

Companies spend on technology, not workers - yummyfajitas
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/10/business/10capital.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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swombat
_Culling the résumés takes three days. Then he must make time to interview
applicants, and spend $150 for each drug test._

I can think of a way that this company could save $150 per interviewed
applicant. Can anyone else spot it?

What does recreational drug use outside of work have to do with plastics
manufacture? Do the plastics feel different if the engineer had a joint two
weeks earlier?

~~~
zwieback
I think he's hiring (or not hiring) operators and technicians and the fact
that there's a safety training program involved hints at some danger in the
workplace. In that position I would also prefer someone with a clean drug test
although I would still worry that they show up stoned on their first day and
get their arm into the extruder or whatever.

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corin_
I've never touched anything stronger than weed, and I haven't even been near
that in a long time - but if an employer (new or current) asked me to take a
drug test, unless they had a justifiable reason for believing I specifically
was on drugs, then I'd refuse on principle.

~~~
zwieback
An individual's principles are just the same as a company's policies. You
might feel better about yourself refusing a drug test but you might miss out
on an otherwise good job. It may not be a problem for a small company but a
larger company that has to hire lots of manual labor, where drugs and alcohol
are definitely a problem, cannot treat you differently so they have to insist
on the drug test.

Current employers insisting on a drug test is definitely more problematic,
though, if there's no reason to suspect a problem it seems unreasonable to
insist.

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wccrawford
No, they spend on both, keeping in mind the benefits they'll get from each.

Why do people expect companies to throw money around just because someone
needs a job? It's not a company's mission to create jobs. It's to make money.
Sometimes that means creating jobs, but that's a side-effect, not a primary
goal.

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mgkimsal
You're correct, but we do need to evaluate what society's role is in dealing
with this recent bust. The fact that we can suddenly be as productive as 3
years ago but with 7 million fewer jobs says quite a number of things, but the
fact remains that 7 million people who were previously productive contributing
members of society suddenly aren't, mostly through no direct fault of their
own. What, if anything, should we be doing for these people? Retraining?
Handouts?

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zwieback
You used the word "productive" twice in your posting, once in the economic
sense, once in the sense that most people feel "productive" when they go to
work every day. Therein lays the problem - so many pre-recession jobs were
simply unnecessary.

The US now has to come to terms with structural unemployment, which is
something European nations have been struggling with for decades.

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mgkimsal
"so many pre-recession jobs were simply unnecessary."

Well, they can be looked at as unneccessary now, but at the time they weren't
considered to be (otherwise they wouldn't have existed then, as they currently
don't now).

It's not as if employers just suddenly "wised up" 3 years ago and said "hey, I
don't need any of you - you've been 100% unproductive the past several years,
so I will simply lay you off now". Employers are acting as much in their self-
interest now as they did 3, 5 and 10 years ago.

~~~
zwieback
In an ideal world what you say is true. Unfortunately, employers don't
necessarily know what's the "wise" thing to do. Take the housing boom: from a
contractor's point of view it was good business to build many times more
houses than the historical aggregate demand. In reality those houses were
completely unnecessary: short term gain, long term damage.

Same story for the dot-com (and probably the current) bubble. Employers are
notoriously bad at accurately forecasting how many jobs they can actually
sustain. And in a downturn it's easy to squeeze more productivity out of fewer
employees because it's easier to retain overworked employees.

~~~
mgkimsal
I think people are picking and choosing what time perspective to use (not
necessarily you, but I've heard this sort of thing before).

We can look at job situations 5 years ago and say they were unnecessary,
although at the time it wasn't judged to be.

Then we look at now and say the unemployed currently are dead weight. If we
weren't good judges of the situation 5 years ago, why are we any better
(collectively) now?

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mbesto
Behind every piece of technology is a human.

> _“You don’t have to train machines,” Mr. Mishek observes._

This is such an overgeneralized comment. What specific business processes are
these "machines" replacing? Where's the ROI comparison?

I'm taking this article with a grain of salt.

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gaius
You get rich in a gold rush selling shovels.

~~~
josephcooney
I've heard it described as the 'pick and pan' strategy

