You see this in other trades also. The company complaining is not offering a market wage.
I remember a story about how in Denver a CNC company was having trouble hiring journeyman machinists. Well Denver is almost as expensive to live in as California and the offer was for 50 to 60k...
This is self-evidently true in all cases and I really don't get how some people can't get this.
Here in the UK we have a perpetual doctor shortage, except that we don't, because young doctors are worked to the bone in incredibly stressful environments in what seems to be a "paying your dues" model so that you can possibly, maybe earn the fat consultant money that older doctors get on their way to retirement. My understanding is that most leave for better money and living conditions in places like Australia. They exist, they just opt-out.
In the UK, independent software contractors are vilified pretty regularly, and there's often a lot of learn-to-code pushes because there's a perceived shortage. Maybe some of those people could just learn-to-medicine instead and solve both problems.
The "paying your dues" model is also strong in the US, particularly in our manufacturing sector. I work ancillary to the machinst population (as the guy they call when their machines break, basically), and most of thee guys are so gaslit about "paying your dues" that they won't take all their vacation time because they don't want to be perceived as the lazy guy in the shop. In the sane line, senior workers will berate younger newcomers for not knowing anything, rationalizing it by proclaiming they are self-taught, and the suffering brings discipline. After all, the senior workers believe they had to suffer at that age, so everyone else should, right? The who manufacturing population in the US is low on critical thinking, and thus ripe for all kinds of abuse.
Factory owners understand and exploit this. In one such instance that I found frightening, a shop I was visiting in MI had plastered posters up with messages to the effect of "you have a right to work, don't let anyone take it!" as though their governer's repeal of the Right to Work was somehow an attack on workers themselves, and not a gut punch to factory owners who are anti-union. These same owners will spout "nobody wants to work anymore" while offering a pitiful wage for jobs that demand years of experience, or special skills.
I see the gaslighting in everything from tiny 10-man shops to factories the size of small towns, and it is frightening how much power the owners have over this population through insighting fear and anger.
You are seeing a symptom of even the small business owner seemingly struggling for income. People don’t realize the ultra wealthy hired the best and brightest for decades to capture all the excess wealth/productivity generated from technology capital gains.
If prosperity was shared as in 1965, the mode income would be 6 figures.
> Here in the UK we have a perpetual doctor shortage, except that we don't, because young doctors are worked to the bone in incredibly stressful environments in what seems to be a "paying your dues" model so that you can possibly, maybe earn the fat consultant money that older doctors get on their way to retirement.
I wonder what would it take to end feudal employment model that so, so many industries have and what software seems to mostly avoid.
I remember arguing with my doctor mother that had an intern. She practically claimed that the intern _should be_ paying her for learning experience and that's so burdensome for her to even share the knowledge she gathered during decades of experience. It's unthinkable for most software engineers, who often create free products, tutorials, articles with no expectations of pay.
the model for doctor work was designed by a guy who was a cocaine addict. he made it work... cuz he was stimmed to the gills most days. so start by tossing that approach out.
another specter hanging over the industry is that studies have shown that hand-offs to different nurses and doctors is what leads to errors, and in medicine that sometimes means people dying cuz of dumb mistakes. the solution was to keep someone on shift, like 12+ hours, or often more for sensitive cases.
i've done 60 hour weeks in IT, and even napped in a data center -- that hum is relaxing! -- but those were one-offs, while it's a lifestyle for the docs.
>people dying cuz of dumb mistakes. the solution was to keep someone on shift, like 12+ hours, or often more for sensitive cases.
Which was entirely the wrong "lesson" to learn! Once again doctors bristle at being told they should improve their processes instead of being arrogant hero complexes that can do no wrong.
They should have improved the handoff and paperwork processes. Airplane mechanics have been handing off extremely complex procedures and concerns for decades, with very few accidents. So maybe we should learn from them instead of letting tired doctors continue to mistreat people.
Doctors similarly were grumpy about bringing in checklists like pilots have, despite them having a demonstrated effect.
The NHS is a monopsony employer and has hardly any competition, I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary. Surely if what you're saying is true, junior doctors would not be paid less per hour than someone working in Aldi.
A friend of mine runs a successful business bringing over doctors from the Philippines, Pakistan, etc to work in the NHS, so the gap gets filled that way.
> I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary
This is far from true. On the margin, doctors can work in the private sector or leave the country. Only a few choose to do so, but this is (among other reasons) because the NHS always has to respond to price pressure to keep that small number from growing to where it causes shortages.
Recently a change in how pension contributions are taxed was pushed through almost entirely because it affected senior doctors. If the NHS had pricing power as you suggest, why wouldn't they just tell doctors to pay up?
Salary progression is the most obvious reason but don't discount the effect of morality and ethics.
I know two junior doctors, one is working in Australia and the other is still in the NHS and would never countenance leaving no matter how rational a decision it may appear.
I don't think its lack of suitably qualified people leaving school - I know someone whose parter was responsible for selection of students for entry to one of the UK's top medical schools and they said they really struggled to find fair ways of selecting people given the oversupply of "perfect" candidates for a relatively small number of places.
Agreed but there is a time component here as well. There may in fact be a doctor's shortage because getting a supply of new doctors takes X number of years but the demand is now.
In the UK with NHS shortages it's all about wages though. The time component just means that whenever they finally get the wages figured out it will still take years to improve.
If you really need doctors NOW, bump up the rates as high as they will go. At some point you will either run out of money, or you'll find a doctor somewhere in the world willing to take the 12 hour plane to move to the UK for the 1 million pound an hour wage you're offering them.
Also worth keeping in mind - there's a big difference in "market rate" between "well-treated doctor in a well-functioning health system" and "relentlessly over-worked doctor in a wretchedly crumbling health system". And even if paid well above "market rate", the latter position will attract far fewer applicants who really care about patient welfare and outcomes. And suffer considerably higher turn-over.
I do see your point, but the fall of the Weimar Republic isn’t a great comparison.
Ultimately, it still boils down to “I think you should be limited to making X for doing job Y, because I don’t believe it should be worth as much as job Z, which is clearly prestigious enough to be worth 2X.”
Market forces are a surprisingly efficient means of separating perceived and actual value for pretty much anything, even with some fairly sizeable warts.
Yes and no. A nation like the UK can afford to pay any one doctor millions of pounds. But that solution scales poorly to a national level. And worse if you try to scale it to all the other sorts of essential workers. And when an extremely large, complex system is wretchedly mismanaged - paying the guys in the trenches 10X does not fix that. For example, many of the UK's public buildings were built with "RAAC", and are at risk of collapse: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/sep/04/raac-crisis-...
Meanwhile - a rather large number of HNer's seem to disagree with you about the virtues of those "efficient market forces" when it comes to health care. Perhaps discuss it with them here? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37398504
No. Doctors who qualified in a different country cannot simply start working. They have to do expensive and time consuming training to convert their credentials. This is partly because it's very important your doctor has appropriate language skills and understands the local system - and partly because local trade associations of doctors insist on it to protect their own jobs.
We have a peculiar situation where NHS can't raise wages, but they certainly can hire staff from agencies at much higher rates (and agency mark up). Imagine if NHS could hire staff directly at those rates...
Leaving aside the political aims of the governing party, the NHS employs a lot of people, it's the biggest employer in Europe and one of the biggest in the world, so even a 1% raise costs a large sum of money.
Large nominal sums of money are really easy to turn into a negative headline, rather than the cost of using staffing agencies which requires a bit of analysis.
See Brexit for an example. "We're spending £350m per week on this, isn't that mad?!" versus "various analyses and projections show that raising trade barriers and reducing staff mobility will likely have a negative effect on domestic businesses"
The Conservative party wishes to destroy (by privatization) the National Health System. It will be replaced with a "health" system substantially identical to the American system.
NHS management is notoriously corrupt and a bureaucratic nightmare, which is why the national health service failed in the UK.
If you live elsewhere and are surprised to have never heard about this, it’s because it hasn’t been acknowledged yet by the government to save face, but anyone with relatives stuck on a NHS waiting list or who have sadly passed away waiting for an ambulance that doesn’t come already knows this.
I remember this one time as a dev, I went through this entire interview process and they offered me 30k a year. I was literally laughing so hard I fell on the floor -- I thought it was a joke. Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.
I ended up working with them as a part-time consultant to actually find their first few devs. Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.
I had something very similar happen a lot of years ago when I was consulting and a client in a bank I'd worked with had asked me what it would take for me to consider joining them full-time.
When I told them they stared dumb-founded at me and said "but that's more than I make". We didn't talk about it again, as I don't know where you'd start explaining how capitalism works to a manager in a bank.
When I was in a similar situation I declined. (I was going to offer to contract, but then an absurdly low offer came in via email.)
It turned into a series of email flames from an "entrepreneur" that involved references to Frodo and the Ring.
Needless to say, the company burned out super-fast. The guy running the company didn't realize that he has to pay market rate in order to attract talent; and if he can't pay market rate, he has to reset what he's trying to do in order to meet his budget.
I think any response would be fine as the employer is responsible for the offer. There's really no point asking me how much I would like to be compensated (the answer is always $1b) when the real question is how much are you willing to offer in return for my services.
Some employers ask this at the start. Then, you'll go through $x interview rounds.
If you say 100 quatloos, then go through 3 rounds of interviews, discussions, and they offer your 100 quatloos, you'd be an asshat to complain about salary.
And the employer would have every reason to think you're a dumbass.
Note that refusing to answer is fine, but being entirely dishonest (a random number, eg "any response"), would make me believe you are utterly untrustworthy.
So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research? I find that hard to believe. I think they knew what a dev would cost and were hoping to be hire from the left side of the salary curve.
I've also been in a few interviews where the company was being evasive about the salary range. In every case it was below market and the hiring manager was just too embarrassed or too scammy to state it. Hoping they would hire someone desperate enough (ie "exposure").
> So, Google is free. They were hiring for a very expensive employee class and doing 0 research?
Some services vary in price by huge amounts.
Use Google to research how much it costs to have a company logo professionally designed, and you'll find you can spend anything from $5 (remote fiverr designer slaps your name on a stock template) to $5,000,000 (fancy ad agency rebrand for a fortune 500 company)
So I can see how someone could accidentally make an insultingly low offer for some services, despite having tried to research beforehand.
I think most successful business owners are above average intelligence, but they’re also frequently really blinkered - they know a lot about something but almost nothing about a lot of other stuff, if it hasn’t come up in their path. It’s such a noticeable lopsidedness that I almost wonder if it’s a kind of prerequisite for being so foolish as to start a business.
I think it is necessary for being really successful in most fields that you neglect a lot of other stuff. I've had to deal with quite a few successful scientists, and it is striking how otherwise very intelligent people can show an almost shocking naiveté in regards to, e.g., politics (outside faculty, I might have to add).
My take is that business owners are bottlenecked on their capacity to take in information. If they could integrate more knowledge about what’s going on in their business, they would be able to make better decisions. And they know it. So there’s a very high opportunity cost spending that cognitive effort researching random things online.
You simply don’t get to put all your focus on making your business succeed without being a bit “blinkered”. That’s what focus means.
The main criteria for becoming a business owner is access to capital not ability and by there are more small businesses then large concerns. Furthermore actually smart people aren't generally blinkered intelligence is by definition generalizable.
Your confusing reasonably trained in a narrow area with intelligence.
No, I’m saying that smart people can be blinkered, that knowledge is distinct from intelligence, and successful businesspeople are sometimes lacking in general knowledge, sometimes startlingly so.
I don't know where you live, but in most Western countries the capital required to become a business owner (i.e. start a legal business entity) is within reach of most people.
Unless we are talking about the money to file the paperwork to instantiate such an entity this just isn't true at least in the US.
Lets examine the parameters. In order to start a new business one has to be able to cover startup costs and live on your savings. Lets look at average savings as a starting point.
Even 10k is really very little in truth just a little runway until you can either acquire additional funding or crash and burn.
Lets inject some reality. Half of America has basically nothing. Another 25% would have to sink the majority of their accumulated wealth eg home equity into such an endeavor with a 50 50 chance of existing in 5 years. They COULD do it but it would be both scary and dangerous and half of them would end up ruined. It's like saying I could climb Everest.
I could scrape up the funds for the plane ticket and its possible I might survive the trip but anyone saying "most people could climb Everest" would be talking nonsense.
To be quite frank this is mostly bullshit. Few people in the majority could live on less than full time hours or successfully launch a new endeavor on less. The counter examples mostly involve the "business" of owning things. For example owning the house someone else lives in especially if the day to day affairs are managed by a property manager, or investing in an endeavor wherein the majority of the work is done by those slightly less privileged wherein the "work" is effectively giving direction to secure your investment.
You dismissed the meat of the argument. People have finite amounts of time and money. In present context households are already running full tilt usually with 2 full time workers just to stay in one spot with too little in reserve to even cover ordinary disasters. It is this surplus of time and money that creates the opportunity for exciting things to happen like starting a small businesses.
Increasing costs and inequality rob us of the future surpluses that would be produced by such endeavors. Should we want to enrich our society it isn't sufficient to pretend opportunity exists we just endeavor to actually support it.
"You dismissed" - what, by calling it mostly bullshit?
The rest of your response is similar to your previous rambles about how it's all too hard, despite the countless examples, a mere google search away, of people who have started and run businesses in Western countries without instantly starving to death, or whatever your mostly-bullshit argument is.
So say you are liquid for 1000 bucks with average credit and a 50 hour a week time commitment to working and commuting to earn just enough to get by.
This or worse is about half the country
You need expertise, time, and money to start a business. The majority of people lack not one but all 3.
This is probably why only 9% own an established business. Indeed jp Morgan says that future business owners on average start out substantially wealthier.
Which supports my assertion that the majority are ill positioned to start a business.
Money buys time, money buys relevant expertise in, wealth makes risk tenable because failure doesn't mean homelessness, money and financial health in fact buys access to borrowed money.
Everyone could just do what only 9% of people do is an incredibly privileged thing to say it's like Zuckerberg saying anyone can have a website or bolt saying anyone can run.
Your glass is half empty. There are businesses you can start for under $1000, you may not personally be aware of them, but they exist (the business I own was started with much less than this amount in 2016 & has delivered decent returns with part-time hours since, no particular skills other than basic English & hard work required). Obviously you will need to spend time over your nominated 50 hour a week time commitment, why is this impossible? If you want to build wealth you need to put in the time. I don't recall claiming any of this was easy.
I guess some elements of capitalism need people with your defeatist outlook, to be lifelong wage slaves.
The glass is what it is. To be defeatist is to commit yourself to failure. I have no such ambition or shall I say lack thereof. To be a realist is to properly understand the world as it is and plan accordingly. If one wants to actually succeed then this is infinitely more valuable that fake optimism.
There are a lot of as you put it "wage slave" businesses which have 45 people making barely enough to live 4 folks making 20% more in semi-supervisory positions working 60 hours a week with lots of unpaid overtime effectively making less per hour than the grunts and 1 guy making a decent living.
You can accurately say that any of the guys could in theory move up but the logic breaks down trying to apply it to the group as a whole with one position essentially worth having anyone COULD move up but EVERYONE never could.
Society is essentially so constructed in the large. We can't all sell each other financial products. If we want society to function we will have to have a whole lot of people who are modestly compensated and I don't just mean french fry cooks. There are a lot of positions that are both challenging and necessary that really aren't paid that much. These people aren't all stupid losers and they aren't all too stupid to be business tycoons. They fit into the slots that society made and if we want people to move up we ought to do a better job at creating such slots and allocating resources to them.
Bemoaning the fact that people haven't pulled themselves up by their bootstraps is basically useless.
"A very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. It is not merely book learning, a narrow academic skill, or test-taking smarts. Rather, it reflects a broader and deeper capability for comprehending our surroundings—"catching on," "making sense" of things, or "figuring out" what to do"
Once someone gets to Bill Gates level intelligence, I would agree any additional steps beyond that probably negatively correlates with grit and 'a certain irrational headstrongness' to a sizable amount, so much so that it noticeably reduces chances of business success.
I refrain from quoting pg nowadays but he used to be worth reading, here's an article from that period which is of some interest: http://paulgraham.com/founders.html
No words on low IQ but absolutely nothing about being a genius.
Also, a paragraph which may point at mild psychopathy as a good trait to have. Which is absolutely in line with top leadership.
> intelligence is negatively correlated with success in business
Has anyone ever seen a negative correlation on a graph? It implies the most successful businessman are practically the dumbest people to exist. It's an extremely foolish, incorrect assertion. GP and downvoters must be amazing at business.
And yet the richest person in the world is the exact person to pay double the value for a shitty social media company by making an inane comment on their platform AFTER the SEC already warned him that, after the first time he made an inane comment on that platform that was substantially relevant to public markets, he would be forced to follow through.
Yeah I'm not convinced there is any connection between intelligence and business acumen.
In the last couple of months I’ve seen him absolutely destroy a BBC journalist in an off-the-cuff battle of wits. Is luck the only reason you’re not richer than him?
Elon… is not that smart. Take the “hyperloop” for example, invented in the 1800’s, IIRC. When I considered it in the 90’s as a thought experiment, I quickly realized how dumb it would be. The earth moves, all the time. The pressure wave of a failure somewhere in the system would literally kill everyone on board. If any parts were above ground, a simple sniper bullet from several miles away could kill hundreds of people. I was a teenager, simply writing a report for school. In my report, I quickly (within hours of discovering the idea) realized the expenses and risks of maintaining such a thing would quickly overwhelm any benefits. Yet this “novel idea” a random billionaire came up with is somehow different? I don’t think so.
I could go on with dozens or potentially hundreds of examples where it’s clear he didn’t apply any critical thought at all.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying he is dumb. He just doesn’t think things through before saying them out loud. I think the majority of normal people do this. In other words, I think he’s a normal person who got lucky, and works hard to keep what he has. Just like everyone else. However, we live in a world that idolizes lucky people…
Mild psychopathy == dysfunction when it comes to organizing compromises or large scale transition away from local optima. There is a reason why democracy gives the people a large reset button, to flush the leaders aggregating at the top and all the floatsome that went along with it.
A former coworker got hired as a young company's DBA. They were more-or-less in the manufacturing space but with an internet sales channel. They had set up cubicles on the factory floor, with a "break room" on the floor consisting of a couple of vending machines with picnic tables. He wasn't getting anything done, what with the constant noise of pneumatic equipment and beeping of fork-lift trucks, plus the constant sweating from not having air conditioning.
He gave notice after a week, and one of the founders took him aside and asked why. Turned out he was their third DBA in a couple of months and they didn't understand why they were all leaving on such short notice. He was pretty gentle in letting them know...
>Turns out this was the first dev position the company ever had that wasn't contractors.
The most upsetting part of this is they were most certainly paying insane prices for that contractor, and probably weren't even offering you half of that. Businesses are so comfortable at padding another business's pockets with obscene mark up, but utterly refuse to let even a little of that money go to the "workers"
> Everyone else they had interviewed had stormed out, pissed off that they had wasted their time; they didn't even realize what they did until I started asking questions after I got off the floor.
Uh, those that stormed out did it right after the salary piece, and they didn't put it together?
The typical mind fallacy: amongst other things, unless it was done deliberately, it's really really hard to guess why you've upset someone, especially when they're so upset they don't talk to you any more.
Nah, if they stormed out right after you told them the salary, it's pretty obvious.
It sounds more like an example of 'cultural density' -- not wanting to realize or acknowledge something that's at odds with what your local culture desires (in this case, the desire to pay as little as possible).
This was the highest paid position in the company (30k a year) and a salary (which only their managers were paid in a salary). They thought they were offering a really good salary, not realizing it was FAR below market rate. They still hired engineers at below market rate (~60k) but I helped them find some really smart junior engineers who could maintain the existing code; and warned them that these engineers would likely leave in the next year or two, max.
They were able to become fairly profitable with full-time engineers, eventually, and ended up paying above market rate, last I heard.
What? Was everyone else at the company living in their car and relying on the food bank to feed themselves? Or was this in some strange ultra-low-CoL environment?
It was long ago, maybe 2009ish? Developer salaries were actually going down, IIRC, during this time. Likely due to companies exactly like this one and pivoting to more digital solutions. 100+k was very rare outside of SV. Adjusted for inflation, 30k is roughly equal to about 40-50k in todays dollars.
Non-profit doesn't mean bad salaries. I can say that because I work for a non-profit and I can compare my salary with many salaries in the industry through my union.
> The company complaining is not offering a market wage.
It is not always the company. In the UK there is a shortage of driving instructors. Many of them self-employed and can charge for lessons whatever they like but for some reasons they don't - probably people already squeezed by cost of living cannot pay much more and instead ready to wait weeks for lessons which are readily available in countries without a shortage.
Market stop prices from going too high but doesn’t solve the problem of shortage. If part of the problem is that it is hard to get a certification required to be a driving instructor government can work on making it easier/faster (not going to happen unfortunately).
This is caused by IR35 changes where self employed de facto can no longer offer services, as they are being forced into something called deemed employment, where they have no employment rights, but pay both employee and employer taxes without ability to make profit. Many people in the industry simply threw in the towel, because it became pointless to work.
It's not exactly that simple. I know an employer in the cabinetry field. It's not genius work in the shop but you can't be asleep.
He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.
The town is full of hundreds of healthy males working for Walmart, oil change shops, non commission retail, and all those sorts.
There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
> There is some kind of issue that makes it so someone will work stocking a grocery store for $40k a year instead of screwing a cabinet together for $60k, with opportunities to make it up to $100k in the shop and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
Yes, it is called an insufficient pay to quality of life at work ratio, which also incorporates volatility of income.
All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.
This doesn't follow nearly as well in the trades. Plumbers make good money not just because they are good at putting pipes together, but because most people don't want to spend their day getting dripped on or even dealing with wastewater.
> All the cases I hear require overtime, weekends, overnights, evenings, and unstable, seasonal employment. And probably not offer health insurance subsidies or 401k if less than 50 employees.
This is my understanding as well. Random piecemeal work in random places that only have one hotel and still manage to nail you for 150/night.
Yeah you can make $45k in 3 months, but it's 4 hours from nowhere, the work isn't consistent, and they don't offer healthcare or 401k. You can't make a live out of 1 month here, 7 months here, etc., and options like buying a big sleeper van isn't really an option when winter in rural Ohio comes around, etc.
But with pay like that, the shop would be out of business, because the consumers won't shoulder the resulting high price of the cabinets.
Either the business finds a way to be much more efficient (e.g. producing cabinets much faster and selling wider) while paying the workers more, or it has to scrape by while employing some less fortunate folks. (Or shut down, or course.)
We do not know all the details. Does the $60K job require working nights or overtime? Does it require a flexible schedule?
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm shows there are not many subfields of cabinetmaking that average $60K/year. One is "Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing" which averages $60,520/year, so another issue is the actual job may call for more experience than just being able to use a screwdriver.
Otherwise, residential building construction laborers make $ 42,950/year, says https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472061.htm . They have more appropriate training than a grocery stocker. Why aren't they applying?
I have some family members in the cabinet business. Nobody is paying $60k/yr unless they're getting a lot of OT. They're commuting 2+ hours each way, don't get paid for the drive time, drive their own trucks, have their own tools. Most cabinet shops (almost all) don't provide any kind of benefits or PTO.
So, $25/hr, plus horrible commutes, plus tons of time and expense. There's a reason that guy can't find anybody, he's not telling you the whole story.
I've posted here before about my dad in the cabinet field. He got a raise to $20 an hour in 1991. He worked a lot of overtime too, so by the end of the year I'm sure that was over $50k. In 1991.
It’s really hard to undo people’s impression of what things are “supposed” to cost after decades of outsourcing manufacturing to low-wage countries. People who aren’t looking for artisan work really aren’t interested in paying inflation-adjusted prices from 30+ years ago, which is an interesting pairing to the not uncommon complaints that things don’t last as long.
Well, the labor force has finally decided they're not going to do hard work for starvation wages. The guys running the companies have increased prices, but haven't sent that money down to the labor force. I have a friend that's a plumber, he easily makes his company $450k/yr in billable services, he's making less than $30/hr.
The most important part is that these were not starvation wages in the 80s!
People used to pay american employees enough to survive, thrive, and even support local businesses that didn't have to crush their margins to 2% to compete with walmart.
The reason everything sucks is because americans have only cared about "sticker price" in comparison shopping for decades, and I posit that's mostly because the american income has spent the past several decades being cut in half simply because employers didn't pay people.
Yeah, between active wage theft and the growing profit-taking I’m not surprised that the union movement is stronger than it’s been in my lifetime. I don’t know your friend but I know a bunch of people like him.
Sounds like an excellent opportunity for your friend to start his own plumbing company with some other disgruntled plumbers, and offer lower rates too to happy homeowners.
According to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics the mean hourly wage for cabinet makers and bench carpenters as of May 2022 was $20.25 per hour. Even in San Francisco the mean hourly wage was only $26.37. Lesson for today - your instincts abiut whay real world, non-dev jobs pay are totally out of whack with reality
Would you believe the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Here are the "Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2022" for "51-7011 Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes517011.htm
(2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a "year-round, full-time" hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.
The "Top paying industries for Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" are:
Employment Annual mean wage
Aerospace Product and Parts Manufacturing 240 $ 60,520
Federal Executive Branch 190 $ 60,460
In the "Industries with the highest concentration of employment in Cabinetmakers and Bench Carpenters" the best paying is:
Motor Vehicle Body 3,040 $ 49,990
and Trailer Manufacturing
The most common (at 20% of the industry) is:
Furniture and Related 68,860 $ 41,620
Product Manufacturing
EDIT: in 2001 the mean annual wage for cabinetmakers and bench carpenters was $25,120 with median of $10.74/hour and mean of $11.40. https://archive.org/details/welcometoamerica00demi/page/984/... . (It is the oldest record I could find, published in "Welcome to America : the complete guide for immigrants : the English-Russian version".)
What did your father do in the cabinet field to get $20 an hour in 1991?
He had just moved to the US in 1988. He had no real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat when he was a teenager. In 1989 my mom and I moved here with him. In 1991, he got a raise to $20 and we went to Price Club (Costco) and bought a ton of groceries, and took a photo with them on the kitchen table with all 3 of us using a self timer. It's a major memory of mine.
He was one of the 'foreman' in the shop handling the custom fixture/reception desk line. So if Sun Microsystems at the time wanted new cabinets for their new building, the rest of the shop would build the boxes, but my dad's department would build the reception desk. Basically, you could give my dad some drawings from an architect and my dad could figure out how to make it, while also getting it into the building. He was still cutting and assembling then too as 'engineering' and cutlisting is a short part of that overall work.
From the BoL, a cabinetmaker is someone who job is to "Cut, shape, and assemble wooden articles or set up and operate a variety of woodworking machines, such as power saws, jointers, and mortisers to surface, cut, or shape lumber or to fabricate parts for wood products."
Your father did more than that. He was a foreman, he did design, and he worked on custom office furniture including installation. Of course he gets paid more than a non-supervisory cabinetmaker working in a factory.
As a first approximation, "First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers" at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes471011.htm says the mean wage is $77,650 - nearly twice as much as the mean wage for a cabinetmaker at $42,120.
> You're not going to find someone screwing together ikea like boxes in America.
That's actually quite literally what my cabinetmaker did for my most recent home. Ikea cabinets cut down to size in his shop, and installed when ready/all the parts got in. Other brands seemed pretty identical to this - largely premade parts with a few sections designed to cut down to size.
Didn't seem to take much more than a measuring tape and a couple different saws to me. I'm sure I'm being flippant, but it was eye opening seeing that process vs. watching my grandparents build a second home growing up.
Part of the reason wages have not kept up is also due to the work becoming less skilled. The middle has been more or less completely hollowed out as far as I can tell. The types of job my grandfathers both would have set the dinner table with in their respective trades simply no longer exist. You either need to go mass-market low-end and seemingly as low quality as gets you a check in the mail, or high-end luxury market and all the spit'n'polish that entails.
I'd love to be wrong - but trying to simply find those craftsmen in the "middle" to hire is more or less impossible for me.
That's not a cabinet maker, that's a handyman basically.
When I said people should go work for a cabinet shop and make $60k+, I meant in a place that's making medium to high grade cabinets, custom hopefully or atleast to spec for track homes at worst.
What you're describing is somebody modifying mass produced cabinets from a catalog and installing them.
The installers I know all make $80k+ a year if they do work you're not embarrassed about.
You earlier described the position as "screwing a cabinet together for $60k", when you wondered why a stocker making $40K wouldn't want to change jobs.
Now you are describing a position which requires non-trivial training.
How long does it take to learn those skills? Who pays for the training?
https://www.carpenterstraininginstitute.org/apprenticeship-p... says "To graduate from cabinet maker apprentice to journeyworker, you’ll complete 7,000 hours of on-the-job training (OJT) and 640 hours of classroom learning." That's much more training than needed for stocking. It gives these statistics for the carpenters training as a whole:
Average earnings for all first-year students:
$33,436 – $46,363 + benefits*
Average earnings for all second-year students:
$45,600 – $63,200 + benefits
Average earnings for all third-year students:
$51,666 – $71,646 + benefits*
Average earnings for all fourth-year students:
$57,748 – $80,077 + benefits*
Journeyperson
$60,789 – $84,295 + benefits*
Foreman
$72,485 – $97,010 + benefits*
which again means $60K/year requires a lot more training than being a stock clerk.
Can you point to a job listing for this sort of position? I looked and found roughly comparable positions, but paying less than $80K.
"As a Woodworking Prop Builder, you will play a pivotal role in bringing our clients' visions to life by crafting unique and eye-catching props and decor pieces. Your craftsmanship will be on display at a wide range of events, from weddings and corporate gatherings to private parties and more." paying $18-$22 hourly
"The Craftsworker, Carpenter position focuses on carpentry and basic construction related projects/repairs. The position requires good math skills and the ability to think outside of the box. Experience in set design or custom woodworking is a plus. The Craftsworker, Carpenter works with a variety of materials, such as wood, fiberglass, rebar and concrete. The Craftsworker, Carpenter is often called upon to build/construct things that don’t come with blueprints or an instruction manual; they are built to specifications of the client and/or to fit in an allotted amount of space. Projects can vary from day to day, based on work orders, department requests, routine maintenance, or capital projects. Tasks can include such things as roofing; fencing; wood structure repairs; fixing doors/door hardware; installing door systems and windows; fixing ADA building access buttons; fixing shift doors in an animal enclosure; constructing safety fences/barriers for an exhibit; designing and building an automatic animal feeder disguised to look like a tree; or constructing various exhibit elements such as artificial plants, rocks or trees." paying $30/hour. That's far more than cabinet working and still only $60K/year.
(The site I was using doesn't have linkable URLs.)
Zip Recruiter has positions for cabinet maker in the range "$12-22/hr".
It matters to me. And unless we want to assume my father was special and gifted a salary long ago, and now everyone I know in that industry from his lifetime in it is an anomaly, I have to talk about it.
Sure you could. At that point you should just give up entirely on talking to people if you think I'm lying about the experience of my cabinet maker father.
You could be telling the truth as far as you know. Did your father tell you everything?
That's a simple way to resolve this impasse - point to a job ad for a cabinet maker offering $60K/year for someone with no "real wood working experience beyond building a small sailboat". [1]
You know an employer right now who is looking for people. Can you point to a help-wanted ad for that company showing what they are looking for?
I did a job search and found a $66K/year Cabinet Maker I job in Hawaii (which is one of the best paying places for cabinet workers according to the BLS tables you don't trust), for the state Department of Education. However, it requires apprentice training or 4 years of carpentry experience. https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=Cabinet+maker&l=Hawaii
From the same site, in Hawaii, there's an offer for on-the-job training, starting at $17/hour, so about $35K/year + overtime.
Otherwise there are cabinet maker jobs in Hawaii in the $20-$25/hour range and require a few years of experience. The same holds for elsewhere in the US.
I did find that CalTech is looking for "a Journeyperson level contributor in carpentry and cabinet making" at https://phf.tbe.taleo.net/phf03/ats/careers/v2/viewRequisiti... and they pay $29.75 - $43.75 Per Hour, but require "Completion of apprenticeship or equivalent training, one year or more of journeyperson level experience and five or more year’s total experience in cabinet and/or carpentry trades"
Furthermore, that person "will apply journeyperson level skills in providing building maintenance, laboratory installations and rehabilitation projects. This person will also apply cabinet making skills to the layout, fabrication, and installation of new and rehabilitation projects" and must be able to weld, and they would like someone with at least 5 years of work experience in a university or facilities setting and CNC machining certification.
So yes, "approach $100k for dependable people that known the field" is possible. But that's someone with years of experience, and for something far beyond the basic skills your father had.
> He pays guys $60k+ and some approach $100k for dependable people that known the field. He has trouble finding people.
I've seen trade jobs that get described like this. However the reality is different. The jobs are effectively seasonal and no one makes $60k because they don't end up working a full 52 weeks of the year. They get paid per job and once they finish the job there's no work and thus no pay until the next job. A lot of times employees are expected to own and supply their own tools. They often also require a commute out to a job site.
Working trades like this ends up averaging out to a bit better than minimum wage but without predictable schedules and/or long commutes. When someone makes six figures it's because the job was a new subdivision or something.
If you fail at hiring you have failed at the most important aspect of running a business. He is doing something or several things wrong, and there is no excuse. He can't blame anybody but himself for his troubles finding people. Just like you can't blame your competitors if you don't get customers. Hiring and training is a crucial part of running a business. Is he training young men to work for him, or is that "somebody else's job"?
Usually the issue there is nobody knows it exists. Or they are intimidated by not having skills, and having worked for WalMart, no expectation of any meaningful training.
Also, they don't own a suitable truck, nor own the suitable tools. The job might pay twice as much as WalMart, but if it costs you $40k-80k to enter that line of business, the wage differential is insufficient to pay both the capital expenditure plus depreciation of the required equipment. With auto mechanics, the folks selling tools (such as the Snap-On Tools truck operator) will handle the financing.
It might ease of connecting workers to jobs. Walmart, wuick lube places, retailers all spend a lot of effort to make it known they're hiring and how to apply.
I'll tell you exactly what that is is cuz I'm that guy. Couldn't get anyone to take a chance and train me. I'm rather quite handy and safety conscious but couldn't get a job doing production work without experience period.
If you want stock boys you can pay em cheap but you gotta train em.
Instead I moved and found work in tech which matched my education.
Prior experience cannot be the for setting wages. No matter how rustled an employers jimmie’s over big numbers, when enough are out of because it does not make financial sense to take a job, people will revolt.
If small businesses cannot hang due to their model (and sensibilities) being based on 1990s math, the solution is tax the mega rich and rebalance the market in the aggregate.
Screwing a cabinet together is actual work, you need to complete things at some expected pace at some expected quality (it's a low bar, but there's a bar).
At Walmart most of the time you can just fuck around and not do much work, if you get fired at Walmart you just go fuck around at an oil change shop until they fire you. I know men that have done this their whole lives.
For a much more charitable view, Everyone everywhere in the US knows walmart and how to get employed by them. Further, they trust walmart will pay on time. How many people know of Dave's cabinetry shop? How many people trust Dave's shop?
To me, a large part of the actual problem here is a marketing problem. It's really hard for a small shop to market that "hey, we need workers, we are willing to pay a premium, and no we aren't a scam company".
Well, and you have to put up with Dave. He might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with him, for all we know. Dave can't afford to pay me enough to put up with his toxic abusive bossiness.
Well, and you have to put up with your Walmart boss. S/he might be an asshole if you're not drinking buddies with them, for all we know. Walmart can't afford to pay me enough to put up with their toxic abusive bossiness, and don't offer much guarantee that the potential boss is better than Dave.
Walmart might be the biggest scam company in the United States — they've stolen over $100 million in unpaid overtime, and pay wages so low that they've recommend their employees utilize foodstamps. Then there are the standard corporate playbooks: a popular one is to keep a significant amount of employees just under full-time so you don't have to legally give them benefits.
There are hundreds of Dave's at corporate Walmart, and they care so little about the employees at any given location that they probably wouldn't even return an email, let alone talk to shift workers face-to-face.
What makes it harder for many of those smaller shops is that they require the new worker to own their own tools. WalMart does not require workers to supply their own forklifts, nor bring their own mops & buckets when they start working there.
Working in "the trades" is an entirely different thing.
Idk if you've been to a Walmart or an oil change place.. but they get people to work pretty hard and efficiently for low wages. That's basically their secret sauce. My Walmart appears to be staffed by zombies, yet for the most part the store functions pretty well day in a day out, 365 days a year.
Yes but they also get people who will just do the bare minimum and make everyone around them pick up the slack until someone takes the effort to fire them. There's essentially an entire category of people who do this.
They get paid the bare minumum and do the bare minimum in exchange. I don’t see a problem here. What do you do BTW? I would bet that not assembling cabinets.
The problem is that they put the whole store behind, then Walmart blames everyone for the store being behind and pressures them accordingly. Which is Walmart's fault, of course, but Walmart might as well be a force of nature as far as its workers are concerned; they can't change Walmart.
They're actually dead weight that the entire organization carries around, I honestly think in some cases they'd be better off being paid to not come to work.
What I do isn't really relevant unless you're trying to make some personal slight.
Custom cabinet work does not have a low bar. You need to be familiar with multiple joinery techniques and finishing methods, even if your parts are coming straight off a CNC. Getting them perfectly square, face framed, mounted etc takes a lot of time and attention. For houses where the framing was done poorly, it takes even more time.
I believe fairly competent cabinet assemblers / installers are making $40-75 / hour depending on location. Everyone else paying less is half-assing it or doing a poor job.
Sure, but an apprentice can learn the basics to be useful on the job in a couple days.
That's not the point anyway, working entry-level retail is pretty much a 0 stakes job — quality has been mostly engineered out of it. Even a basic cabinet assembly job requires some quality control. Some people do not want to do anything of quality.
IMO we'd all be better off if people had a universal basic income and these people could spend more time finding something else to do with their time.
A Walmart job is an exceedingly reliable paycheck for a clean job in a climate-controlled environment where the majority of the occupational risk is exposure to the public.
I can't fault anyone for choosing that option if they can live with the income level, it's relatively sane.
> Personally, I'd rather work with all of the chemicals...
My best friend was a chemist. He told stories of some of the accidents he saw (or heard, or saw the property damage, or triaged victims of, or ...) during the relatively few years when he worked in a lab like that.
Quite a few of the chemists in that lab left chemistry, and did not return. My friend left the lab, and moved into computational chemistry.
> and up to $140k in the office as a project manager once you really know how things are built.
This is so bizarre. If someone knows how to build a cabinet, why would you promote them so they no longer build cabinets? If someone loves building cabinets, the only way to make more money is to stop building them...
It's one of the problem why companies cannot find skilled workers...
A friend of mine explained it as "We rise to the level of our own incompetence". Start a job at level 1, do a good job, get a promotion/find a new job to rise to level 2. Repeat until suddenly, you were really good at doing X job, but just got promoted/moved to doing Y job and now you are struggling because it's not very related to what you did in the previous position that you were good at.
It makes sense at a certain level, and can explain why we get so many people in positions they don't seem suited for.
Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building. But being an expert builder usually means you are intelligent and thoughtful and logical. So if you combine your cabinet experience with those traits, you are a great candidate for project manager, where you can be paid more and provide more for your family.
It's not like they are forced into it. No shortage of people that turn down the chance to get into management.
> Because there is a limit to how valuable you are as an expert builder building.
That's rarely a thing. Most jobs pay is not correlated to the value it creates. Simple example is software development. Team of 10 can create product that generates millions every day, but their pay will not be correlated in any way with that revenue. Maybe a manager will get a bonus, but most of the money flows to the owners.
Sounds like an advertising problem. How would anyone know about those cabinet making jobs, as opposed to very visible jobs at places like Walmart? I've certainly never seen an ad for a $60k a year entry level cabinet-making job!
The complaint is valid. A better title for the article would be trucker shortages are self correcting. The “number of trucking carriers has increased 45% since July 2019;” you don’t see a 50% increase in the quantity supplied without a supply-demand mismatch, which in anything but a perfect market causes localised shortages.
When confronted with these shortages, Congress tends to “fund employee driver training and recruitment programs,” which does nothing for independent owner-operators. Given that is the responsive end of the supply curve, the next time something must be done about a trucking shortage, it should be in making it easier for aspiring owner-operators to secure SBA loans.
> Given that is the responsive end of the supply curve, the next time something must be done about a trucking shortage, it should be in making it easier for aspiring owner-operators to secure SBA loans.
Government should not be help people by offering them debt with improper underwriting. All it does is screw up prices and long term supply/demand curves such as with education and homes, and screws future taxpayers for the benefit of current taxpayers.
If the government wants to encourage more people to become truck drivers, then the government can start paying its drivers more, improve minimum working conditions for truck drivers, and pay truck driving schools directly to offer free truck driving qualifications.
> then the government can start paying its drivers more, improve minimum working conditions for truck drivers, and pay truck driving schools directly to offer free truck driving qualifications
Paying its own drivers makes sense. The second two are straight out of the ATA’s playbook for industry capture by large incumbents. The part of the supply curve that’s responding is owner-operators. They don’t benefit from working-condition mandates or driver’s schools; the large incumbents do. The second two advantage them over owner-operators, and could conceivably exacerbate the problem.
Is the goal for society to have more truck drivers? Or is the goal for the government to help increase the number of owner operators?
If being an owner operator is a good business, then a lender will do the proper underwriting and extend a loan. If a lender does not, then that means the truck driving business is not lucrative enough, and so people should be looking elsewhere to sell their labor.
Smooth logistics. When Congress intervenes, it’s to alleviate supply-chain snarls.
> If being an owner operator is a good business, then a lender will do the proper underwriting and extend a loan
Why do you pre-suppose a functioning lending market for independent truck drivers? A 50% increase in owner-operators could easily saturate what used to be a cottage financing industry before being noticed.
The core point is we tend to think of truckers as employees from a distance. That shapes our policy responses, e.g. knee-jerk assuming the problem is pay or working conditions. It’s not just that because many truckers aren’t simple employees.
They might be offering a market wage under their price constraints.
If everyone raised wages together, we wouldn’t magically be wealthier. Number of workers is approximately zero sum, but their productivity in regards to wealth generation is not.
I recently was headhunted by a company trying to place someone in Denver. The pay was 80k a year, less than I make in the midwest.. a substantial raise in cost of living for a pay cut with no remote work option. I told her she would have a very hard time finding someone in my area to take that job.
(Going with the assumption that it's purely due to salary)
If you adjust the salary for new-hires, you'll have to also adjust every employees salary otherwise it becomes unfair to existing employees. Lets give a raise to everyone in America to match inflation isn't really a tenable strategy. Most small businesses would simply go under if they had to do that for 50-100 people. I believe this is the unfortunate reality of many businesses in the US which are struggling already.
> Most small businesses would simply go under if they had to do that for 50-100 people.
If you can't pay your employees market wage, why do you deserve to stay in business? Do restaurants ever expect to underpay their tomato suppliers using the same logic?
You deserve to stay in business when you are a legal business entity that is following all the laws and regulations. Giving everyone a raise is not required by law. It is not a realistic strategy to get out of this inflationary environment - that's my view.
> You deserve to stay in business when you are a legal business entity that is following all the laws and regulations.
You also need to be making a profit though, or at least break even after all costs are accounted for. Otherwise you will run out of money. In our current economic model, a company that is too inefficient to compete in the market does not deserve to stay in business.
There isn't a conspiracy against hiring people who are going to make you money. Anyone who adds value to a company and is going to generate more revenue than their labor cost is likely going to be hired over someone who does not.
Maybe it should be. Even if only to match inflation. Salary actually decreases over time if you don't receive raises. $100k/y today might be equal to $110k/y next year.
Imagine the entitlement required to think that filling out a few forms and paying a fee (all that is required to own a business) should entitle you to take advantage of people for your own gain.
OK, so .. why is this the employee's problem? As soon as they can find better compensated work elsewhere, you're not going to succeed in underpaying people.
I remember a story about how in Denver a CNC company was having trouble hiring journeyman machinists. Well Denver is almost as expensive to live in as California and the offer was for 50 to 60k...