Demand For Programmers Hits Full Boil as US Job Market Simmers (bloomberg.com) 272
When the American job market heats up, demand for technology talent boils, an anonymous reader writes citing a Bloomberg report. From the story: Nationally, the unemployment rate was 4.1 percent in January, and analysts project that it declined to 4 percent, the lowest since 2000, in Labor Department figures due Friday. For software developers, the unemployment rate was 1.9 percent in 2017, down from 4 percent in 2011. While companies are writing bigger checks, they are also adopting new strategies to find engineers for an economy where software is penetrating even mundane processes. Companies are focusing more on training, sourcing new talent through apprenticeships, and looking at atypical pools of candidates who have transferable skills.
"It is probably the most competitive market in the last 20 years that I have been doing this," said Desikan Madhavanur, chief development officer at Scottsdale, Arizona-based JDA Software, whose products help companies manage supply chains. "We have to compete better to get our fair share." What's happening in the market for software engineers may help illustrate why one of the tightest American labor markets in decades isn't leading to broader wage gains. While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
"It is probably the most competitive market in the last 20 years that I have been doing this," said Desikan Madhavanur, chief development officer at Scottsdale, Arizona-based JDA Software, whose products help companies manage supply chains. "We have to compete better to get our fair share." What's happening in the market for software engineers may help illustrate why one of the tightest American labor markets in decades isn't leading to broader wage gains. While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year.
And that demand will be high, forever.
Pay more and you get more. Pay this and what you get is code monkeys that couldn't find a better employer.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year.
And that demand will be high, forever.
Pay more and you get more. Pay this and what you get is code monkeys that couldn't find a better employer.
Sadly you're not joking. .NET came out in 2002. I remember looking for a job in 2003 and every job I looked at was asking for programmers with 5 to 10 years or more of .NET programming experience. ... it's no wonder some people embellish their resumes.
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Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem here is multi-layer. For one thing, HR drones cannot quantify quality with a metric that is not "X years of experience", so if you tell them "Find me an Excellent .NET Developer for this project!" what they hear is "Find me a Developer with 10 years of experience for this project." The pay of course is another aspect, the employers thing that everyone is desperate, and if they waste enough of your fucking time you will just take whatever they offer. And lastly, they always want some one proficient in their EXACT stack, which given number of Frontend x Backend x Database x IDE technologies limits their pool of candidates to a fraction. It is retarded for me to think that someone who knows one MVC framework cannot pick up another one in a week. A bicycle is a bicycle is a bicycle.
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Re:Correction (Score:5, Funny)
You're confusing them by using Roman numerals.
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Yes. I started working with .NET back in 1997 or 1998. It took a long time before the betas officially came out, and then another long time before 1.0 was officially released, so yes, by 2003 I had 5-6 years of experience with it, but not 10.
That said, yes, I've seen many requirements that are impossible to meet unless you were on the development team, or following the project before it was officially announced.
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Have worked with Microsoft technologies for 12 years, including .NET.
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I remember looking for a job in 2003 and every job I looked at was asking for programmers with 5 to 10 years or more of .NET programming experience. ... it's no wonder some people embellish their resumes.
To be fair, and not to be overly condescending or accusatory... you really should have seen what was coming and gotten that experience in before the technology was actually developed. Just because the technology doesn't exist is no excuse for not being experienced in it. If you're not able to work miracles then you're unlikely to have a successful career in software. Case in point: Zuckerberg has a website that isn't even good and he's basically God now.
No miracles: no salaries.
It's the software industry ma
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I remember looking for a job in 2003 and every job I looked at was asking for programmers with 5 to 10 years or more of .NET programming experience. ... it's no wonder some people embellish their resumes.
To be fair, and not to be overly condescending or accusatory... you really should have seen what was coming and gotten that experience in before the technology was actually developed. Just because the technology doesn't exist is no excuse for not being experienced in it. If you're not able to work miracles then you're unlikely to have a successful career in software. Case in point: Zuckerberg has a website that isn't even good and he's basically God now.
No miracles: no salaries.
It's the software industry mantra.
Thank you, and I did learn from my mistakes. I've already started learning COBOLscript, which is certain to replace JavaScript sometime in the next decade as the default client side language of the web.
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Time to get a low paid person from another nation to fill that job.
The "ads" had to be run for a set time in the US to legally show the position could not be filled.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
I have clients who struggle filling positions. When I inquire, I find it's never that there aren't applicants, just not applicants of sufficient quality. And in those cases, when I ask how much more they're offering for the position above market rates, they all look at me with bewilderment.
Also that unemployment rate? Manufactured horesehit. http://www.shadowstats.com/alt... [shadowstats.com]
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Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
It is old school business classes that taught them the way to be a successful manager is control costs, as if workers were just another ingredient to pour into a big machine that manufactures product.
If you really need someone with significant technical, "overpaying" them 20% does not matter, if the business is using their skills very effectively. Of course, that implicitly throws the responsibility on the managers.
They do not want to pay more probably because they suck at their jobs. In a real business, you pay, say, $1 million in salaries, $1 million in various business costs (rent, insurance, advertising, etc.), charge $3 million for your services and the business owner pockets $1 million in "profit" (which has to pay off the capital/investment costs to create the business in the first place). In this context, arguing over whether your salary costs are $1.00 million or $1.02 million, when you need to pay a little extra to hire key people the whole business running well, is pretty idiotic.
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Overpaying someone 100% doesn't matter if that person is worth it. If a person costs me 10k a month and makes me 50, paying him 20k is STILL better than losing him.
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1) How many of those companies say 'Ok we're going to offer more pay than any other company in an attempt to lure someone who is better', and
2) How many of those companies try to add a benefit, such as working from home, in an attempt to find something better, and
3) How much thinking 'outside of the box' is there at all? It seems most companies see that other companies are paying $X for skill Y so they offer $X for skill Y. If you're not exceeding the market you're not using the market prop
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Plus a PhD, black belt in at least one martial art and ideally a Pisces or Capricorn.
LBGT^2 preferred.
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Nah, we just didn't give the job to you, because of your crappy and entitled attitude.
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Please do.
I'll take the man when you're done hiring. He'll probably get cheaper that way, too.
Diversity, it's awesome. Especially if others have to do it.
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The only demand I'm seeing is for H1Bs and diversity hires. Sure they're are plenty of *ads* for jobs, but 99.9% of those are put there by recruiters with no actual jobs available for non-H1Bs/non-females/non-minorities, or mandatory posts for jobs where they already have someone in particular in mind (usually an H1B). AFAICT, there are very few actual jobs available for U.S. citizens, especially if you're a white male (who can't check off any diversity quotas) or outside of a few select cities that no one
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Looking for jobs in Europe there are plenty, and they seem more than interesting in non-female non-minority candidates.
Is the US really that bad? Have you considered a formal complaint on the grounds of discrimination?
Re:Correction (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it really isn't that bad. I am a 40 something white male programmer and I know many other 40 something white male programmers and none of them are having trouble getting a job, none of them are getting passed up for hiring or promotion by women or minorities. I suspect the people who complain about it are either just really twisted around and unable to see that they are also not having trouble getting hired and promoted, or they just really aren't as competent as they think they are.
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We literally just hired a guy who's probably around 55, I haven't asked because I don't care. All I care about is can he code and he can.
I have no doubt that as we get older our ability to keep up with new technology becomes more difficult; or maybe we become too impatient to learn the new stuff. Either way, I'm planing my finances in a way that if I found myself unemployable at age 55 then I'll be able to retire, or more likely work part time doing something else that I love. I make plenty of money now so
Re:Correction (Score:4, Interesting)
If I had a company I'd hire 55+ people that have good references. They tend to have stable lives and are regular and predictable in their work. At 55 they aren't suddenly going to have children and completely change their focus and work output like someone who is 30.
If I have a lot of work to get done, and work that never really ends. Then I'd take the dependable farm horse rather than the young racing thoroughbred.
If I have 6 months for my start up to make or break. Then hiring energetic college kids makes some sense, if only initially.
Though I'm pretty old school compared to the trends in tech companies. I think it is beneficial to hire both junior and experienced people. The junior people learn from the senior people. The senior people get exposure to exchange fresh ideas. And strengths of both can be used while weakness are covered in a complimentary way.
PS - sort of related thought... What's insane are the big companies that want to pretend they are just like the startups. Trust me, being a startup sucks sometimes. It's a big disadvantage not having the financial resources to get the stuff you need, or the time to do it right the first time. Having a focus to do exactly one thing in a short amount of time is what a startup is good at. That doesn't scale correctly to a place like Facebook or Google.
Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
If only minorities were getting hired, then there would probably be a lot more minorities in the tech sector.
The real problem is that tech companies want to pay programmers blue collar wages. This is why their push for minorities to learn programming is no more than an attempt to saturate the market with skilled programmers to depress wages. H1B workers are another method to do this.
I'm telling my kids to stay the hell away from programming unless they couple it with some other specialty, like biology. Programming by itself just isn't special anymore. If you want to do something worthwhile (both financially and personally) with it, you have to be able to pair it with another discipline. No one's going to pay someone a lot to develop a silly iPhone game or create a simple retail POS.
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"Programming" is a huge field. Some types are very well paid and in demand, some are not.
My friend is doing front end Javascript. Apparently demand is huge and he is raking it in. I know, front end Javascript of all things. But he says back end guys are ten a penny. He used to do it himself but front end pays twice as much.
There is also the question of quality. In embedded stuff there are a lot of electrical engineers who write a bit of code too. They can do okay firmware for simple stuff, but if you want a
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That's a bit far-fetched, considering that the average wage for a programmer [indeed.com] is 3x the average blue collar wage [indeed.com]. What a job is worth depends on how much productivity it generates. An employer will be willing to pay up to slightly less than the productivity generated by a jo
Re: Correction (Score:3)
It's actually the employee's job to do their job; not negotiate salaries. In a reasonable and balanced world, a professional class would handle all the negotiation for the productive laborers. This already happens at the top end (exectutives and media stars). The rest of us simply can't afford fair representation.
one more thing (Score:3)
must be able to work 60-80 hours a week
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Salary pay of course.
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Willingness to travel to customer location, own car required...
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Re:Correction (Score:5, Insightful)
What is in high demand is coders that know how use their code to actually do something else.
I almost exclusively write code at work and I'm a mechanical engineer. The code is just a means to an end. A way to do something that we did 10 or 20 years ago faster. Expecting to get a job just knowing how to program is like trying to get a job just knowing how to swing a hammer.
All of the jobs I've found are like that. My last position was $60/hr, teleworking. There was no 'coding test'. The languages I know appear on one line in my resume. In the on-site interview they were never brought up. It is just treated like "MS Office" is on my resume.
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I've seen that as well. For the past 20 years, I've been to job interviews where the companies give out programming tests and explain it is because the graduates coming out of the universities don't know what pointers are, how to implement linked lists or even how C++ destructors. They then require that various positions require a degree in medical imaging or fluid dynamics.
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Correct, too. I do know a fairly large selection of programming languages pretty well, but that never comes up in interviews either. It's basically the requirement. You wouldn't ask a truck driver if he can drive stick or a accountant whether he can calculate. You simply assume they can because it's a basic requirement for the job.
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What is in extremely high demand is programmers with 20 years of experience in a technology that has been around for 5, no older than 19 and working for 20k a year.
On top of that, demand for programmers with 10+ years of experience, with 3+ years of experience in some technology that has been around for 5, and the ability to communicate with developers, users, department VPs, and C-level execs, is incredibly high right now. High enough to push total compensation over $200k even in Midwest markets. When companies say they want more programmers, they tend to either want the low paid code monkeys you mention, or the senior devs / architects I mentioned. The demand for an
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What is always in demand, and well paid, is people who excel in more than just "programming" or "IT stuff". You can make insane amounts of money if you manage to combine legal with IT or financial auditing and IT.
Banks have deep pockets...
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If supply really demand (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:If supply really demand (Score:4, Interesting)
I've demanded to be allowed to work from home for the last 8 years with an occasional few days a month in the office and gotten it.
bob suck up jay our h1b works 80 with no time off (Score:2)
bob suck it up jay our h1b works 80 with no time off. Jays has some friends who will replace you for less.
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Pussy.
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Re:If supply really demand (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks to Obamacare, in civilized states, everyone pays the same price for insurance regardless of pre-existing status.
BZZT! Bullshit.
My 33 year old daughter pays 10x as much as her siblings because of her pre-existing condition. The law says you can't be turned down because of a pre-existing condition, but it says nothing about being able to afford what is offered
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Dang, just ran out of mod points. This rates a rare AC mod, IMO.
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Re: If supply really demand (Score:3)
Lick those boots!
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Re:If supply really demand (Score:5, Insightful)
If they would only lift the age cap... (Score:5, Insightful)
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If the market is so good for developers, why do very good programmers in their 60s, who have current skills, have such a hard time finding work?
Because they are all universally white, male, and tend to be conservative.
Re:If they would only lift the age cap... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Because hiring managers... (Score:5, Insightful)
... are quite often clueless gimps in their 20s and 30s who don't understand the skills older people can bring - above and beyond years of coding experience - and assume they're slower and dumber than someone in their 20s who's all enthusiam but doesn't have much of a clue.
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If the market is so good for developers, why do very good programmers in their 60s, who have current skills, have such a hard time finding work?
It's a good question. I can give you some answers.
1) Their experience, although good, is in older technology instead of the current flavor of the day that will itself be considered antiquated in a few more years.
2) Often they live in small towns and the only shop that needed them closed. They aren/t willing to move to larger cities where they might find work, so they stay where they are and there simply aren't any other local employers who need their skills.
3) As someone else said they tend to be
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Re:If they would only lift the age cap... (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they don't have current skills. I work with these 60 yo programmers and can't get rid of them soon enough. They learned one niche skillset in the 80s and never learned anything again.
They're plumbers that insist on only using lead pipe instead of PVC, Copper or PEX or electricians that insist on using knob and tube.
Their skillsets were top notch when what they knew was relevant. They played the waiting game of thinking they would make it to retirement before having to learn something new.
Look at how much whining occurs when Rust, Go or Python shows up on Slashdot.
Sure they are. That's why we keep getting called back to work after we retire. There wasn't one millenial hired at my work that knew more than me about anything we did. They thought they did, but us olde fartes put that notion to rest pretty quickly.
They were hella good at social media though.
There are some oldsters who don't keep up. Just the same as there are noobs who want a promotion to management based on their coming in on time for a week. But that olde farce who's been there over 30 years doesn't keep his or her job by being obsolete.
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That's why we keep getting called back to work after we retire
The intersection of those getting rehired after retirement and those that can't find a job at all is probably zero.
But that olde farce who's been there over 30 years doesn't keep his or her job by being obsolete.
Sure they do. Just like we keep old machines around. Sometimes it's just easier to wait them out to retirement than get rid of them.
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Up-Or-Out Promotion System Hurts The Military (Score:2)
Up-Or-Out Promotion System Hurts The Military and it's the same for technical work.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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There really is a 4th option:
Small companies who wants to get by with the smallest cost with large returns. That's where I usually shine. I have some skills that are top notch, but what I really bring to the table most often is aligning projects with actual company needs. Balancing getting it done quickly with highly maintainable code that works every time. That usually means not using the latest and greatest languages that haven't fully matured yet, or don't have a good support system when you need to
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One other option:
State/Federal work. - Your work isn't valued, nothing gets done, the pay is shit, but the perks make up for that. You can be 100% incompetent at programming and will never get fired because the amount of paperwork to start the process to replace you, isn't worth the effort.
Small tasks requiring 1 programmer will take years as the higher-ups change design specs daily, and more and more people are thrown into the dev team until the original program has been twisted so badly it now has it's ow
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You can always find a good path (Score:3)
Your comment is just the right kind of insight and cynicism. Lots of truth here. So is a career in software development not worth it in the long run?
There is a lot of truth to what is being said here, but like any humor is presents an over the top scenario ... in reality you can find many companies that are decent to work for, especially as another poster noted small to mid size businesses that are not start ups (say 20-100 employees). They are great if you really know what you are doing, because you can h
You still can't get a job without a degree (Score:2)
Ding! (Score:5, Interesting)
While technology firms are looking at compensation, they are also finding ways to create the supply of workers themselves, which helps hold costs down.
And this is why the bosses (as opposed to the usually sincere workers) at Google, Microsoft, etc. are all behind these "teach every person on Earth to code" programs.
I'm sorry if little Suzy doesn't want to code, but we need her to help keep down programmer salaries.
Re:Ding! (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sorry if little Suzy doesn't want to code, but we need her to help keep down programmer salaries.
What's more disgusting is that they pretend to be feminist heroes for trying to steer all these young girls into STEM even if they don't want to. They try to scare parents, insisting that those are the only jobs of the future and little Suzy will be left behind if she pursues her liberal arts dreams. I don't think women should be discouraged from programming, but I also don't believe they should do it if they're not really passionate about it. If you don't find math fun and interesting, programming isn't for you. It's time consuming and difficult, and it's a waste of time to cram it into every student's curriculum when only a fraction of them will actually use it.
Ideally, elementary schools should teach deductive and inductive logic. Those skills translate into everything: math, programming, argumentative writing, scientific inquiry, etc.
fake news (Score:4, Insightful)
We'll know demand for programmers is up when salaries start rising for the first time in 15 years.
2001, a Bubble Odyssey (Score:5, Insightful)
It smells too similar to the dot-com bubble for comfort. During the height of the dot-com bubble, co's didn't pay that well because they gave you stock options instead of big salaries as a signing bonus. And when the bubble popped, the market was flooded with programmers such that jobs were hard to find, at least on the west coast. Therefore, you had no savings because you got stock options that are now worthless, and you had no job. My legacy language experience was the only thing that saved me, and barely.
One could say "this time is different", but they also said that during the height of mortgage bubble, in terms of comparing that to the dot-com bubble. The reasoning was that homes had concrete value while dot-coms didn't. Didn't matter: the mortgage bubble created the second worse econ slump on record.
They are saying similar about AI: it's different from the AI bubble of the 80's because real and common products rely on AI now. That may be true, but as mortgages showed, that's not enough. And even if you are not in AI, an AI pop could affect rank and file IT because unemployed AI experts will flood non-AI IT job openings.
It may indeed be "different this time": a different path to misery. The only consistency is that if it smells bubbly, it probably is. The only real uncertainty is the size and scope of the poppage. Keep a rainy-day fund, people.
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The part that really worries me is the reliance on unqualified developers. This was very much the case during the dotcom bubble. There was so much investment money floating around, it didn't matter if 5, 10, 30% of your software developers were barely useful. Know html tags? You're hired!
It's not quite this bad now, but we still have a huge influx of people who can barely copy paste from stack overflow to make things "work" (until they don't). They rely on the few experienced devs in the team to clean after
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it comes down to compensation (Score:2)
Dear editors, (Score:2)
"Demand Hits Full Boil as Job Market Simmers"?
Please change the subhead to "from the tortured-metaphors dept".
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Re:Just ask yourself one question. (Score:4)
Mcdonalds workers are underpaid. No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country
Well, they certainly don't have a right to expect top notch people. Before I retired, I could do every job in our department. I could do it as well as the people who did it for their regular job. I'd put the time in and do the hard and odd jobs too. Some of the men were "job description" only, and almost none of the women would work overtime or travel. And they were all afraid to deal with the suits. So I'd pick up the slack.
Which is exactly why I was paid 3 times as much. If a person is competent enough and has the drive, they will do well.
People my age who thought I was some sort of suck-up or company man will have put in an extra twenty-four thousand hours by the time they retire - if they get to retire at the normal retirement age. That's 67 in my case - I retired at 55. Do good work, and be rewarded.
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The business was based on the model that college or high-school students could earn a bit of cash working part time or during the holidays. They weren't meant to become the one-company town employer.
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Mcdonalds workers are underpaid. No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country
When my kids get their first part-time job as a teenager, I'm not expecting them to earn enough to live on. It should give them spending money, help them pay for car insurance, etc. And more importantly, the job should give them some experience working -- dealing with managers, coworkers, and customers who they may not like, showing up to work whether they feel like it or not, and doing what needs to be done even if it's not precisely in their job description. And it should probably be unpleasant enough
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but that quickly ends when costs catch up.
Seattle. When the $15/hr wage law was passed, landlords started raising their rents. Never mind that pay would take a couple of years to reach the specified level. people caught in that pinch are now living under bridges.
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No, the constant whining that they can't find people shows that we're underpaid. The managerial class would rather suppress wages than get work done.
And why not? They just want to replace other workers with automated processes so it can wait until they find someone cheap who can barely pull it off.
Then they put that they saved the company a bazillion dollars by managing software as a chief executive project program manager architect and move into another management position at some other company before s
Re:Not for engineers (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a software engineer and I'm seeing much of a demand.
Maybe it's because you write buggy code that contains a lot of inverted logic errors.
Pipefitting (Score:2)
They fit the same as anything else. Unless you're using a proportional font.
programming and IT should be more trades like (Score:2)
programming and IT should be more trades like with unions
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Tech is over for white males, only H1B Indians and Afirmative Action women get in. Been this way since after the dot com bust.
That's bull. I live in a city that is 2/3rds minorities. My coworkers: Mostly white men, a couple of Asians who are also citizens of this country. Not one person on an H1B visa.