Who does maintenance and repair on the homes? I assume you have contracted that out?
Probably more so; who can your average McDonald’s do without, if they were to suddenly win the lottery and not show up ever again? The general manager, or the Jr. Burger Flipper?
To segue into another misconception I saw upthread- the reason that the manager makes a relative lot of money to Jr. Burger Flipper isn’t because we denigrate the value of the work Jr. Burger Flipper does, it’s because Jr. Burger Flipper is much more replaceable than the manager. They can go hire just about anyone off the street, and have them flipping burgers in a day or less. Thus, Jr. Burger Flipper is easily replaceable; so much so, that if you were to pay him say… $15 an hour, you’d be throwing money down the toilet, because there are other people out there who are willing to do the same job, to the same quality, for the same number of hours per week that he is. Why would you stick with Jr. Burger Flipper, if you could get some other person for less money who is equally capable of doing the job?
Meanwhile, some tech company somewhere has a programmer who knows how to write microcode for specific processors that they develop. There are a handful of people in the country who can do that. His skill set is very scarce, very valuable and he’s hard to replace as a result, so he’s paid big money in order to stay.
Pay has nothing to do with anyone’s feelings about the worth of jobs; it’s almost always related to the abundance or scarcity of people who can do that job effectively, at least in the realms of middle-management or below.
Depends, some things a tenant will do for money off rent. AC and such yeah it’s a repair guy.
Burger flippers are a bit less fungible than that. There are quality differences, and not just in skill, but in motivation, morale, and attitude. It is worth paying more for a better burger flipper, than to pay the minimum, and get the minimum employee.
And, managers are a bit more fungible as well. It’s not that hard to train someone, with the right attitudes and motivations, to manage a store.
I’d also point out that your typical FF manager actually does not make much more than the hourly employees, and if an entry level manager, often makes less per hour.
I’ve worked at MW jobs, and just the act of being paid MW made me less motivated. I’ve worked at jobs where they pay the employees well, and the same ones that have mediocre performance at MW are exceptional for just a couple bucks an hour more.
There really is a difference in quality of employee based on pay, even at the lowest scales. If, when I were a fast food manager, I could have paid my burger flippers $15 an our, I certainly could have gotten value out of that, rather than the barley over MW I was allowed to pay, and get sullen employees who call off all the time, refuse to put down their phones, and do the bare minimum work, and that only if I am constantly on their backs.
Now that I run my own place, I pay significantly over the industry average, and I get significantly better than average production.
He also gets paid much more for doing a much easier job. Burger flipper would be very, very happy to take that job as well, and the scarcity of the programer’s skillset is artificially created by the high costs of entry for a college education.
I could train a burger flipper to do the programmer’s job in probably well under a year, and get value out of him for most of that time in training. It is that we need more burger flippers than we need programmers, and so we turn that higher demand for a much harder job into an excuse to pay less, and we do that by limiting the burger flipper’s access to developing those skill sets that would allow him a easier, more lucrative job. But, as you said, there is only a demand for a handful of people that can be able to do that in the entire country.
Of course, if everyone had the same access to developing those skillsets, then the burger flipper job would actually pay much more than the programming job, as, if given the choice, which would you choose? That would upset the economy, as we need more burger flippers than we need programmers, and the labor market is the opposite of every other market, in that the more demand there is for a job, the less it pays.
Given a decent UBI and free college education, you’d have to pay much, much more for a burger flipper than for a programmer.
Also, given the current state of the economy, where unemployment is at historic lows, it is actually getting hard to find a decent burger flipper. I’m not in the fast food industry anymore, but many of my friends are, and it is becoming a more and more common complaint that they cannot staff their stores, as no one really wants to do that shit job at any pay, much less what they are allowed by corporate guidelines that are set by people who are making an order of magnitude more. There are other, (usually smaller and with less corporate overhead) start up places that are willing to pay much more. Part of the reason that they are willing and able to pay more is because they are not supporting a giant pyramidal structure of a bunch of executives who make as much as the entirety of a few stores’ payroll each.
Pay has nothing to do with feelings about the worth of jobs, it has everything to do with careful analysis of the worth of a job. I call my employees “money catchers”. They are the ones that actually produce most of the production, without them, I would be far less profitable. (I know this because my first year, I had no employees, and I worked really hard for no money, and now I have a dozen employees, and I still work hard, but slightly less, and for much better money.) I pay them as much as I am able to afford to pay them, and they work as hard as they can to make me more money. Every time I give out raises, I end up becoming more profitable. (It’s a vicious cycle.)
And, we have brought up the fact that we are not just talking about middle management and below, but also about upper management, senior management, and the ownership class, who are often very overcompensated for their “skill set.” The skill set that they have is the ability to write, or at least influence, their paycheck, and has very little to do with their actual ability to increase the productivity or profitability of their organization. Many of these people could be replaced with a burger flipper, and no one would even notice.
For instance, if our fellow poster Littleman decided to increase his rent, he would get more money. He would not be contributing any more to his tenants, to the community, or to the economy, but he would be viewed as being “better” because he has more money. If you then replaced Littleman with your local burger flipper, there would be very little difference.
So, in conclusion, and maybe TL;DR, employees themselves, even at low pay scales, are not entirely fungible, as they do have individual attitudes and skills that contribute differently to the organization and are more motivated by better pay, professionals with specialized skills are not entirely fungible, but they largely can be if adequate educational and training systems are in place, and senior executive and owner positions are almost entirely fungible, and often times an entirely unnecessary drain on the organization’s resources.
No, you couldn’t. I think you best stick to talking about dog grooming - you don’t know anything about IT.
Regards,
Shodan
I think something that goes unsaid throughout your piece, but is very important, is that a place that pays employees higher than average, is also likely to value and treat those employees better than average. Treating and paying employees well is an excellent strategy to get good workers. Obviously, lots of companies don’t care. Would Amazon be even more profitable if they treated and paid their warehouse workers better? Maybe, but they clearly don’t think so.
The other thing that is important to recognize is that all of these things exist in a marketplace. Employees and employers aren’t fungible in the way a gallon of gas is, but a place paying below market rates will find it difficult to keep employees. That employer will find they’re left with empty positions and employees who for some reason aren’t worth the market rate. This also explains why more skilled jobs and jobs that require more experience can demand a higher wage. A programmer with 15 years of experience and a high demand skill set will make much more money than a former burger flipper with an associates degree in computer science and no years of experience. (Maybe in 15 years that former burger flipper will be able to demand the same pay, but not yet.)
Of course, in some places the market can get very distorted. For example, I feel that teachers are paid less than other jobs with comparable training requirements and responsibility. There can also be big distortions at the high end. CEO pay has been increasing like crazy in the last 30+ years, mostly because it seems companies find it prestigious to pay their CEOs lots of money. Is Aaron Rodgers worth $76 million? There is only one Aaron Rodgers.
The same goes for the landlord example. A landlord can’t simply raise rent above what the market will bear and expect to make any money. The landlord will have no tenants. If a landlord asks below market rate, they will have lots of prospective tenants, and can be picky, but at are earning less money.
I know about training, I know a whole lot more about training than you probably know about IT, and I know more than enough about IT that I can say I know I know more about it than you know about training.
Sure, you needed a 4 year degree in order to show your bona fides, and to get your well rounded education and to show that you are prepared to then learn your job once you got it, but we are not talking about giving someone an entire general education in this particular case, but on the job training for a specific task.
Programming isn’t really all that hard. Once you are able to think algorithmically, and able to write pseudo code and documentation, then the rest is just translating it into the actual language of your particular compiler.
If I handed someone the specs on the necessary algorithms and documentation, and all they needed to do was to translate that into the necessary code to get the expected results, why should it take a 4 year education for that skill?
Besides that, should the burger flipper be given the same opportunity that someone like you was given, to go to a college for a full degree in computer programming, then it would take even less time to train them how to do your job.
What do you think would take so long for you to learn, the creation of algorithms and documents, or the translating of that into a language that the compiler recognizes?
Nah, what you are talking about is simply gatekeepers to the industry, keeping out the undesirables and keeping the supply of people with what really is little more than a basic vocational skill limited, so that you can continue to demand a higher pay than the actual difficulty of those skills should call for.
If you lost your job, and had to go work at a different company that uses a different system, and so uses a new language that you have never heard of, how long would it take you to get up to speed?
Also, out of curiosity, if I were to offer you a burger flipper job, what would I have to pay you for you to take it? Would you take it for the same salary that you are making now? For 50% more? 100% more? Name your price that you would demand in order to take up a job that you currently look down on.
They are making announcements of massive raises and such, so maybe they do think so.
One thing I do like about the amazon model (from what I’ve heard) is that they do virtually no investment on new hires until they have shown that they are actually able to show up for work on a consistent basis. With eh current crop of millennials coming into the labor force, it is rather hard to find anyone who is willing to actually show up and do their job.
But much of that is social expectations and demands of perceived superiority due to seniority. I’ve seen plenty of examples of when the much better employee was the fresh out of college kid who makes a fifth of what the senior techs make, even though he is out producing them.
The command the money because they demand the money. They get away with that because that is what is expected.
I personally think that teachers should be paid much, much, much better than they are, as well as being given much more support in the classroom. Doubling or even tripling their pay seems fair, considering the product that they are creating is our future.
CEO’s should command more money than their workers. Maybe even as much as a dozen or times more than the lowest paid, for the biggest companies. Making thousands of times what your average worker makes ensures that you have no realistic connection to the company.
But, rent is a pretty inelastic commodity. I have employees who complain that their rent goes up, but they don’t go somewhere else, because the rent is pretty high there as well. Even if they find something slightly cheaper, moving is enough of a pain that they will put up with it to some extent.
Pretty much right on!
With a little room to argue little bs exceptions or little add-ons and buts, and different scenarios, but in essence right on. We’d have a 400 page book to cover all that.
And yes I could probably raise it to make another $500 a month anytime without changing much and I certainly wouldn’t be increasing my “production”
I could be replaced by most burger flippers. Though I have seen some people who are so incredibly incompetent they would manage to screw it up.
That’s neither here nor there though.
Years ago, I was working on a consulting assignment, flying back and forth to Seattle to write SQL queries. My client came up to me to see what I was doing. He said something like “That doesn’t look all that hard. I don’t see why we pay you so much money.”
I replied “It’s not that hard. If you like, I can go back to New York and let you guys take over.”
"…but we don’t know how to do what you are doing.
“That’s why you pay me so much.”
It’s like that old joke where a TV repairman was called in* to fix someone’s set. He looked at it a minute, thumped the left rear corner and the picture came back. He then presented a bill for $20 to the owner. “Why, this is outrageous! I want an itemized bill!” he objected, so the repairman rewrote it.[ul]
[li]Thumping the TV – $2[/li][li]Knowing where to thump it – $18[/li][/ul]
*I told you this was old.
Hilariously wrong. I know more about training than you do about IT, I know more about IT than you do about training, and in particular I know more about training in IT than you do.
Says the guy who hasn’t spent the better part of forty years doing it, managing it, and teaching it.
It takes more than a year to learn to do this, and you are not going to be particularly productive the first year.
You need to read a book called IIRC The Mythical Man-Month. It’s about project planning and management in the IT world.
One of its truths is this - ‘adding inexperienced people to a project makes it go slower, not faster’. Inexperienced people need not only to be shown what to do and how to do it, they need to have their work debugged, and that takes time away from the experienced people.
I have worked on projects where the management thought they could “train by doing” and thereby get something for nothing. It never works out, and it usually get suggested by someone with no experience in the field. Like you.
Regards,
Shodan
:blink:
K9, the devil is in the details. It’s not just if/then, and do/while. That’s flipping burgers.
It’s not just figuring out the path to get from A to Z. It’s all the stuff in between that will trip you up along the way.
It’s BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRXYUVWXY. Add data needed from other sources (be it code libraries or data or what ever the hell), services called, multiple languages per application, client/server weirdness, where, how, who and what is going to do the heavy lifting. And security. That’s just the start.
Sure, someone can ‘learn’ Python in a few days of class, but that’s just the hair on the bear.
I certainly don’t want to scare anyone away from programming. Much of it IS simple logic. Getting it all to work together is the trick.
My previous place of work was a GIS conversion company. Take paper maps and convert to GIS. I ended up doing all the training for my shift. Wrote a training document. Was promoted to do all hiring. My boss said that if they have sat in front of a computer before, hire them.
That worked out well. :rolleyes: I left, they are now out of business.
Once again, only because they are not educated in what you are. Education is not a naturally limited resource.
And how long does it take to learn where to thump it? Did it require a 4 year college degree? Does he claim that it would take decades of experience to replicate the feat?
I’ve thumped quite a number of CRTs, and even some old school picture tube style TV’s in my day. Not that hard. Takes maybe a dozen thumps over a lifetime or a CRT to get a pretty good idea of where and how to thump it to get the picture and colors to realign.
Were I the client, I would have asked what to charge to fix it so it didn’t need to be thumped anymore, as that’s not a fix.
I am not talking about getting someone up to having decades of experience, I am talking about the 4 year degree. That is what I am saying could really be done in a year, and could be done for far cheaper for both school and student.
That the burger flipper needs to take 4 years and tens of thousands of dollars in debt before he is able to start at your job is what I am objecting to. I am not objecting that on the job experience is incredibly valuable, in fact, I am specifically saying that it is more valuable than the academic experience that serves as a gateway to your industry.
That time and expense that many people cannot afford is an artificial barrier to entry for people in your field. You were not better than the guy that ended up flipping burgers, you just had better opportunities.
The question is how do we give everyone a free college education, and my answer is that most people do not need a full college education, they need vocational training, and computer programming does fall under vocational level training.
And yes, I’ve trained well over a thousand people in everything from burger flipping to managing burger flippers to cable installation to computer repair.
You just explained why no company ever hires and trains any employees.
Or maybe you just described why you don’t put inexperienced people directly onto complex projects, and that you need to do some level of training on them first. That’s not something that many companies understand these days, I’ve seen.
Did you start directly on a big project, or did you receive some training first?
Well, no, not like me, as I did not suggest any such thing. You don’t train by doing and get something for nothing, you train by training, and that is actually an investment by the company into the employee. Then there are many things that you can only learn on the job, and cannot learn in an academic setting, and if you are trying to claim that on the job training never works out then you are simply wrong. I assume that is not what you are trying to say, as that would be something that someone with no experience training whatsoever would say.
I can only assume that you are not saying that you graduated from college with your 4 year degree, and you were done learning, that you didn’t get any further training, even thought it seems to be specifically what you are saying. Can you clarify your position on whether or not job experience has any value?
As someone who tried to learn computer programming and failed at it, I think some of you are over-estimating the ability of a person with average intelligence to learn programming good enough to make a career out it.
I can’t say whether or how any of this applies specifically to IT , I haven’t really done any since I got my CCNA back in 1999.
The principle is sound though in at least some fields. As a mechanic or body guy I could Certainly train someone while getting work out of them. In these fields it’s somewhat easy for an experienced person to do a diagnoses, know what needs done, and direct almost anyone to do it.
They’d certainly make more than a burger flipper while doing so and eventually would know what to do themselves.
While many jobs requiring degrees , I’m sure have a high load of non-productive time to prime the person to be trainable in the first place. In those jobs, the prospective IT guy, doctor, whatever it might be has to be the one to fund the non productive time ( schooling) instead of the company. Unless the company could guarantee they’d have the employee for x amount of years then they can’t eat the training and still be profitable.
I think one thing that does go towards k9s point though is, to be honest much of that schooling is really not essential to the job.
My mother often uses the example of her class on , I think a panoramic x-ray machine.
She says she could easily train someone to operate it in a day or two, it’s not much harder than taking a picture. Yet while studying to be a hygenist she had a course some six weeks long where she had to learn what every part was and what it does. She compares this to needing to know how an engine works in order to learn to drive a car.
She thinks it’s a waist of her time and education when she’s doing panos when I think certain assistants are allowed to do it with a short course , and basically any burger flipper could do it with less training than burger flipping takes and be paid vastly more money.
I get that, my first academic attempt was in computer programming. I only got partly through my 3rd year before I ran out of money and had to take a year off before I could go back, then that year stretched to two, then three…
It wasn’t simple, and there were a number of complexities that do require more than a few days to master. However, I also paid $2,200 and spent many hours a week taking a theater class, along with its associated homework, as it was one of the classes that was required for General Education credits, same with a psychology class ( very interesting, but not related or helpful to the actual field I was going for), three english classes and I forget exactly how many, but a few for a foreign language requirement.
I also worked two “part time” jobs for well over 50 hours a week combined.
If you had just let me take nothing but computer and math classes, and not required me to spend a large chunk of my time supporting myself and minimum payments on student loans, yes, I could have easily completed all the coursework in a year or less. Let me do most of my studying from home, not having to fight with roommates over whether they should be quiet when others are trying to sleep or study, and it would be even easier.
So, yes, that is why I am saying that you can train a burger flipper to be a programmer in under a year. I’m not saying that they will be the best, not saying that they will be able to problem solve and come up with the most optimal algorithms for a task, or even that they would be able to complete a complex task without assistance. They will not have the decades of experience.
But, at the same time, someone with more experience is actually a better burger flipper than someone without. Part of this whole thing is the specific assertion that burger flippers are completely fungible, and programmers are not. There actually is more than just if/then and do/while to burger flipping (and associated burger flipping like activities.)
And that is why I am saying that the programmers demand for a higher pay than a burger flipper is based more on the artificial constraints in opening the gateway to the industry than on the actual relative scarcity of people willing to do the job.
It is not just computer programming, though. There are many people who would have no interest in it, even if the training was free and the job was lucrative. Computer programming vs burger flipping is the example that is used here, but the same goes for many other vocational skills that got bloated into bachelor’s degrees.
Yeah but if you made the education efficient there would be twice as many programmers so they’d make half the money…for the exact same job.
Plus those vested in universities would only get half the money from the currently burger flipping, aspiring programmer.
Hell if the information needed isn’t sensitive, once again it’s often simply coded by people overseas for far less money.