requires a significant investment. And since this
industry is already very unstable with razor-thin margins, it's not something
many employers seem willing to do, which is unfortunate.

So maybe the solution is coming up with better training programs, so that
manufacturers can hire new employees without taking on such large risks?

~~~
adrianhoward
_I think the main reason is that it is very hard for a low skill worker to add
value to a manufacturing company. There aren't any comparable entry-level
positions that allow the employee to learn while still being productive._

And that is an artefact of industry killing on-the-job training and
apprenticeships in any meaningful way.

My dad went from sweeping the floor to designing satellite test rigs with on-
the-job training. My partner's dad went from painting ships to designing
nuclear reactors with on-the-job training.

My dad never went to university. Started off helping out at my granddad's
shop. Moved from there to an apprenticeship scheme at a local engineering
firm. From there went into the drafting room. From there learned more
engineering. When I was in my teens he was designing satellite test rigs for
BA. Ended up a very expensive contractor specialising in conveyor systems of
all things.

My partner's dad never went to university. Entered an apprenticeship scheme at
Chatham Dockyard. Started off painting navy ships during construction. Moved
into drafting office. Started doing more engineering work. Became a member of
the Institution of Mechanical Engineers as a Chartered Mechanical Engineer in
1966. Worked on the design and building of early UK marine nuclear reactors,
nuclear containment facilities, etc. He ended up working in nuclear medicine
before he retired.

On the job training is possible. Just nobody in the US and UK seems to want to
do it any more ;-(

(Favourite "I wish I knew that at the time and kept it" moment from my youth.
My dad always brought home used A1/A0 paper from his design work for me and my
brothers to scrawl on. I remember one when I was about seven or eight that was
of this massive array of tiny ovals in a mesh of wires. I though the pattern
was cool and stared at it for some time, before turning over to try to improve
my drawing of Spider-Man. I now know what I was looking at was an A0 schematic
of some magnetic-core memory (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic-
core_memory>). So wish I had that now so I could frame it for the wall ;-)

------
opendna
Classic: according to the article, the definition of a qualified new hire is
one with the qualifications to get accepted into university engineering
programs.

Ya'll have probably read some of Prof Peter Cappelli's editorials (he's been
making the rounds to promote his book "Why Good People Can’t Get Jobs"). One
of the things he's pointed out is that HR use of resume databases encourages
people with poor search habits to believe there is no choice. Basically, it's
a failure consider the Bayesian math of nested filters.

Consider a company, in a city of a million people (don't want to pay for
relocation), which wants someone with a bachelor's degree and five years of
experience. The US unemployment rate for people with bachelor's degrees or
higher is ~3.8% and about ~7% of the population is between 25-29 years old.
Rough and tumble numbers put the pool of candidates around 2500-2700 before
including any subject-specific knowledge. Ask for a specific discipline, like
"Computers, mathematics, and statistics" for which 4.2% of bachelor degrees
were awarded, and you can cut your your pool of candidates down to about 100
(1/10,000). If you also filter to require mastery of PHP, javascript, and
Marqui, 10 years experience with Server 2008 and fluency in a Romance
language...

tl;dr: the absence of time travelers in the applicant pool is not evidence of
a skills shortage.

------
molsongolden
"The so-called skills gap is really a gap in education, and that affects all
of us."

That closing line doesn't really sound like the gist of the piece at all. It
sounds like manufacturing employers just don't want to or don't feel they can
afford to pay works a fair wage.

~~~
evv
Exactly. This article makes it sound like manufacturers somehow aren't
restricted to the supply and demand of their labor.

If laborers are leaving manufacturers for better pay at fast food companies,
workers need higher pay. Its not that complicated. If the company can't afford
higher wages, maybe the demand for this skilled labor isn't what we think it
is.

If these skills are actually in high demand, they _will_ pay the bills.

~~~
robryan
It is the same thing with propping up the auto industry. If a company can't
afford higher wages and it isn't economically rational for people to invest
their time in an area then maybe the only rational thing to do is for that
manufacturing to head offshore.

~~~
rhizome
Which is basically an artificial pushdown of car prices.

------
lifeisstillgood
This is fairly speculative, but I have been thinking this paradox over for a
while.

A high demand for scarce highly skilled workers _must_ drive salaries up in
competition.

Unless the skills are not actually high skilled, but _obscure skills_. I
predict that "high skilled manufacturing" is a morass of proprietary solutions
to highly specific process needs - that is, the metal fabrication plant
alluded to at 10USD per hour has highly specific machinery doing a fixed task,
and that the skill is mostly one of repairing the proprietary code.

From a software perspective, that mostly means the machinery is "legacy" - and
impossible to refactor. So it can never be improved upon, only replaced.

I am not a 3d-printer fanboi - the advantages of additative manufacturing are
hugely over hyped (at the moment), and likely to remain elusive for, lets say,
a generation, before it becomes obvious to all we throw away factories and
their jobs and build millions of thing-o-matics.

However in that generation there will be huge opportunity for semi-general
manufacturing - robots with sufficient flexibility in parts and software that
they can be re-purposed easily as part of a (virtual) conveyor belt.

This sounds truly skilled work - flexibly adapting as processes and customers
change.

if providing semi-general manufacturing machines is uneconomic compared to
proprietary simpler but "obscure skill" machines, then we cannot expect a
productivity premium for actual highly skilled workers and should expect 10USD
phour jobs to limp along till Shanghai takes their lunch.

If however semi-general machines can be made to adapt to different
manufacturing requirements, then our whole manufacturing base may be in want
of replacing.

Again something emerging economies will have an advantage in.

So, overall, the West should view itself as Great Britain was at the end of
the 19th Century - a pioneer whose advantages had run out, and without
wholesale massive investment will simply enter a managed decline.

Disruption opportunities - Development of semi-general robotic manufacturing
solutions that can quickly be re-purposed. And proving that it is both
ecomnomic for a greenfield site and an installed base.

~~~
angersock
Both you and gvb seem to perhaps lack first-hand experience of machine shops.

It's not just "repairing code"... Oftentimes, small job shops will be taking a
dimensioned drawing and write their own G code to actually generate the
objects.

This will probably involve some back-and-forth with the machine stepping
through the part manufacture, and must be done carefully to guarantee that
both the machining is done efficiently by the machine and that the program
doesn't result in a catastrophic failure damaging the workpiece, the tool, the
machine, the operator, or some combination of the above.

This is, in fact, skilled work. Moreover, experienced operators know how to
check parts for proper dimensioning (QC at the bench), perform maintenance on
their machines and change tools, and watch a part in progress to make sure
something really dumb isn't about to happen.

Moreover, the job doesn't stop at the machining center--you may still have to
go and clean things up manually, do welding, do polishing, or any number of
finishing touches.

Keeping this all working together is not something to laugh at.

I haven't even touched on the logistical challenges of retooling or upgrading
equipment, or operating with machines that (unironically) still accept paper
tape.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
I am struggling with the economics behind this - we seem to have discovered an
entire industry that sits in a eddy of economic thought - the value added by
an operator has a very low ceiling, so they cannot negotiate much, plus the
operators themselves have non-interchangeable skill sets - so the number of
jobs they are actually qualified for is very low, especially in a given
locale. Hence 10 USD an hour.

In short, the manager of a Mcdonalds can move to a local KFC or Wendys with
very little effort. An operator of machinetools X has no chance just picking
it up on tools Y.

What I think we are seeing is the result of automation destroying jobs - as
ChuckMcM says up page. And if so I am interested suddenly in rereading the
Communist Manifesto - because in 20 years, we cannot continue having money
flow to the owners of the means of production as defined now - if almost all
production is automated, what happens then?

I am too tired to do much more than realise there is an interesting path of
thought leading away from here - one I suspect having been trodden by many
other thinkers before me. Any travel guides welcome.

edit: too vitriolic

~~~
michaelt

      but then if the skills were transferrable (ie not 
      proprietary) then the market would adjust - but it seems 
      that there are very very few people with Machine X 
      experience in each locale, and they are desperate for jobs.
    

It's not a problem of proprietary skills - Siemens controllers, Fanuc
controllers and Heidenahin controllers are extremely similar. Changing between
Siemens and Fanuc is more like changing from Eclipse to Netbeans than changing
from Java to C.

The problem is the entire market for CNC machine operators is very small.

Edit: I see you've edited your comment.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Yes sorry about that - as a general rule for comments and emails, if I put
f%%k in there, I really should rethink it.

opendna below suggests there is research that small (isolated) pools of labour
fail to benefit from the intuitive supply/demand wage growth.

My antennea are wavering - this feels like a disruption happening. If I ever
pick up my research MSc I think this will be the perfect subject.

------
anigbrowl
_Part of Isbister’s pickiness, he says, comes from an avoidance of workers
with experience in a “union-type job.” Isbister, after all, doesn’t abide by
strict work rules and $30-an-hour salaries. At GenMet, the starting pay is $10
an hour. Those with an associate degree can make $15, which can rise to $18 an
hour after several years of good performance._

I'm not a fan of unions or work rules, but those are terrible wages. How does
the guy expect to get 21st century skills for 20th century wages?

~~~
Jach
Fortunately the market tends to weed guys like him out if he refuses (or is
unable) to raise salaries to meet his required quotas, unless he's just clever
enough to get government handouts that keep his company afloat indefinitely.

------
Soarez
If an Entrepreneur can't pay for the resources needed to build/ensure a
product/service at their market prices, he should and eventually will, close
business.

There is nothing wrong with that. That is the economical system in the works.

If no one is willing to pay for his product/service at the price he needs to
charge, it is because either people do not need it, or they can get it cheaper
somewhere else. In business, if you can't compete, you shouldn't.

In this specific case, these jobs are getting oursourced to china or replaced
by machines. This is wonderful. Not for infimal number of people that lose
their jobs, but to the huge number of people who will be able to afford that
product/service cheaper.

I can't set up an ice-cream kiosk in antartica and whine about how business is
hard and what will be of the antartica ice-cream industry.

~~~
goostavos
What does that mean for us though, the "skilled workers" when everything is
being shipped overseas? A friend of mine who works as a systems engineer for
Verizon said their dumping 30% of their US staff and shipping it to overseas.
This seems to be the pattern (anecdotally) as of late for a lot of large
companies. When there's someone with comparable skills on the other side of
the world who will do your job for a fraction of the cost, what's to stop a
race to the bottom?

~~~
indiecore
>what's to stop a race to the bottom?

Absolutely nothing, welcome to one of the big problems of capitalism.

~~~
marknutter
The "race to the bottom" benefits the consumer, don't forget. We will make
less money in wages, but we will also have access to far cheaper goods and
services because of increased productivity globally. It's not a big problem of
capitalism that people in third world countries can pull themselves out of
poverty, it's one of its great triumphs.

------
kirillzubovsky
Okay, so if there is a problem, what's the solution? Sure enough, highly
skilled labor in Taiwan, for instance, that is willing to do the same work for
a fraction of the cost, isn't going to stop working just because US employees
don't find $10/h attractive. It's a free market and if we want to make things
in US, we have to keep the costs comparable.

Now, assuming blue collar is done, as robots can take care of most of the
tasks, could someone explain why we need workers to oversee the computers?

The way I see it, you need a really expensive robot, and you need a really
expensive programmer to make it work; everything in the middle is cheap.
Software should be able to distill anything that is happening on the robotic
side and present it in such a way that a trained mechanic would understand and
be able to fix it. If that's not the case, then we need better developers (and
in this case, perhaps, better designers and human-factors engineers) to write
better software.

Now, a few folks mentioned that what you need is really a mixture of
experience in the mechanical side of things and understanding of the software
- presumable that allows you to react and solve problems whenever something
goes astray. Well, that could probably be solved by having a few engineers on
staff who would help when needed.

That leaves us with yet again, fairly simple mechanical labor. Perhaps then,
the article is right, we have a serious education problem. Those who attain
enough education, leap forward and presumable learn more to subject themselves
to mundane mechanical tasks, while those who would be greatly fitted to do the
jobs, actually don't have enough education to understand even the most basics.

Someone's suggested comparing the math needed at Mc'Donalds with the math
needed at one of these factories. I'd be curious to know too; although I
suspect that in McDs all the calculations are done by a computer and all
humans need to do, is simply not to f-up. Even then, when humans fail to add
2+2, all they lose is an occasional McFlurry, while at a factory they could
impact tens of thousands of dollars at once.

So, here we have a conundrum. We need labor to work the $10 jobs, but the pool
of employees is simply atrocious. At the same time, qualified labor has better
things to do with their time. Now, back to my questions - what's the solution?

~~~
tomjen3
There isn't any. Unless you can pay more for skilled labor than unskilled
labor, you are not going to be able to hire anybody.

The solution is to adapt or close the factories down, and go work at McDonalds
(or get a better skilled job elsewhere).

------
kosei
I cannot fathom how the author takes the side of the employers at the end of
this article. So workers should reduce their expectations so that certain
manufacturers can succeed while paying them below-expected rates? Does the
author legitimately expect individual workers to look out for the country's
employment best interests above their own?

The candidates smart enough to realize that they could earn 2x-5x as much
after college won't take these jobs, and most of the people who can't earn
those wages elsewhere aren't qualified to do these jobs.

------
tokenadult
From the article: "The secret behind this skills gap is that it’s not a skills
gap at all. I spoke to several other factory managers who also confessed that
they had a hard time recruiting in-demand workers for $10-an-hour jobs. 'It’s
hard not to break out laughing,' says Mark Price, a labor economist at the
Keystone Research Center, referring to manufacturers complaining about the
shortage of skilled workers. 'If there’s a skill shortage, there has to be
rises in wages,' he says. 'It’s basic economics.'"

Agreed. That is the basic problem. If a worker can produce hundreds of widgets
a day after specialized training with new computer-controlled machinery, but
the worker could make just as much money per hour right after high school
flipping hamburgers at the local fast-food restaurant, there is no reason for
the worker to go through two years or more of specialized training, especially
at the worker's own expense.

Much of the rest of the article discusses the overall rationality of workers
seeking jobs that they can obtain with the least investment of their own time
in training for a given income. Of course. Part of the problem is that if
companies hire on the basis of course completion certificates rather than on
the basis of demonstrated competence, they will miss out on good workers, and
yet hire some lousy workers, and thus be reluctant to offer competitive
starting wages. (It's expensive to hire a worker who can't do the job, and
it's also expensive to let go workers who don't learn on the job and to hire
their replacements.)

In what I think has become my best-liked comment on HN, I've collected
references other participants here helped me find about company hiring
procedures. Companies need to hire on the basis of actually being able to do
the job, not on the basis of what classes workers have attended. The review
article by Frank L. Schmidt and John E. Hunter, "The Validity and Utility of
Selection Models in Personnel Psychology: Practical and Theoretical
Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings," Psychological Bulletin, Vol.
124, No. 2, 262-274

[http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%...](http://mavweb.mnsu.edu/howard/Schmidt%20and%20Hunter%201998%20Validity%20and%20Utility%20Psychological%20Bulletin.pdf)

sums up, current to 1998, a meta-analysis of much of the HUGE peer-reviewed
professional literature on the industrial and organizational psychology
devoted to business hiring procedures. There are many kinds of hiring
criteria, such as in-person interviews, telephone interviews, resume reviews
for job experience, checks for academic credentials, personality tests, and so
on. There is much published study research on how job applicants perform after
they are hired in a wide variety of occupations.

[http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes...](http://www.siop.org/workplace/employment%20testing/testtypes.aspx)

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States,
prefer a work-sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most
other parts of the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general
mental ability test.

The overall summary of the industrial psychology research in reliable
secondary sources is that two kinds of job screening procedures work
reasonably well. One is a general mental ability (GMA) test (an IQ-like test,
such as the Wonderlic personnel screening test). Another is a work-sample
test, where the applicant does an actual task or group of tasks like what the
applicant will do on the job if hired. (But the calculated validity of each of
the two best kinds of procedures, standing alone, is only 0.54 for work sample
tests and 0.51 for general mental ability tests.) Each of these kinds of tests
has about the same validity in screening applicants for jobs, with the general
mental ability test better predicting success for applicants who will be
trained into a new job. Neither is perfect (both miss some good performers on
the job, and select some bad performers on the job), but both are better than
any other single-factor hiring procedure that has been tested in rigorous
research, across a wide variety of occupations. So if you are hiring for your
company, it's a good idea to think about how to build a work-sample test into
all of your hiring processes. If the job you are hiring for involves use of a
computer-controlled machine tool, have the candidate put the machine to use
making sample parts (advertise the job in a way that makes clear a work-sample
test is required, to screen out people who have no clue how to operate such
machines). Hire the able, and pay them what they are worth.

Ask yourself about any hiring process you have ever been in, as boss or as
applicant: did the applicant have to do a work-sample test based on actual
work results expected in the company? Why not?

~~~
rsheridan6
>If you are hiring for any kind of job in the United States, prefer a work-
sample test as your hiring procedure. If you are hiring in most other parts of
the world, use a work-sample test in combination with a general mental ability
test.

Why would you use a mental ability test outside of the US, but not in the US?
Is it illegal in the US or something?

~~~
WildUtah
Yes, using a general mental ability test (IQ type test) in hiring is illegal
in the USA. Some protected groups do worse on average on such tests.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Griggs_v._Duke_Power_Co.#>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1991>

~~~
wisty
> Some protected groups do worse on average on such tests.

Are those the same protected groups which tend to not have degrees or other
certifications? Because "ban the IQ test, ask for a degree" might have a
similar effect.

------
jaggederest
This is the transition between manufacturing as a blue collar occupation and
manufacturing as a white collar occupation.

------
ommunist
The name of the article is misleading. It is all about the greedy fat cats
that want mice to go to the mousetrap, but moaning about high prices for
cheese, so they are unable to charge the mousetrap properly. Good for mice,
bad for cats.

------
frozenport
I wonder what kind of skills are lacking. Claims of deficiencies are
qualitative.

For example, how much math does somebody need to know for this kind of job? Is
it trigonometry to find hypotenuses? Are they writing programs or entering in
data to notepad?

This is an important distinction because we need to compare these skills to
those of a shift manager at McDonald.

For example, at a hotel the shift manager must supervise the employees, handle
money, and keep journal entries. The later two involve rudimentary mathematics
and computer skills. There is a good chance that this is a fair wage when
compared to similar jobs.

~~~
galadriel
From my experience of college level instrumentation design, if one want to
design parts and run CNC to its full potential, he/she should be decently
proficient in curve drawing, understanding gear design, etc, and the math
required for it can be quite involved. This is after you know the broad design
detail. Some difficult things involve how to best approximate a curve on given
CNC constraints, figuring out best fit for parts, etc; and then write
appropriate programs for it. IMO, there are only a very few people who would
have skill set like these, but not enough to move on to higher level
engineering jobs.

Although, a lot of this thing is getting automated, and there is a huge push
towards figuring out how you can feed a CAD design directly to CNC and let it
figure out best way to implement it.

PS: I cannot expect that you can ever hire enough good people in this category
for $10 an hour. They would probably be writing VB scripts and earning more
money. Working in a fast food chain would be totally a waste of potential of
decently skilled workers.

------
sharkweek
_...highly skilled manufacturing jobs — the ones that require people who know
how to run the computer that runs the machine._ \--

Thinking meta for a moment here: How far does this concept go of machine
process. Could we program machines that can run the computers that run the
machines? And how about machines that program those machines?

One of my favorite Twilight Zone episodes :
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s>

~~~
sami36
No we can't. I base that on being a software architect who sat through endless
useless _marketing_ meetings from IBM & their ilk promising the imminent
advent of _Doodleware_ (have a business person with domain knowledge & no
technical skills draw a process on this monkey-easy UI tool & we'll generate a
working application from it.)

I maintain that being a programmer will still be a highly paid skill in demand
for decades to come for one simple reason : You can't bullshit a computer. You
can't sweet-talk a machine into accepting your algorithm because of your great
personality , looks or any other intangible except for knowing what you're
doing. if you want a parallel, look no further than the sorry state of machine
translation & that despite the enormous amounts of datasets they've been
playing with. Human intelligence & judgement, even on a very very narrowed use
case is not something computers are close to replicate.

~~~
Evbn
I dunno. Perl does a pretty good job of "do what I mean" style programming.
Sure, not every hard problem can be solved automatically, but a lot of tasks
can be accomplished by a short script or banging keywords into Google, etc.

~~~
sami36
You still need to _tell_ Perl your intent, laid out in a very specific way. by
the time you're ready to write your code, you've already solved 99.9999 % of
the problem at hand. you're severely underestimating your smarts.

------
andrew_wc_brown
When applying for programmers I'll refuse to hand in a résumé without being
able to demonstrate my skills and provide sample work first.

The hiring process that most companies use is backwards, and I think mostly
due to people that go to school to learn HR and taught this impractical
approach.

------
gtirloni
Companies are simply offering wages that are comparable to some worker in
China would get. It only makes sense in a flat world. Question is: do we want
that?

In the IT industry, specially IT support and break-fix development the same
thing happens. Local people don't want to accept low salaries? Let's look what
India or the Philippines are charging. Problem solved.

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erikb
I read about this so often, that I can't think anymore that the problem really
is the low pay for high skilled jobs. There must be a reason why in so many
countries for so many years nobody increases their hourly rates and hopes to
get well educated people for the current rates.

