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Comment by throw_away_777 | Hacker News Reader

Well perhaps they should consider paying better wages or offering better working conditions if they truly have problems finding people.

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"Well perhaps they should consider what literally anybody would have considered long before some HN rando suggested it."

It's not the jobs that make people not want to work there. It's everything around the jobs. Money has diminishing marginal value. For many, many people, not living in a heavily drugged-up rural area where nobody else has any prospects is going to outweigh any wage increases that aren't going to drown the company. People aren't spherical cows.

The company exists there because it's the closest thing to the Third World that exists in America, with the commensurate low worker compensation and the weak worker rights that that implies. Because it probably couldn't exist anywhere else.

(Whether that company's continued existence is valuable to the society that grants it its imprimatur is a different question entirely, and one where reasonable people can differ.)

> People aren't spherical cows.

And more importantly, people aren't in a vacuum.

Small cities and rural areas don't grow or wither by accident. They grow when the government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured. They wither when markets are captured and the network effects of oligopolized megacities become more valuable than genuine market experimentation.

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

I agree with you in general, but there is also the specter of international competition that is a lot harder to meaningfully regulate (we've seen what protectionist policies do, to all of our detriment).

Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?

How is China able to be so protectionist and so successful?

Because they can be an order of magnitude cheaper because the health of the workers they barely pay doesn't matter to them. This is starting, already, to change, if slowly, both due to external pressures (PR) and the rise, again slowly, of markets that are in turn cheaper and even less give-a-shit than they are.

(EDIT: Also, it's important to realize that that "success" very much does not extend to rural China. They're not airlifting money out there the way that we effectively do for our rural populations and so industry is even more concentrated than in the United States, when you adjust for relative population size.)

And this is the argument of the types who want to rail against OSHA and minimum wages and the like in America, but frankly, I like not living in a society with factory-crippled invalids and suicide nets on the windows so I am so very unsympathetic. It's an externality that I'm certainly not comfortable overall with, but the bright spot is that those dangerous, barely-paying jobs are a rear-guard action as we play out the clock towards ever-cheaper, more-pervasive automation; that said, the inevitably oppressive effects of modern capital owning that automation is why I am effectively, if not in name, a socialist in 2017.

A lot of that "success" is not real. China is building infrastructure that no one is actually using. Temporarily propping up the economy but not tied to long term gains.

https://www.google.com/amp/www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/20...

That's a minor quibble compared to how far they've come from where they started.

>Those network effects of big cities are not intrinsically tied to oligopolic structures. They're also just bigger and more attractive to a big chunk of the population, yeah?

Well, they're certainly more attractive to young people nowadays, but at their core, they really offer a few things:

* Lots of skilled workers, all in one place.

* Lots of preexisting infrastructure, all in one place.

* Low per-capita cost of additional infrastructure.

On Hacker News there are occasional articles saying many programming jobs ought to offer remote-work as a fringe benefit. That sounds nice, but for a lot of areas of the country, it just wouldn't work. Hell, I remember living in a suburb of Boston, with commuter-rail access to the center city, which as late as 2003 did not have broadband internet in some parts of town.

To this day, there are still rural, exurban, and outer-suburban areas without the network infrastructure to make telecommuting really viable.

So while cultural attractions are nice, I think that they compete with extremely expensive housing, affordable transit, affordable network access, and job density as factors in where to live.

That's a fair cop, and I don't disagree as far as that goes. It's one of the reasons I really like your posts. =)

I do think, however, that there are social issues driving it, too, that go beyond fairness of competition (at least as is generally understood). When you leach out the less privileged from your communities (be they gay, brown, black, trans, etc.), you're going to incur a competitive disadvantage. Bigger cities, for the most part, are a lot more welcoming, and present significant attractive forces that aren't really purely economic in nature, and by themselves can be a big counterweight to stuff like more expensive housing.

> * Lots of skilled workers, all in one place.

A lot of software companies like to piss that advantage away by moving to some "technology hub" on the outskirts of major cities.

Neal Stephenson put it something like: "The world had finally settled on an average comfort of living approximately equivalent to an Indian goat-farmer," in his book "Snow Crash."

I guess a country would want to prevent that from happening, but on the other hand, wouldn't the human race strive to increase productivity and reduce scarcity to the point where the average lifestyle was a bit higher than an Indian goat-farmer? Because right now the average is I expect more along the lines of an untouchable.

> the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani bricklayer would consider to be prosperity

http://faculty2.ric.edu/rfeldstein/521_fall_08_files/excerpt...

government enforces competition laws at every level, preventing markets from being captured.

ROFLMFAO. It's government that causes markets to become captured. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

It's extremely unlikely for a true monopoly to form in the absence of government regulation.

Regulatory capture is by far not the only kind of capture, and a well-run government can avoid it. Just as a fair free market can avoid whatever you're goalpost-hauling at when you say "true monopoly". Of course, it's also much more likely that a market without regulation enables collusive behavior on the part of actors with the greater balance of power who don't have to answer to the society around them. Monopolies are not and have never been the only, or even the biggest, societal threat. Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody.

The only real threat to an entrenched oligopoly or a cartel in your sufficiently-free market is a necktie party on the streetcorner, and that in practice is rare 'cause paying for guns takes money.

and a well-run government can avoid it.

Which is about as likely as the proverbial "sufficiently smart compiler".

Oligopolies and cartels exist because cooperating against the public is a better option for them than competing with one another and (as any game theorist will tell you) the first to be disloyal gains only a small edge at the cost of significantly reduced results for everybody.

But in reality, cartel members cheat all the time. Take OPEC, for example, where members are always producing more than their official limits.

Except over and over again online -- and even more if you've ever gone to a Chamber of Commerce meeting in a small town -- these business owners do what the valley does. Whine they can't hire, and refuse to raise wages.

I collect these links because I find it funny; I'd paste some but I'm on the wrong computer.

But my guess is lots of these places are paying shit wages for shit work with low or no benefits and few advancement options. It's weird they can't seem to find decent employees, eh?

This also matches my experience with family that still live in a similar area. Employers whine endlessly about the lack of workers for their $14 and hour factory job with expensive shitty health insurance. On the other hand, my brother runs his own chain of pizza restaurants in the midwest. He starts at 50% over minimum wage and pays for health insurance. Guess who has no problems hiring as many reliable employees as he needs?

I grew up in a town where this was going on. Some just complain, you're right. Others literally can't make the math work, and I watched a local company submarine themselves for trying.

There are few advancement options because there are few ways to advance. They're dead-end jobs, and there's a wage ceiling because their competitors don't have to play by the same rules. They're jobs that won't exist in twenty years, maybe not even ten, because of a number of factors; the question is not how to better employ the people who would be their workers, but how to give everybody a baseline-decent life regardless of "work" (in an economy where most "work" is rapidly becoming less important).

Sure, some businesses aren't going to work out / the economics don't work.

Others are like the wire manufacturer MLP Steel: there will (probably) continue to be a need for someone who can make custom stuff fast, and that requires you to be local so it's a couple day delivery instead of a month being shipped from China. But their claim is they pay "$12 to $20 an hour, plus health care and benefits", which means they start you at $12. The fuck do they expect for $12 an hour? That's under $20k/year after taxes, in an area where craigslist suggests it's going to cost you $700/mo to rent and heat a place to live. Again, my brother who runs pizza restaurants starts employees at $16.

A side issue that all those funny links have is they always randomly intermix requiring years of experience and they won't hire anyone without a degree or years of experience, which mostly fake claims about hiring anyone off the street... who also happens to have a Mech Eng degree and be willing to take $1/hr more than McDonalds and given those criteria not be involved in drugs or prison.

And as a side note it stereotypically required in all employer anecdotes about alcohol and drug abuse to point out that the drunks are trivially detectable as non-functioning but the painkiller addicts are extremely high functioning and indistinguishable in performance from sober people yet we have to discriminate against them anyway, just for fun apparently.

From experience: it's not that difficult to tell from very brief interaction when someone is drunk. It's a lot harder to tell when someone is using narcotics to the point where you can't trust them with dangerous machinery and the lives of their fellow workers.

If you think this is "discrimination", I very strongly question whether you've any experience at all dealing with semi-functional narcotics abusers. Because your superficial dismissiveness does not track with the seriousness of the problem.

I don't think narcotics are the issue. Nobody wants to hire an addict, yeah. The trouble is, as he said, trying to get a trained mechanical engineer to live and work in an area with few other employers, for $1/hour more than McDonalds. That's just not a very good return on the skillset investment.

The employer who said he wouldn't hire narcotics users is not hiring mechanical engineers, though, he's hiring factory workers for steel-drawing machines. They're operators and tradesmen, not engineers. It doesn't require a degree--it requires the ability to learn and the ability to not mis-handle machines to the (potentially fatal) detriment of your coworkers. Which narcotics (and other drugs) kind of screw with.

"This work takes years of training"

The ability to buckle down and study something as a project for a couple years is very expensive in employees. You can hire an engineer who can definitely do it, or a non-STEM bachelors grad who might be able to do it, or take your chances with a kid off the street. $12/hr is probably not going to find that caliber of employee.

Some google work indicates McDonalds is paying a minimum of $10/hr nationwide as of this year. For an extra two bucks the employer thinks he's going to get Warner Von Braun himself... in a city where the average job pays $18/hr. Good luck with that.

The trades don't get $12/hr. Millwright average pay across the nation including non-union jobs is twice that at $24/hr.

(edited to add, I accidentally deleted a paragraph claiming that three millwrights could trivially outproduce perhaps nine general laborers, which makes the guys claims about expense especially weird. Its very expensive to employ the far left corner of the bell curve)

Dude is asking for vaguely millwright caliber of employee for half price and is shocked, shocked I tell you, that all he's getting is drug addicts trying to keep their unemployment benefits going.

I can ask all day for subcontractors to work under me for $8/hr and the lack of serious applicants tells absolutely nothing useful about the software development field or the social problems of the USA. Thats the fundamental problem of this story.

"I only pay peanuts and I'm only getting monkeys, so this is a national crisis worthy of national coverage" No, not really.

Exactly. Part of creating a viable business is figuring out a way to charge enough to pay for the workers you need. Though whining to reporters turns out to be free. If employees started at $20/hour, perhaps with paid training for 3 months at $12/hour, I confidently predict he would have zero trouble hiring. Either he needs to raise prices, raise the productivity of his workers, or pay himself less. Maybe all of the above.

Common symptoms of manufacturers who "can't hire" are a lack of interest in training people and whining that local tech schools aren't churning out workers (on the workers' dime!) with the exact skills they want, who will jump for $12/hour. I reiterate the parallels with the tech industry.

I live in a small town myself, which has its own struggles finding enough people for all the jobs. The biggest thing I've noticed when having conversations with out-of-towners is that those people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point. Somehow we've collectively built up this idea that there are simply no jobs to be found outside of the cities, period. With that, nobody outside the local region even thinks to see what jobs are available in these places while on the job hunt.

I have a feeling this idea of no jobs really was, more or less, true at one point in time and the preconceived notions simply haven't kept up with the ever changing landscape of the world. This isn't the only example of where information seems to severely lag reality.

I'm sure that a job exists for me in Smallville, USA.

But I don't need a job; I want lots of jobs. In my city, there are, within a 30 minute commute (Muni willing!), tens of thousands of well-paying, interesting jobs I can jump to if my current company goes south.

Having options empowers workers. It's no surprise that most workers gravitate to places where they're empowered.

Bingo. I've lived in Smallville, USA. Single tech job within a 60 minute commute. Maybe 10 in the surrounding counties.

In a city, if you lose your job or voluntarily want to move on, there are at least a few others nearby. In small town USA, you have to move--likely to another state! Too risky. No way I'd move back.

It seems a little myopic to only look at tech jobs. In fact, I'll be surprised if anyone interested in working in tech struggles to find a job at all. But in terms of the number of people employed, tech is not that big of an employer, and software development specifically only accounts for about 0.8% of the workforce. There are more farmers than that.

Back to the topic at hand, there are 7,635,000 unemployed Americans. There are 5,040,000 vacant jobs. The vast majority of those counted as unemployed theoretically could have a job, but for various reasons they don't. A big reason, as we've been discussing, is that they live in cities while the jobs are often in small towns.

Your story is sound for a tech professional who can jump around from job to job on a whim, but someone who is already struggling with unemployment has proven that the city cannot offer them what it can offer you. At the same time they don't even realize that other options exist (again, not rejecting the job, but not realizing that they exist at all).

> hose people do not believe the jobs exist at all, at any price point.

I used to live in a small town rural area. There were 4 employers of software engineers. I worked for one large one (~500? sw engineers), the other two were universities with poor pay and uninteresting tech prospects, and the fourth had 30 people total. I believe there's a fifth company now.

If I wanted to do more things with my career than work for one company for the next 20 years, I had to move. Remote jobs aren't very good for people without connections (because connections typically form through personal contact, something difficult in rural areas), and freelancing/consulting at the junior end is excellent for someone who excels in marketing themselves and building webapps.

Moving to a city lets me do things with my career as I want, not what the sole company wants. If the company crashes, my career is not in disarray and I don't have to move.

I simply can not recommend to anyone who is looking to make something of themselves to move to a rural area. The connections, niches, specialties, opportunities are just not found in rural areas. You have to build them up manually and it's simply not possible without deploying tremendous effort just to tread water in relation to the you-that-moved-to-a-city.

It's of course plausible that a senior person with a lifetime of connections and a deep specialty can live in Nowhere, USA, and have a solid life. But those simply don't hold true for junior/midlevel people.

A software developer does not exactly seem representative of the general population though, and especially not representative of the population that are in need of work! If we're just talking about what careers we have, then as a farmer, I imagine the employment prospects in the city are downright horrible for someone like me.

Employment prospects for farmers are dismal, as automation and modern methods make possible more land farmed under fewer people.

There are just more jobs in cities. this is why housing is such a terrible crunch in cities... crap regulations on housing development, but zillions of jobs and people crowding in for them.

> Employment prospects for farmers are dismal

You might be surprised, especially if you have the necessary skills. There is a farm labour shortage going on. I feel like you are just echoing my point here: That people don't even realize what jobs exist when they are outside the city.

> There are just more jobs in cities.

Well, of course there are. There are more people. However, the unemployment rate where I am is more than half that of the nearest large city (and population isn't decreasing). If you don't already have a job, rural areas are increasingly more likely to provide you one.

> this is why housing is such a terrible crunch in cities...

Not really, because when housing becomes expensive, your profitability from your job decreases to the point where it is no longer worth even doing. Sure, if you are software developer making six figures in SF, you are still okay (although possibly still selling yourself short[1]). But someone making minimum wage in SF? They're paying to have a job!

In truth, people want to be in cities for the lifestyle, especially for the large dating pool. Rural areas definitely fall short on those aspects.

[1] https://hired.com/state-of-salaries-2017

Strangely, I've never been hit up by a recruiter from Smallville. Though it's about 3/week for the city. I've worked as a carpenter for many years in both Smallville and ?Largeville? I never had a LinkedIn, or a resume online.

I feel like I worked with a lot of competent people with no options because in both locations, if you want a skilled labor job, you go in person to the office at 730 in the morning before the crew bosses leave for work.

This doesn't work if you live in another city or town. There's some Craigslist/ad in the paper but since that usually confined to a town or region that can be limited.

It's predominantly a employer's market with the employee reaching out to the employer, where we in tech in the city are mostly used to an employees market where the reverse is true. (Though all the jobs I've had, I've found myself and reached out to the employer)

Also, in a world where you are expected to change jobs for a raise or advancement, having options and access to other employment options is a big deal. In these two ways, the Smallville job market is underserved.

The wages are a part of it. Scottdale is less than 30 miles from where I live. I know Western Pennsylvania.

Experienced tradesmen can make really good money in this area but the downside is that they have to work long hours in harsh conditions. If they were paying more money, they'd be able to pull in qualified candidates from further away but they'd also attract more undesirables. They'd still have to separate the wheat from a lot of chaff.

Monetary compensation isn't all of it though. There is a surprisingly extensive problem with opiate addiction here in Western Pennsylvania. In the past 5 years, I have had four friends or acquaintances die from definite overdoses and several who are possible(likely) overdoses.

I'm from a suburban, middle-income area and we have heroin addicts all over the place. Ten years ago they were eating pills but with the crackdown on prescription pill mills, they have moved on to heroin.

And conversely, the people who say they can't find work should accept lower wages and move to where the work is.

Meanwhile, all of these people should keep their hands out of the pockets of the rest of us. (To be fair, the non-workers are far more likely to take my money than the non-employers.)

And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories. There's nothing inherently wrong with that either, but it doesn't solve the "we need jobs" problem that politicians claim to be trying to solve.

>> And then the calculus changes and it's overall cheaper for people to buy from overseas factories.

Import taxes can fix that. Our poorest citizens can't compete on price with the middle class in some of the poorest countries.

Cheap imports allow for cost savings so the money otherwise spent on expensive domestic goods could be made elsewhere.

We tried raising tariffs to protect local businesses and consumers in the 1930s and all we got was a lousy world war.

The only time broad tariffs genuinely worked in America's interests was under Jefferson, when his devastating tariff hikes jump-started the industrial economy.

I'm no history expert, but I think it's fair to say that a solution for a pre-industrial backwater might not work as well when it comes to a (then unimaginable) technological, military, and economic superpower.

To paraphrase Paul Krugman on government spending, trade is a two way street where your spending is my income and my spending is your income.

Its not that simple. Remember the the predominance of American economy is not self-generated: it is a part of the world economy. Now, when you create artificial barriers like import taxes, American businesses become less competitive in the world market, as such tarriffs do not exist there. Over time, they stop innovating until they reach a crisis point.

e.g. see what happened to the big American automakers. They have a monopoly on trucks in the US and yet they became uncompetitive to the point of almost going bankrupt.

Import taxes might give you a win in the short-term, but they are harmful over the long-term, especially when our trading partners retaliate. This makes American manufacturers / exporters less competitive in overseas markets. And as Jack Ma said "when trade stops, war starts". Reducing international trade is a Bad Thing in the general sense.

How do you know they can afford to do either? Many businesses are barely scraping by. I think many folks used to startups flush with VC cash are very disconnected from this reality.

Where do you think the better wages come from?

I'm just curious: what would it take, in terms of wages and working conditions, for you to move to a town in the middle of nowhere with 4200 people, 98% of whom are white, and where poverty and drug abuse are rampant?

I can't imagine taking a job there for anything less than upper seven figures, and even then I'd just work there for a year or two and then move back home and retire young.

I'm a Jewish atheist lesbian trans woman. In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words.

I can't imagine anyone who's not white moving to any place that's 98% white, and even most of my white friends would balk once they realized they wouldn't be able to get good sushi there. And of course, there's nothing to do, very few people to talk to who aren't on meth...

Jesus, I'm a pretty big fan of living in sparse places, but I still don't want to live any further away from civilization than an exurb of a major city.

People shouldn't downvote you. I'm a Jewish non-theist straight male, and I share a lot of the same concerns.

Mind, a small town without rampant poverty and drug abuse, and particularly in a non-religious area... that's another thing. It's easy to skip the stupid sushi shops, and if you live somewhere within driving distance of the sea you can buy fish and make your own damn sushi. It's especially easy to skip if a reasonable professional salary goes so much further, speeding up a timeline towards personal financial freedom.

But no, I definitely don't feel safe about living in a place where only the church-men are holding back violence born of altered minds and raw despair.

> In a town like that, I'd probably get lynched and/or raped for just one of those words.

These places have problems, and I understand that you are being hyperbolic, but it's a bit much. It's like a demographics-inverted version of Trump's inner city warzone stuff. They're just people, and they aren't that different.

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