

The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire - will_critchlow
http://randfishkin.com/blog/28/the-irony-of-the-us-economy-in-2010-no-jobs-no-one-to-hire

======
canterburry
I think one of the fundamental flaws with American companies is that someone
with "the right skills" means the person is a shoe-in at the time of hire.
They are expected the walk onto the job with all the training, know-how,
experience etc that the company needs at that very minute.

Since trends are constantly changing and always towards something new and
never before seen, there will simply never be a time when there is a bounty-
full supply of shoe-in candidates.

American companies need to look for people who are fundamentally smart, able
and willing to learn, are problem solvers and have reasoning skills and whom
they can shape into the exact resource they need...and then know they can
reshape them again when needed. I really believe this will lead to a far more
qualified workforce at every company and be a source of renewed loyalty
between employers and employees.

Consumerism has driven America into treating labor as any other store bought
product which can be easily, quickly and cheaply acquired to fill a momentary
need and discarded when trends change.

This is not a labor market problem, it's a problem of approach and mentality
in staffing and HR.

Look at the really successful companies out there and you'll see they hire
fundamentally smart people, everything else can be learned.

~~~
codexon
_I think one of the fundamental flaws with American companies is that someone
with "the right skills" means the person is a shoe-in at the time of hire.
They are expected the walk onto the job with all the training, know-how,
experience etc that the company needs at that very minute._

That's not an American problem. It is a global problem.

100 years ago you got job training. Then you had to pay colleges the privilege
filtering you or your colleagues out for the companies. Nowadays even that is
not enough, and businesses are demanding 2-3 internships because people are
desperate enough to push all the costs of job training onto themselves.

It is a welcome change for many businesses, but the result is that too many
people choose a field by accident. Then they have effectively wasted X years
and X dollars. As a business, you don't foot the bill of training a
potentially bad worker/student, but the entire society loses total
productivity.

~~~
codexon
Clarification (since I can't edit my comment anymore):

Businesses should foot the cost of job training to prevent supply/demand
mismatches where thousands of people spend 4+ years preparing for a job they
never get hired for.

Why? A business is much more in tune with market demand than students
following the flavor of the year and end up being edged out by 0.1 GPA or
being the 101th person in a market that can only sustain 50 new workers a year
etc...

------
enjo
This is another great opportunity to point out something rather puzzling about
this recession.

If you have a college degree your unemployment rate is 4.7%, with a big chunk
of that 4.7% in the building related fields (architects, civil engineers,
etc... are having a tough go right now).

<http://www.bls.gov/cps/tables.htm#monthly>

It's a double digit unemployment rate if you just have a high school diploma.
Meanwhile manufacturing output has actually increased dramatically, without
adding any significant jobs. That's what I find scary. The U.S. is the worlds
leading manufacturer (I'm having trouble finding data from 2009, but in 2008
we we're the largest manufacturer by a wide margin). Yet, manufacturing _jobs_
are way down. I'm not sure those jobs are ever coming back. We've gotten crazy
good at automation. Until the cost of human labor in the U.S. decreases by a
rather large percentage, we'll continue to build ever more sophisticated
systems for building things.

I'm not sure what that leaves us with.

~~~
IgorPartola
The problem is that our current economic system is not ready to deal with such
a high productivity level. With technology advancements eliminating entire job
classes virtually overnight, in our lifetime we will reach a point where there
will be way more people than necessary jobs; and the economic system will have
to adapt. Two simple (not easy) solutions that come to mind are artificial
population control or a different resource diatribution model.

~~~
dhh
I'm sure people thought like that when agriculture got automated and didn't
need as many people any more. Higher productivity shifts people from industry
to industry. There's often a lag between the death of one industry and the
rise of another.

~~~
Charuru
Just because it was true in the 19th and 20th century that human resources can
reallocate from agriculture to manufacturing does not mean it will continue to
be true in a future context.

Every day our R&D is chipping away at the necessity for a human labor force
until we get to the day we have 0 percent employment.

------
wccrawford
He is 1 step away from saying that the government should be telling people
what education to take, and what jobs they'll fill. (Remember Gattaca?)

Some industries (not all!) have a shortage of workers. This has -always- been
the case. Each generation feels a different pull when they are children, and
so has different goals for later in life. We even encourage children to pick a
career in Elementary school! By the time they are out of college, the job
market has had 15 years of changes. It's no wonder that the jobs available and
the skills that people trained for aren't a match.

Is there a solution for this problem, other than the government ordering
people around? Not that I see. I think the system is working as well as it can
while not encroaching on people's freedom.

1 final note: It's a LOT easier to find people for jobs if you offer better
salary. Nobody ever mentions that when they're complaining that they can't
find people to hire. Instead, they blame the 'market' or the 'government' and
keep their offered salaries low.

~~~
randfish
That certainly wasn't my intent - I was just brainstorming a list of ways one
might fix the shortfall of math/science/engineering professionals.

Salaries: Maybe we're still low, but looking at
[http://gigaom.com/2010/11/10/stat-shot-the-results-of-
silico...](http://gigaom.com/2010/11/10/stat-shot-the-results-of-silicon-
valleys-talent-war/) \- we're paying between 10-20% above these figures
(generally) for our engineers, so I suspect that's not the case.

~~~
terra_t
Rand, your post is repeating the same garbage about job training that's been
universal for the past 30 years (See "The Job Training Charade" by Gordon
Lafer,) with a little dash of age discrimination just so you'll fit in with
the hacker news crowd. (I know a lot of people who are in their 30's, 40's and
50's who've successfully learned new skills)

Communications of the ACM has hand-wringing articles in every issue about "Why
don't students want to study CS?" They never mention the elephant in the room
-- that these students are hearing from computer professionals in their 30's
and 40's who all of a sudden find they are working a dead end job.

There's a huge demand for inexperienced out-of-college engineers that will
work for cheap (for instance, equity that probably won't materialize), not
demand health insurance, and work 80 hours a week on "charge of the light
brigade" projects that lack any semblance of project management. There's very
little demand for experienced engineers who realize that management is full of
__it.

There's no educational institution that produces people with the skills it
takes to develop today's web sites. Often CS graduates get a bunch of 20-year
old pap about algorithms and never learn a thing about project management,
modern distributed systems, and all the little details from CSS to the
management of social systems. People get those skills working in the school of
hard knocks, and a lot of those people (like myself) have been doing it for 15
years and we're not going to take crap from anybody.

When it comes to inequality, it's dawning on people that higher ed is part of
the problem, not part of the solution. The few remaining "good" and "secure"
jobs in this country are open to people who graduate (as undergraduates) from
Harvard and Yale. The entrance of women into the workforce has doubled the
opportunity of employers to play out their racist and classist impulses.

~~~
aphexairlines
> There's no educational institution that produces people with the skills it
> takes to develop today's web sites.

That's quite a charge. CS graduates come out with at least a grasp on database
design, object-oriented design, functional programming, state machines,
concurrency, type safety, program evaluation, OS fundamentals, networks, and
the software development lifecycle. In addition, the curriculum leaves room
for the student to start specializing in a few areas of interest. That's not
"a bunch of 20-year old pap about algorithms."

All the little details of CSS and the language or platform of the week
shouldn't need to be taught by schools, since the point is to prepare the
student to pick them up as they come.

~~~
terra_t
It depends on where you go. Jon Kleinberg's class on algorithms (and classes
based on his book) is great. I don't think every CS student gets access to
that quality of construction

As for database design, OO-design or concurrency, my experience is that you've
got to spend two years or so building that kind of system before you're an
asset instead of a liability. Some students might really get that much work in
during their educations, but they won't all entirely.

In 1992 I took the only CS course that I've actually taken, and it was a
course in comparative programming languages that introduced OO programming
through Ada (a thoroughly obsolete form) and spent a lot of time on logic
programming with Prolog. Now, I think Prolog is beautiful and my recent work
has led me to believe that (20 years later) we're going to have to go more in
that direction, the fact is that for practical purposes, Prolog is a dead end.

And then at the graduate level it's all about fads. At one top CS school
there's nobody interested in the semantic web and description logics because
that's all "dead stuff from ten years ago." In the engineering library at that
school, I can find five units of modular shelves filled up with conference
proceedings that plod endlessly about IP QoS, despite the fact that none of
that has ever seen the light of day. Anybody with a pulse can think of ten or
twenty other research areas that ought to be vastly more productive, but,
somehow, resources never get allocated for them.

In terms of the actual needs of the workplace, what it takes to be productive
~is~ detailed knowledge of the details that are relevant now. Why are Facebook
and Google having a crazy bidding war for employees (other than the fact that
they've got too much capital?) -- it's because they're building stuff on a
scale that nobody else is and you can't get experience building at that scale
elsewhere.

------
JSig
The BLS does a TERRIBLE job of managing the unemployment stats. The
birth/death model just does not work at cycle changes. For a detailed look at
these issues check out Mish's many posts at <http://bit.ly/9yjUjN>

Additionally, there is something going on beyond a flawed model. From
zerohedge.com => <http://bit.ly/b5AJsz>

"Readers may be surprised to discover that beginning in April, of 2010,
continuing through today, there have been 22 out of 23 consecutive upward
prior weekly revisions! In other words, the BLS has a definitive mandate to
underrepresent the "current" weekly data and to allow it to catch up with
reality once it has become "prior", and thus no longer market moving, when in
reality should the BLS present true data it would have likely missed estimates
on more than half the occasions it has "beaten" and caused ridiculous market
spikes like the one experienced earlier. Furthermore, combining all individual
weekly data, demonstrates that the BLS has underrepresented initial claims by
roughly 80,000 year to date."

Check out the post for a nice chart.

~~~
rbranson
Disclaimer: zerohedge is a bunch of hysterical Austrian economist nutcases.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Ad hominem, try again.

~~~
johnny22
Perhaps it's just bias, but i have real trouble taking any advice or getting
news from somebody who goes by the pseudonym "Tyler Durden", or anybody who
ends up getting published by said person.

~~~
SkyMarshal
Agreed it's a bit silly, but it's still worth training yourself to look past
that and evaluate the argument independently of its presentation and other
irrevelant context.

It's hard, and I use the word 'train' intentionally b/c it requires discipline
and constant attention. But I've uncovered gems of understanding over the
years from doing that, that I wouldn't have otherwise, some which confirmed my
worldview, and others which refuted it or expanded it.

Some people are brilliantly insightful, but just awful at communicating and
presenting their understanding.

------
ianb
None of the hard-to-fill positions could be filled by someone with "training"
- those are positions that require experience and talent. Both of those can be
cultivated (I'm not so pessimistic to believe they can only be imported, or
are formed by a population of fixed size), but training/education isn't going
to do it. Which is maybe the fault of education, or maybe it's just that we
ask too much of education. But try-harder techniques (like increasing funding)
won't result in the qualitative changes to make training a problem-fixer.

~~~
lotharbot
Not that long ago, I read several quotes along these lines:

 _"We have plenty of openings, and we're getting 5 times as many resumes as
before, but only half as many qualified applicants."_

Most of the quotes were from people in medicine, IT, and similarly complex
fields. The problem isn't a lack of "training" of the sort that could be
covered by a community college course and a 3-month internship; the problem is
a lack of "training" of the sort that comes through _years of hard work and
experience_ , combined with an entitlement mentality that says "the world owes
me a job" instead of "I will develop skills that are useful to an employer,
and therefore be able to get a job".

As you say, this is not a problem that will be solved by increasing funding.

~~~
space-monkey
A corollary to this is that in any complex field that is expanding at any
material rate, demand for capable (experienced) people will be higher than
supply. There are more jobs than yesterday, so there are more jobs than there
were people getting experience yesterday.

------
Vivtek
I question his (somewhat oblique) assertion that people in their 30's are too
old to train effectively in new skillsets.

~~~
Encosia
Absolutely. I'm in my 30s and haven't noticed any decrease in my ability to
continue learning. It's definitely a challenge to discard your old mental
models if/when they start to become hindrances, but far from impossible.

My Mom (nearly 60) went back to school last year to learn occupational
therapy, and has been doing great. It's not rocket surgery by any stretch, but
it's _exactly_ the kind of retraining that's relevant to the article's
assertion.

~~~
jimmyjim
I had a guy in his late 70s in my accelerated Calculus II class this summer at
a community college (power series, curve arc length, determining
convergence/divergence, etc.) -- with a class full of students from second-
tier schools. He was one of the few students to ace every test and exam.

~~~
robryan
It's possible it might be more about willingness than ability, I have come
across older people that probably would have been capable of similar things
given the will but have essentially thrown in the towel, happy where they are
and aren't willing to put in the effort.

------
Multiplayer
I never understand the hiring requirement of a degree for a startup - that is
a silly way to hold your company back. The best coders and designers I have
worked with have either had no degree or have an irrelevant degree. Skilled
people with sharp minds will train themselves to do the things that interest
them.

~~~
davidamcclain
+1

I'm a self taught designer/developer, not a genius but pretty competent with
some useful skills. No CS or Art/Design degree so a lot of companies (start-
ups included) will dismiss me out of hand rather than for my own merits and
failings. And as the saying goes, I know some really dumb people with some
pretty great degrees.

I agree there's value to a degree (any and all degrees I mean) and there's
certainly some painful ineptitudes in my self-taught skills which I might not
have if I did a CS or Art/Design degree. My point is that just requiring a
degree seems somewhat arbitrary. It doesn't tell you if I scraped through and
don't really understand the subject or if I'm the next Woz. It doesn't tell
you if I know how to ship or if I'll need constant hand-holding for the next
few years.

------
chesser
If everyone is competing for the top 1%, you're never going to solve the
problem.

And of the people with the skills you want, why should they work at your
crappy company instead of starting their own?

Try this on for size: "Here, I'll give you a salary and maybe a tiny fraction
of equity to come work at my company. But you're over 30 so you'll need to be
re-educated."

Why aren't you jumping at the chance!? Oh, maybe other people feel like you
do. Imagine that.

If you want to hire talent, you need to pay for it. If you can't pay, then
it's no surprise. (Would you work for me for what you're offering to me to
work for you?) If you _won't_ pay, then you're not "desperate for talent", you
just have a _preference_ for cheap labor.

You're not entitled to a cheap labor pool just so you can live out your
personal aspirations to be a CEO. And I like how you expect other people to
pay for all that education and training they'll need.

~~~
bigboote
Only the top 1% of people (by creativity) are useful to creative companies.
People in the bottom 99% reduce productivity. So yes, creative companies all
need to compete for the top 1%.

~~~
chesser
That's the point.

Even if that top 1% gets bigger in absolute numbers, there will just be more
or bigger companies vying for them, so the problem never goes away.

Even if you magically boost everyone drastically so the average person of the
future is equivalent to the top person _now_ , imagine how big an advantage
the top 1% will _still_ have.

A company that can't get top people is simply not competing well enough in
terms of compensation of whatever sort.

An equivalent article could be written on the problems with _employers_ and
what they need to do to meet the requirements of the people they want to hire!

------
andre3k1
This has a very specific name in economics: structural unemployment.

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

To my surprise, the author made no use of that term.

Worth checking out the Wiki if your interested in reading more on the
phenomenon.

------
narrator
The per-pupil spending graph reminds me of the healthcare spending as a
percent of gdp graph. They are both symptoms of the very American ideology
that the only way to improve anything is to blindly spend more money on it.

~~~
tomjen3
I doubt that it is an American ideology - it seems to be something pretty much
everybody does.

~~~
wyclif
Yes, but speaking as a citizen of the USA, we spend the most with the least
progress to show for it.

~~~
tomjen3
Properly, but only because for generations you had the money to throw at the
problem - the US powerhouse used to be able to pay extra because it was the
economy on the planet that was in the best shape.

~~~
wyclif
We still have the money to throw at the problem. The real problem is that
throwing money at education =! better education.

------
motters
This article highlights something which I think will become a growing issue.
Higher education is becoming prohibitively expensive for many young people,
and often doesn't deliver (and isn't intended to deliver) the sort of training
which employers seem to want. There's a need for better and more accessible
vocational training, but at the same time a reluctance from government and
employers to get involved with it - both seeing it as someone else's
responsibility.

Probably this is an opportunity in disguise for some new kind of vocational
training system to emerge.

~~~
candre717
While it might be a new opportunity, I think there is too much lobbying in
Washington to protect the interest of the status quo and not the students'.
Education is a big money machine, and since there's enough groups and
individuals who want to keep it as is, it may very well stay as is.

We live in a world that has outgrown the current education system.

------
speby
Maybe offensive but this is perhaps the 12th or 13th article related to
income-inequality or Bush tax cuts that I've seen on HN in the past month or
two. Frankly, these articles are getting old and I'm seeing almost no new
perspectives. Most are written in a kind of, "this is unfair, let's do
something about it," tone and the authors rarely have any real basis for
understanding how wealth is created (or how the super wealthy sustained their
wealth or created such massive new wealth over the past 4 decades). It just
sort of gets old to read the same thing and then ultimately, read many of the
same righteous comments on here.

Any chance someone is open to some new politics topics instead of this and
healthcare?

How about abortion? Immigration maybe? Military spending? Education costs?
Unemployment and underemployment?

------
natrius
This is really just taking one person's (or one industry's) hiring issues and
painting them as the cause of the entire economy's problems. If you actually
ask businesses what their concerns are, slow sales come in way higher than a
low quality labor pool.

[http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/structural-
imped...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/structural-impediments/)

Yes, there are probably sectors that need more employees. Yes, there are
probably people whose old jobs have disappeared. That doesn't mean that
structural unemployment is necessarily a significant factor in the economy's
current problems, and there is considerable evidence to the contrary.

------
chubs
If everyone only wants to hire 'the best', the jobs market will soon end up
the way of the metaphorical bowl of jellybeans: only the aniseed ones left,
which nobody wants to eat. Why not employ people who aren't what you want
_yet_ , and, here's a thought: train them up!

------
zaphar
I've been thinking about some of this for a while. Someday I'd like to try an
experiment where companies ignored College education and up but recruited at
the High School level with the intention of taking someone from Intern to
Highly Skilled worker. Something like the apprenticeship model from the past.
In some ways I think College and Post-Grad education is overkill for some
careers and an apprenticeship/intern model would be superior.

Unfortunately I'm not the Founder/Entrepreneur type so I'm unlikely to ever
own my own company to try the program out in. Maybe I'll be able to convince
an employer to try it someday.

~~~
wyclif
I hear you, and you know I agree with you on this point, but the naysayers
(mostly employers, it seems) will shoot that down with, "We already know the
apprenticeship model works, but we can't afford to implement it in a culture
where the average American worker changes jobs every 6, 7, or 8 years.
Essentially we'd be training our competitors, and we can't afford that."

I myself have benefited greatly from the apprenticeship model-- up until very,
very recently (for example) there was no other way to become a land surveyor.
You had to actually apprentice, in the formal sense, with a licensed
professional to get on the career track and achieve the minimum level of years
of experience and then sit for the licensure exam.

~~~
prodigal_erik
Why is apprenticeship so prevalent for that profession, compared to others
which seem similar (at least to this outsider)? Is it the amount of hands-on
field work? The number of potential students to support a classroom?

~~~
wyclif
Because land surveying, educationally speaking, is a subset of civil
engineering. The amount of field work is part of it as well. You can't learn
how to conduct a property survey or boundary delineation without lots of field
work. The other reason is that civil engineering is extremely regulated
(another problem).

------
wheaties
You'd be surprised at what is being done in the government to reeducate
disabled and hurt soldiers. Some of the engineers at my company are working
with some 20 veterans who have no training in software. Unfortunately they're
being lead and managed by beaurocrats who also have no software experience.
It's so awesome to see the kinds of pratriotism displayed but in many things
government the effort/focus is in the wrong direction. They should have hired
software folk to train these guys and lead them.

------
reynolds
I'm not sure that I agree with the claim that retraining someone for a short
while can place that person at a similar level of mastery as his or her high-
tech peers. It may work for entry level positions. And even then they may not
have the same motivations as someone devoted to their craft.

------
skybrian
It's an opportunity for a business that can somehow put non-highly-skilled
people to work and make a profit doing it. But startups don't usually think
that way. Everyone wants to work at a place that sets a high bar for hiring.

------
pedanticfreak
If you can teach high school students to be decent programmers surely you can
teach a intelligent art history or English majors as well.

Solution: Hire anyone intelligent to do the job for a fraction of the pay.
They learn a new skill and you avoid paying a premium for hard to find skilled
workers. You also get fiercely loyal employees instead on entitlement filled
prima donnas.

~~~
aphexairlines
> "entitlement filled prima donnas."

Where is this coming from?

