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Comment by scottLobster | Hacker News Reader

Yeah it seems like there used to be a cultural value of putting people to work. Generally speaking you had to be a real fuck-up to not get a job. Maybe the jobs available weren't the best, but you could get something to pay for basic food/housing with little effort or credentialing. The attitude was, if you were a decent person and willing to work, "come by and we'll find something for you to do".

Now the zeitgeist in the job market seems to be "Why should we give you the gift of this job? Speak quickly and well, lest we cast you back into the void! You are a piece of shit until proven otherwise!"

Granted some of that was always around for more competitive jobs, and some fields like engineering seem relatively exempt (outside of FAANG-style interviews) due to demand, but given what I was taught to expect growing up by schools/parents vs what reality turned out to be, there's definitely been a shift.

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Well, there is the other side of some engineering, particularly with software, which is ageism. So those on the “wrong” side of the hump get laid off and can’t find work. Now it’s because they didn’t manage their career well enough, etc. etc. which translates to “you are a failure.” So what seems exempt is only exempt at the beginning of your career.

> Yeah it seems like there used to be a cultural value of putting people to work. Generally speaking you had to be a real fuck-up to not get a job. Maybe the jobs available weren't the best, but you could get something to pay for basic food/housing with little effort or credentialing. The attitude was, if you were a decent person and willing to work, "come by and we'll find something for you to do".

This might be a local thing, but here (central europe, balkans), there are currently enough jobs for basically anyone, even shitty jobs for really uneducated and slightly incompetent people and up to great jobs.

The problem I see most is housing... "society" expects you to get a job, get a wife, settle down, make 1, 2, 3 kids, have a dog etc. You've got a good enough job, average pay... want to move out? Still expect half (or even more) of the paycheck to go for rent. Want to buy a nice three bedroom apartment in the capital (nothing luxurious, just something normal, in a socialist apartment building, a few kilometers outside of city center)? That'll be 250-300 monthly paychecks. The boomers got their apartments or built their houses during socialist times, and now we have an extreme case of NIMBYism everywhere, even rural areas.

This means that a lot of young people stay at home... and if you're at home, you have a room, a bed and food... why bother working more than bare minimum (to cover entertainment costs, parties, drugs,...) if it's almost impossible to move out and still live normally.

Do you think this is a social change or a change in the reality of workers leverage? You seem to be implying that corporations used to give people jobs because it was the right thing to do, but now they are more selfish. I think laborers just don't have much leverage anymore.

Domestic workers losing leverage isn't a huge surprise given that the last 30 years have been about globalization.

Globalization is only part of it. Lots of things beyond globalization have titled power away from labor. Look at the locomotive labor unions being blocked from striking by the president and congress last month for a recent, egregious example.

The courts, too, largely moved towards corporation rights over workers rights/needs.

Probably too minimum wages are below the market clearing levels in most places. This evidenced by places seeing an increase in the number of employed when minimum wage increased.

Insofar as there is a cultural element, I'd say companies used to take more risk on average, at least at the individual worker level. My sense is having an extra pair of hands to help used to be seen as an opportunity, now every single pair of hands must have a concrete, justified purpose before they even get an interview.

Bean-counting and cost cutting has always been present in business, but, likely due to the rise of modern computing and metrics/data gathering capabilities, it seems to have been taken to an unproductive extreme.

Of course that's only the social component. Globalization and the hollowing out of labor unions (at least in the US) have also certainly contributed.

> Now the zeitgeist in the job market seems to be "Why should we give you the gift of this job? Speak quickly and well, lest we cast you back into the void! You are a piece of shit until proven otherwise!"

Last I heard, there's plenty of businesses that are deseprate to hire people (restaurants etc.).

Are they sufficiently desperate to pay a reasonable wage with reasonable vacations? Not in my experience.

It seems reasonable enough for the multitude of people who work in these businesses already...

That’s the case for the standard jobs that people with a business/english/history degree compete for. There’s so much supply of college grads.

But, if you look at trade jobs (plumber, electrician, etc.) then there’s still tons of demand and they pay well.

But no one wants to do that.

This almost certainly varies with the specific labor market, but what I've heard anecdotally is that there's tons of demand for experienced tradespeople, but the prospects being fresh out of school aren't great unless you have connections.

When I was in Kentucky visiting family a year or two back, there was a big billboard from a plumbing company looking for plumbers… barely paying more than the local McDonald’s at the time. Then there was a factory advertising on TV that they we’re desperate for semi skilled industrial workers… paying less than the local McDonald’s.

From my perspective, trades are effectively gatekept (somewhat purposefully but also as a function of the business). It's a damned-if-you-do/don't situation with licensing headaches on one side, and the prevailing reliance on networks for finding both jobs and work on the other; the former a way to rein in the volatility of "vendor" availabilty and work quality caused by the latter, but with the side effect of raising the barrier to entry (and the cost of training for already wary bosses). "Trust" concerns on an encounter-to-encounter basis are too important for the robust market you would like. I've talked to two people who were looking for construction workers: one was a family friend who knows me well and was somewhat cool on me applying, especially after finding out the physical difficulties I'd had at a retail job that had turned out to be more demanding than I'd anticipated. The other was a stranger who freely gave out his number, but who implied that there'd likely be a soft hazing period to determine if I, unlike many other past applicants, "really wanted to work." $20/hr sounds great, but how much of that is going to future physical therapy? (I never texted back.)

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here, jobless, with an art degree (a few credits short of a sculpture minor), watching woodworking Youtube videos in my garage-less Millennial apartment. I tend to think enthusiasm is not really the issue.

> "Why should we give you the gift of this job? Speak quickly and well, lest we cast you back into the void! You are a piece of shit until proven otherwise!"

This is so damaging to our culture. Also, getting really sick of these insanely specific reqs, then when qualified people don't show up begging on their hands and knees: "nobody wants to work anymore".

The US unemployment rate is 3.7%. Even the fuck-ups can get a job if they want one.

Keep in mind that this number does not include people who are not looking for work, for example people who have given up looking for work because they have not been able to find a job.

That number does not reflect those you seem to be referring to. The unemployment rate reflects the ratio of the number of people registered as beneficiaries of unemployment insurance to the number of people registered as employed.

It does not include: - those who don't work and can't benefit from unemployment insurance (e.g., anyone fired from work for misconduct, - those who don't work and are not looking for work - those who don't work and can't work

That makes much more people overall. A recent Pew research published in 2020 estimated that an estimated 29% of unemployed americans are included in that number.[1]

1.https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/24/not-all-une...

No, you don't understand how the BLS counts unemployed people. They are counted as unemployed even if they were fired for misconduct.

https://www.bls.gov/cps/lfcharacteristics.htm#unemp

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