"Dig into" a two-paragraph blurb? Instead of looking at raw BLS statistics? Uh-oh...

Why are there so many people out there who can’t find jobs for a long period of time? [...]The simple answer is: Those who want a job, don’t have the tech skills that companies want.

Wat? No. This is head-spinning interpolation backed by zero real data.

People are unemployed because we're experiencing a significant structural economic shift, not because these people have "generic business" skills (wow, what a hand-wavey statement). Domestic manufacturing has been hit hardest, so those with double-digit years of manufacturing experience have had their responsibilities outsourced to other countries unless they're (a) building aircraft, or (b) working on specialized, highly-precise, machine-produced parts.

This is a great example of the tech-obsessed writing produced by the startup craze. Does anyone really believe people are unemployed because they can't code, given that software makes up less than 5% of our GDP? [0]

I can't believe this type of self-congratulatory pseudo-economic article hits the front page of HN. What a load of crap.

[0] See Table 3 of the latest BEA GDP release. Look for "information processing equipment & software" on Table 3, compare to the level of GDP in 2012q1:

http://bea.gov/newsreleases/national/gdp/2012/pdf/gdp1q12_2n...

We techies have it good right now but don't fool yourself into believing the party will last forever.

How true. Over time various careers become the hot thing to do and then fade. I remembered it happened with nursing at one point. I know of a cardiologist that had a difficult time because that specialty had attracted talent and the supply and demand became out of wack.

With all the attention on learning to code over the past few years as well as the money that is being made by the outliers the competition will increase to the point where salaries will drop.

Build in the gluts when you've got 200 resumes to choose from.

There are positions that took us 6-12 months of full time interviewing to staff. Finding good engineers is hard.

And this is the real problem in the tech industry if you are looking for a job. Unlike other industries, there are no externalities forcing companies to hire a poorer employee.

Speaking as a farmer, there the job has to be done on time, no matter what. If not, the food will spoil, or the animal will die, or what have you. I see other farmers offering pretty decent wages (around $50/hr) for skilled talent. If you're not skilled, you will be paid closer to minimum wage because your contributions end up costing more to the farmer. But the job has to be done, so in the absence of skilled labour, which is hard to find, you pick the unskilled labour and do your best to make it work.

In tech, as you've highlighted, it doesn't really matter if the job gets done and is often better if not done at all, if it was going to be done poorly. If it takes a year for the very best to become available, it is worth the wait. This puts us in a situation where only the top N% of talent is employable, no matter how many have a degree of skill necessary to do the job.

  *When talking machines that cost half a million dollars*

All for a piece of equipment used 3-4 weeks out of the year.

New tractors are running around $150-$250K. Even 30+ year old tractors with good hours on them run about $27-30K at auction.

Some ag dealership labor rate for repair will make you wish you were paying car dealership rates.

Having a commercial applicator's license (herbicide/pesticide).

Trained implement mechanic.

Certified manure applicator (for commercial manure applicators and certain classes of confinement operators, and different from the commercial applicator license aforementioned).

Guys with welding skills can get more also.

I've hated for years how words lose some of their original meaning/intent. "benefits" is one. A "benefit" of working at XYZ company is that you get ABC handed to you at no charge. Fair enough. But when all jobs (in particular fields) come with 'benefits', there's no 'benefit' any more. I dunno - the word just bugs me. Oh, maybe it's because it's not a 'benefit' - it's just something that they're providing to you, whether you want it or not. More often than not, it's not a 'benefit' to me or my family.

"Scholarship" is another one - having "athletic scholarships" seems an oxymoron, but that's for another day...

Yes, your 'benefits' packages don't matter to me. Not really. Not much. Matching 401k contributions are nice, but often they're restricted to some lame company with too-high fees and poor choice of investment options. Healthcare? Currently, I can get it for half what most companies are paying, and personally, I think the continued involvement of employers in providing healthcare insurance is distorting the market way out of whack.

So... sell me on the dream. Tell me that your vision and ability to execute on that - and where you see me in your company's execution of that vision and we'll talk.

Hint: "Looking for senior PHP developer to work on our Magento store! $75k plus foosball table and weekly movies with the team and XBox in the office!" isn't it.

Similarly, benefits like Dental, Medical, etc especially if you've got a family means less risk and money in your pocket if it's paid for and you have a great plan. While it would, of course, be better to just get "straight cash homey" and try to deal with it yourself I would argue that benefits are still a signficant factor in the job decision process.

As for the foosball table et al - that's more a cultural thing and less a direct benefit in my mind.

That said - totally agree that benefits are secondary to the dream and the vision of the company as a part of one's decision.

Similarly, I've never known anyone to take or refuse a job based on a comparison of dental plans or vision plans or medical plans. They're sometimes nice side perks, but if I like the company/job/position, I'm taking it. If I don't like it, the fact that they have a better dental plan than where I'm currently at is a non-factor for probably almost everyone who'd be in that position.

tl;dr - I've never known anyone take or refuse a job because of any specifics in a benefits package.

How many people do you know with families, or with serious health conditions? Differences in benefits can make a real difference in cost-of-living if anyone in your family falls outside the "healthy 20-something with no chronic issues" bracket.

It may be hard to see these people in the startup world, because they often steer clear of even speaking to companies that can't provide these benefits.

I've known people who've taken jobs with benefits vs jobs without benefits. But I've never known someone comparing two jobs and saying "well, this one has a $500 deductible and this other one has $1000 deductible, but the first one also has 2% matching vested over 4 years, and the second one has 4% matching vested over 3 years, so I'll go to job X".

And if you're bringing any smarts to the table, you know what conditions you're especially at risk for, too, so presumably you do pick the insurance plan that is most likely to protect you from catastrophic financial losses.

(And if you make less than the tech industry usually does - say, only $25K a year - that $1000 deductible sure is a lot more expensive than the $500 one)

Many jobs have health insurance, and thus "benefits". Many health insurances are rather picky with what they do/don't cover. If you claim that only "insurance that covers what I need covered, at a price I deem acceptable", can be called a "benefit", then sure, your mention is valid.

It's also a pointless statement.

* health benefits - You'd think that'd be covered in Canada, but you still need coverage for stuff like dental, prescriptions, and what not. It's surprising how many It companies DON'T offer any form of this at all. * vacation time - two weeks is nice, but if you want to attract a top shelf candidate, offer three or even four. Being able to enjoy a week away from the office is worth more then the all the free pop in the fridge.

NOw I'm not saying that I'd be against having free pop in the fridge of what not, but there nice IF those benefits that I've listed are provided in a substantial quantity. Have 100% coverage and four weeks and IMO you'd have qualified candidates knocking on your door right quick.

For the first time in the history of civilization, people are starting their own business.

Might be worth pointing out that before the rise of manufacturing in large scale with assembly lines &c casual work was normal. Not much in the way of benefits or security.

In retrospect, I realize now that they absolutely could have been "real", I just didn't quite get it. This simple realization is also a huge factor, and more young people seem to be realizing it than ever before. I remember pg pointed out in an essay that when you open the cage door to an animal that has been in captivity for a long time, it takes a while for it to realize it can come and go.

I'd say both technology and pure social adjustment to change have both been factors in the last 10 years. While I could have gotten server space and made my apps real in 2000 (and plenty of people certainly did!), it is easier now from a technical and cost perspective than it was a 10-15 years ago.

But the biggest change may be social and just have a lot to do with latency - a higher percentage of young graduate people with very little to lose are now aware that they don't need permission to create and release an app simply because it takes a while for social patterns to shift after a technical breakthrough (and this sort of thing can spread like a (benign!) virus, really picking up steam). This, combined with a considerable drop in price and increase of availability, could qualify a kind of paradigm shift, even if the technology has only changed by degree.

Disagree. It's cheaper than it was in 1997 or 1967, sure, but I don't think it's cheaper than "ever before". For one thing, time is becoming more expensive, if one looks at costs like rent, health insurance, long-term career opportunity cost, and business risk (competitors advancing, unexpected change) imposed by the passage of time. Desirable real estate is insanely expensive, and that drives up everything, especially the cost of hiring people. Cities in which VC is an option are especially expensive: rent alone is more than many people make after taxes.

It's easier to build a CRUD-app than a chip factory, for sure, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. The right comparison might be a restaurant or a gas station in an area with extremely low real estate costs and regulatory overhead... in a time like 1928, when startup costs for brick-and-mortar businesses were very low by today's standards.

The percentage of people who can reliably start a business at scale X for various values of X has changed, but not a whole lot, over the past 100 years. What has changed in the scale range for internet businesses; businesses at smaller X's can now be delivered over the internet, which wasn't the case 20 years ago.

You get to a point where you increasingly can take on responsibility but the relative upside is no longer commensurate with the increasing value you are adding to the company. On top of it you inevitably start to become at odds with your employer in that as your abilities expand you wonder why you work for the person above you.

I guess from my perspective, its become apparent to me that moving up is generally a fools game at a certain point while "moving out" is the real version of moving up. I'm not going to say that taking that step of being independent is easy in that I'm still working on it myself but its hard for me to get excited about that next promotion these days no matter what perks it comes with.

Increasingly, you see super smart late-20s–early-30s professionals, with five or six years of solid domain-expertise, teaching themselves to code. They start using their programming knowledge to solve big problems and generally kick ass. Sounds great, right?

The problem: it's much better politics for the leadership to stuff these forward-thinkers into the lower castes, take credit for all their awesome work, and poach all their wisdom by proxy. Few entrenched managers will admit that "the help" has become the master. Moving out is the only way for these new hybrid-pros to move up.

(Thank your deity for YC, etc.)

Maybe someday we'll see accountants, medical doctors, civil engineers, researchers from all over science with a double major or mixed major (I think those are the correct US terms).

Also, a double degree with business knowledge as well (more general), kind of what programmers turn MBAs do, or the various Management of Technology degrees.

Up until the dot-com boom of the late-'90s, this was the preferred degree for many corporate IT departments. In fact, the CFO was head of IT/MIS in many companies up until the mid-/late-90s.

Other hybrids are bioinformatics and cognitive science/computing.

However, I think external sourcing for leadership positions is more politically risky in the long-term. First, people can get a sense that it's impossible to move up. Second, the new CTO or VP/Eng is going to bring other people in with whom he has pre-existing relationships, those people will be regarded as presumptive favorites... and then the transplants along with those they invite into their clique become the new faction. You can't solve a factionalism problem with external promotions; it tends to create new ones.

Awfully simplistic & authoritative conclusion based on very little data.

The time over which an employment gap is a liability increases dramatically as a function of the size of the gap. At 0-3 months, it's near zero because that's a typical interval between jobs. At 3-6 months, it's about a year (which means it doesn't matter if you hold the next job for that long). At 6-12 months, it's about 2 years; at 12-24, it's 5 years or more. A 99-week employment gap is just too damaging for slacking off to make any economic sense.

There are a lot of people in Williamsburg (and, presumably, every other hipster enclave) who fit that bill. They're "trust fund kids", but most TF kids are only moderately wealthy ($1-3m) and will need to step it up in middle age if they want to keep up their lifestyles. They have no idea how hard it will be after 5-8 years of drug use, partying, and generally wasting whatever intellectual sharpness they had in college. They also have no concept of what it means (and how bad a position it is) to be competing with fresh 22-year-olds for entry level jobs after wasting nearly a decade.

"Why is hiring so tough? Because talented people don’t need you anymore. They don’t need the benefits because they know if worse comes to worse, they will find a comfy job. The options are there for them, therefore the risk of starting their own company isn’t an all or nothing deal."

While this has been true for years, I think, more than ever, talented and driven people are realizing that a comfy career isn't an aspiration but a fallback.

As a society, we need to have a serious conversation about what to do with the millions of undereducated and low/moderately skilled workers who are simply losing jobs to technology, business process improvement, and productivity gains. Becoming techies isn't the answer, but focusing on moving more workers towards a "creation" based style of employment might be a reasonable start. A move toward local agriculture, a rise in trades and craftsmanship instead of overseas production, a re-examination of the wages and requirements for critical service industries like primary education and healthcare...that is where I'd focus energy instead. No, we don't need 190 million coders, but we could use more teachers, more nurses, more good plumbers, more people making high quality goods domestically, and a lot more people growing food that isn't shipped halfway across the planet or covered in a bioengineered chemical soup.

I need a share in a company, more than just benefits, and I need to believe in what they are doing...not just creating more and more re-skinned sites and crud like that. I also need more freedom. Do I sound demanding? Maybe, but the fact is I can demand this expectation right now. Because I could easily go start my own freelance dev shop if I wanted too...

It always bugs we when people don't know that "who's" is grammatically equivalent to "whose"

those who want to quit -> quits -> happy!

those who want a job -> takes the emptied position -> happy!

First, hyperspecialization. Instead of a "programming" career we have back-end, front-end, embedded, machine learning/data science, and many other silos to the career, and people are expected to be "at level" (i.e. as good as a typical person of their age and experience) in the specific silo for which they're applying. We have a zillion active languages and database technologies and web frameworks. People who choose the right specialty are in high demand. People who don't, or who fail to specialize, are more likely to lose out. When you see a two-sided scarcity problem, that's usually what's happening: a mismatch between sought skills and what is available on the market.

This is good and bad. Divergence is when exploration happens (people move away from Java and C++ to Python, Ocaml, Scala, Ruby, Haskell... and find out what works well and what doesn't) and convergence is when they move back, hopefully to better mainstays (in PL, Scala and Clojure are the front-runners; it's obvious that dysfunctional programming in the style of Java-esque AbstractVisitorHandlerFactoryFactory patterns is over) than those that were in the mainstream before. People do eventually get sick of having to change tech stacks every time they take a new job. Convergence sets in at some point, and it will, soon. We're late in a divergent phase. Both divergent and convergent phases are necessary and healthy. When we move into a convergent phase, it's going to be easier for typical programmers to find matching jobs (a reduced "curse of dimensionality" as there are fewer dimensions of variation) but some specialties are going to dry up.

Second, short job tenures. Another factor for which both sides are to blame. There are "job hoppers" out there who seek a new environment and a pay raise every 9 months, and there are companies that fire rashly, or that do such a bad job of mentoring their employees that anyone sane will leave in 6 months. Job fluidity is good to a point, but it's passed the optimal point. Now it's in a vicious cycle: an environment of short job tenures discourages companies from investing in their people, which leads to high turnover. Some startups welcome turnover with the self-satisfied and cultish belief that those who leave "weren't good enough" but that just shows a lack of introspection to a degree that's irresponsible. Extremely high turnover is just bad.

Third and most importantly, we need to handle the education problem. We will see technological convergence and increasing job tenures for macroeconomic reasons... to a point. However, technological change is going to remain rapid and continuing education is going to stop being a luxury (for programmers and in general) in no more than 10 years. People will need to access educational resources continually in order to direct their career growth, and they'll need some way to prove they've mastered skills necessary for the transitions they need to make.

The best solution for this problem, for a forward-thinking company, is to drop to 3-4 days of metered work (for most jobs) and require people to pursue some kind of education in the other 1-2 days/week. That reduces unemployment of the "not enough work to go around" sort, and it reduces the friction caused by mismatches in experience. That said, I've seen "20% time" type programs, as wonderful as they are in intention, fail more often than they succeed. Google's 20%T is only used by about 10% of engineers because there's absolutely no anti-retaliation insurance (i.e. managers can punish employees in performance reviews for taking 20%T and employees have no recourse, which means, in effect, that employees only really have it if the manager wants them to have it). Building a robust 20%T program is really not easy.

Tuition reimbursement is a good policy, but people rarely use it because it requires them to plan in ways that most professionals simply can't. How many people can predict that they won't face a badly-timed drop-everything production crisis or other hourage spike over a 15-week semester? Very few. The solution is going to have to be more asynchronous than the typical university schooling model, but also more open and self-directed than most in-house corporate training.

These exist in all industries because there is too little growth for young employees who stay at a company for any time, even if loved and show promise.

Too true. So many companies, even younger ones, hold onto some stupid concept of paying your dues. Even the "great" companies give the employees who contribute 10x as much a 20% raise instead of a 10% raise...and that's AFTER a bunch of political bullshit to make sure you get recognized. Seriously? That's why even a tiny bit of effort to go out of your way to reward great people can have outsized returns...because nobody does it!

At most places there is just no concept of rewarding people according to how much they contribute. That's why talented people have to move all the time, because of stupid institutions that think a moderate increase in compensation is adequate for a massive increase in value. Ugh.

My current employer is actually really good about this, but so many places fail so completely they make me gnash my teeth in rage.

</rant>

20 years ago you would occasionally here about someone who got a raise or promotion, relatively speaking. Nowadays you are connected and aware of what all your friends are doing and how they are moving on up in life. That easy ability to compare yourself with others:

e.g. "I graduated with Bob and I know I'm as good as him, if not better. Why aren't are moving up as quickly as him? Maybe I should demand a raise or look elsewhere for work if they don't appreciate me like Bob's employer appreciates him"

We today are also far more aware of when friends and colleagues change jobs so people perceive that changing jobs is a frequent occurrence and therefore change jobs more often, which then furthers the perception of job changing frequency in others. It's a virtuous or vicious cycle depending on what side you're on.

Yes, it is more visible what's going on in associates lives, however, real wages for young workers are declining in absolute purchasing power.

The lack of high responsibility positions opening up from lack of top of the workforce people retiring is not helping this issue any.

The one thing I particularly like about the startup world is this rare focus on hiring the best and creating an environment that shows you value employees. One of the easiest ways to determine whether a company is a candidate hopper is to see how the quality of life is at the company. If it is low, it means that they aren't trying hard enough in general to try to keep people around.

At that point, it's up to your employer how they want to proceed (re-education, termination, etc).

It wouldn't have to take the form of classes. It could be some sort of relevant side project or open-source work.

On the other hand, those who do want to further their skills will not stop even if they are already working overtime, have a family with kids, or perhaps even personal side projects.

Sure, but they don't grow nearly as fast... and for many, not fast enough to meet the demands of the marketplace.

"The simple answer is: Those who want a job, don’t have the tech skills that companies want. It’s simple supply & demand. Their skills are generic business & have no coding / technical background. "

to read:

"The simple answer is: Those who want a job, don’t have the tech degrees and years of tech experience that companies want. It’s simple supply & demand."

Anyone can learn how to code.  Anyone can learn how to code well.  The problem is learning technically skills would help you do a new job, but they wouldn't help you get one.  Minimum requirements include tech degrees and years of technical experience in the field.  Having project work helps, but if you can't meet the minimum requirements on experience and degrees, then it doesn't matter what your technical skills actually are.  There are a small handful of companies that make an exception to this tradition, but as it turns out I would say they make up less than .01% of employers (of course this is a ballpark estimate, based on my personal experience, but I would invite anyone to pick out major employer that fits this category and is actively hiring).  

I also agree with michaelochurch regarding technical silos and just bad employer expectations in general.

20% of the labour force hold 80% of the skills and the perfect jobs. The remaining 80% battle it out or give up.

Now the numbers aren't exact and there are exceptions, but with challenges like this you need to adapt. This may mean entrepreneurship or taking a job you don't like or job benefits.

It's not ideal but balancing reality against the dream is hard work.

What really struck a chord with me is the graphic that said Entrepreneurs want blood. There's something primal about closing a deal, it feels like hunting.

There's no hunt on the cube farm, just plowing the fields and planting crops. Grain doesn't taste like meat, and farmed meat doesn't taste like game.