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comment by rob05c

    just 11 clowns out of 14 who were selected from 531 applicants

Is there really a shortage? Or are employers demanding higher quality than the market supplies?

I think this is becoming endemic in many industries. Employers say "we can't find enough workers," while demanding ability far in excess of what the market can supply. The market can supply the workers they need, just not at the level they demand.

I wonder if it's caused by globlisation, or something else. But I definitely think it's happening, in more and more industries. It breaks Capitalism, and it exacerbates our already broken economy.





user-inactivated  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Employers say "we can't find enough workers," while demanding ability far in excess of what the market can supply. The market can supply the workers they need, just not at the level they demand.

They tend to say things like, "We can't find enough workers that can write well enough to do their jobs," or, "We can't find enough workers that know how to think well enough to operate independently in a work environment."

So what they're saying has to do with our education system and is valid, depending on your point of view.

rob05c  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    We can't find enough workers that can write well enough to do their jobs
Eh, I was more referring to employers who say "We can't find enough software engineers who have 10 years of Ruby on Rails experience and know mongo, django, d3, iOS, backbone, jquery, coffeescript, php, java, groovy, and scala. And are passionate about Bioinformatics!"
user-inactivated  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Solution, job training. Know zero about programming but I assume that with fluency in certain languages comes a better ability to pick up similar ones.

rob05c  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Solution, job training
Yep.

Although it's more complex than that. Some employers cry wolf from lack of skills they're unwilling to train.

But some complain about intellectual level. This is especially prevalent in software; I don't know about other fields.

Interviews need to select. If a CS graduate doesn't understand OO or recursion, yeah, you shouldn't hire them, they probably can't be taught.

But the selection process has recently become unbalanced. Interviews contain problems which can only be solved by the brightest 1%. They occasionally find that 1%, so they say "clearly they're out there" and refuse to hire anyone else.

I think the underlying problem is a combination of employers being unwilling to train, and being unwilling to settle for the top 30-50% because globalisation has made the top 1% imminently visible.

How do we fix it? I dunno. Adam Smith thinks it'll fix itself. Maybe it will. We'll see.

user-inactivated  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It will ... maybe. The process of blanketing the entire world as opposed to western Europe with a free market is going to be long and painful for everyone and only in the extreme long run (hundreds of years) will the highest gains be realized. You're right.

humanodon  ·  3717 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If we take a look at certain professions that were common in the past and now are not, I think we'll find that it often lines up to what you're saying.

For example, cobblers used to be much more common, though not overly so (from what I have read anyway) as making shoes is a technical skill and a painstaking one at that. However, everyone who could buy shoes once went to cobblers. Now, (in the Western hemisphere anyway) custom shoes are extremely expensive and tend to be held to an exceptional standard of quality.

But yeah, perhaps there is a clown version of "entry-level position" but "5 years minimum of related experience required".