Why Aren't People Working? (Personal anecdotes only)

In My Humble Opinion
401

I can relate to that bloggers story. I’ve worked at plenty of companies where I joined because of some big growing initiative, only to see it fizzle out after a year or so. It’s frustrating, particularly if you like what you’re doing.

One comment is that the blogger maybe shouldn’t have been surprised that his group got cut. While “analytics teams that cut costs” sounds like a worthwhile investment in lean times, it’s been my experience that they are still a cost center and executives who are more directly tied to developing the products (like the Facebook social media platform or the Meta-verse VR thing) don’t really like a bunch of beancounters showing them where they need to cut corners.

I suppose the advice I have is if someone feels they are one of 50 grossly overworked and underpaid payroll clerks at Global MegaCorp Inc, they might want to think about what the next step in their career looks like and how to get there. And that may mean changing jobs or companies.

The problem with job hopping is that it’s tough to job hop to something other than a lateral move doing the same thing. Companies tend to look for someone who they think is a perfect fit for what they want to do, not someone who has to learn how to do it.

402

I and workplace are lucky, mutual loyalty exist. But, a big difference is, I think, I’ve been with the company (county government) for 31 years, and am quickly approaching retirement. I make a good dollar, and am trying to automate the things I do and am building video trainings for it. They in return let me do my thing and work from home.

I put in my 40 hours, sometimes more, but with my schedule. I’m trying to not get too involved in any big projects that can take years to develop deploy and manage. TPTB understand this.

403

If you are a payroll clerk, you don’t have a career. You have a job.
About 80 percent of all workers don’t have a career…they have jobs.

In most jobs, you are static, (i.e. stuck in one position, without much chance for promotion), or maybe you have one and only one possibility to advance. A teacher is static, (except for one of the 50 teachers in a school who might advance to principal.) An insurance adjuster is static. A salesman in a huge company is probably static, (except for one of the 50 who will become manager of the other 49.)An HR employee is probably is static,(except for one who may move up one notch.)

And of course, minimum wage workers are static.

And my question for this thread is about the static jobs, not careers.
Before covid, Walmart paid $9 an hour, fast food paid $7-- And they were fully staffed. Now they are paying about $16 an hour, and they can’t find workers. I don’t get it.
Sure, as we’ve seen in this thread, lots of boomers retired early. But those were mostly people who had careers, not jobs. And retirement was to be expected, in any case–boomers are all over age 65 now, with many of them closer to 75.

But what’s up with the disappearing Walmart and fast-food employees?

404

The Baby Boom is generally considered to include people born as late as 1964 which means the last of them will be turning 60 this year.

Before covid, Walmart paid $9 an hour, fast food paid $7-- And they were fully staffed. Now they are paying about $16 an hour, and they can’t find workers.

Whether they were fully staffed pre-COVID depends on where you are - but lots of the people who work that type of job don’t need the money to live. They are high school and college students working for spending money, or retirees who want something to do with their time and a little extra money or people who live in a household where another income is supporting the household who are working to pay for vacations and such. And some realized during COVID that they really didn’t need that money and it wasn’t worth the way fast food and retail workers are often treated - how much per hour would you need to be paid to take a job where you had “call in shifts” where you had to be available to work Wednesday and call in Wednesday morning to see if you were needed but not get paid unless you were actually told to come to work ?

405

That’s the thing. This kind of junk is either from the hiring managers being clueless in defining the job, or HR running the show and overriding any tech person who tells them that the job requirements are junk. In either case, a red flag.

Degrees always counted for some years of experience. My last company had a totally different recruiting system for new college grads and experienced people, and getting job reqs for new college grads was easier - so we brought in lots of new PhDs, which worked out great.
Why not hire from c co-op program? You aren’t guessing about quality then. Makes oerfect sense to me. We had an excellent intern program, and a high percentage of my interns took jobs, good since the company did not have that great a reputation (rightfully so) and it was a competitive market.

I’ve seen stuff from CIOs 35 years ago who were annoyed that schools were not doing exactly this. They’d rather hire someone with knowledge of a specific app than someone with good general knowledge. Perhaps some schools are giving in.

As for stacks, I taught data structures so I get you. But there is a lot more to learn in CS today than when we went to college, A lot of stuff is built into languages these days so people use these data structures naturally, or they are all built into objects.
When I was in school what is now called computer engineering and computer science were combined. Now I wonder how many people with CS degrees know what an interrupt is or ever coded an interrupt driver, or wrote in assembly language. On the other hand new grads know networking and databases better than I did, since they weren’t even a thing back then.

406

If by “before covid” you mean, like, 2014, sure. But the tighter labor market had begun to noticeably impact the retail and restaurant sectors by 2019. My formerly 24/7 grocery store started closing at 1:00, then 11:00, then 10:00, all before covid.

They have other jobs.

407

I don’t know about WalMart … but around here (SE Louisiana, some of the lowest wages in the U.S.), fast food employees have been north of $10/hr since the late 2000s (~2008-09). Immediately pre-COVID, it was up to $13/hr to start with no experience. The shift up in fast food wages roughly coincided with the almost 100% reduction in high school students taking such work.

“Local teens working the fast food joints for spending money” is generally a relic of the 1980s and 1990s around here. There are a few one-off exceptions here and there, but generally today’s fast food employee is a twenty-something with little education but a good amount of life responsibility (single parent, having to contribute to multi-adult household, caring for an infirmed love one, etc.).

408

That’s a great insight stated concisely.

To be a well-rounded developer the number of courses needed exceeds four years. A new grad will have gaps in their knowledge by the sheer size of the field.

409

And honestly, not enough people in HR. Way back when, recruiters had to recruit. HR people had to read resumes. And it isn’t easy - I took a contract job to help a law firm hire an IT director because the partners knew they were way out of their league in reviewing resumes. Three days, five hundred resumes, gone through by hand. Some were easy to discount, so the first day was getting rid of 400 resumes. But 100 of them were “need to take a closer look” Twenty of them were “we should look at this person.” They wanted to interview five (and one of them was horrible, but was the son of a friend of a partner or something - so they really interviewed four). Two of them I knew personally (we didn’t interview either of them - one didn’t have the technical skills to be the IT director for a group that had three employees - he was used to managing 40 and not doing a lick of coding/troubleshooting/installing himself - the other didn’t have the personality for when an attorney throws a shoe at you because he got a virus on his computer browsing porn.)

Now, big firms don’t read resumes - they scan for keywords with a trimmed down HR department.

410

And on the other, other hand, it’s impossible to know everything. Today, it’s hard to keep up on new tech that you do know.

This is why we have network people, sys analysts, programmers, hardware people, customer support and a myriad of other descriptions. Nothing wrong with that. We can at least communicate with each other, not exactly knowing how the other does their job.

411

With no disrepect meant …

The fact that you and your company considered PhDs to be “new college grads” speaks to the rarified level at which your group operated.

When most of us in biz are talking about “new college grads for entry-level positions” we mean folks with BAs & BSs. Eager young things that will need a bunch of training and a bunch more experience to begin to do anything useful.

412

I’ve always LOVED (deep sarcasm) getting hired to project manage a project no one actually wanted to do. Often governance related (we have to do this to keep our contracts, meet compliance, etc), always underfunded, usually low priority, with several executives trying to figure out how not to do it at all (and of course, the best way not to do it is to fail at it). Its why I don’t project manage anymore. You know you won’t be there in a year or so, and you are pretty sure the blame is going to get pinned on you for failure.

413

Found out in a meeting today that there’s a strong chance for another round of layoffs sometime this spring/summer, in the middle of record sales and profits. The only reason I didn’t get hit by the last one was because I was the point my boss put his foot down with a threat of leaving (not entirely selfless, as doing so would have left him with only two direct reports). So I’m in the mode of cutting my losses, tidying up my projects that can be completed in a decent timeframe, notating the ones that can’t, and actively sending the resume around.

Because I know what sticking through below-market pay, exponentially increasing workloads, and loyalty are about to get me: a boot out the door and “a good reference.”

414

I strongly disagree with the concept of ‘static jobs’. Sure, there are *some jobs that are truly dead-end with no opportunity for advancement through personal effort, but they are few and far between. And even those jobs can help build skills and experience for a better one.

Since this is an anecdote thread, I’ll give you a couple:

When I was in college I worked part-time at Radio Shack. One of our customers had purchased a business computer system, and was having trouble with it. The other salesmen would scatter when this guy came in, because you can’t earn commission while solving tech problems. So I’d step up and help him. And yes, it was annoying sometimes when I’d see another salesman racking up commission sales while I was earning nothing.

Well, one day the guy came in and offered me a job. He was the director of the Dolphin Center at WEM and a biologist, and had purchased the computer for a cool project to teach dolphins to communicate better with people. He got in over his head with the tech and didn’t know what to do, and the only person he could think of was the one already solving his problems: Me.

So I became the technical lead of a Dolphin communications research project at age 24. I was still in college, so I was allowed to choose my own hours. It was a dream job, and I got it by stepping up when others wouldn’t.

My brother had a grade 10 education. But he was a hard worker. He worked day jobs or manual labor jobs alongside jouyneymen and such. One of them noticed how hard he worked and helped him figure out how to get a GED, then get his journeyman ticket. My brother became a skilled tradesman, then a foreman. He made more money than I did most of his life. In the meantime, a thousand other laborers came and went unnoticed because they did the minimum work expected, then probably complained about their ‘dead end’ jobs.

My mother had to leave nursing to look after her kids when my dad buggered off, and took a job at a local corner grocery for minimum wage. Other workers came and went, but she stayed, eventually taking on more and more responsibility. One day the manager/owner announced that he had purchased another store across the city to expand, and he made my mom the manager of the store.

The pay wasn’t that great, since it was a small store. But my mom learned how to run a grocery store, how and where to purchase goods, manintain inventory, handle staffing, etc. Soo when her modest duplex went up in value, she sold it and put a down payment on a little store of her own with an attached home, and lived the rest of her life as her own boss.

There is no job so menial that someone who stands out as excellent cannot leverage it into something better. But if you take the attitude that many jobs are ‘static’ and therefore not worth the effort, it will be self-fulfilling.

415

And for good reason. My youngest worked for Target in high school. They couldn’t manage to schedule her for times when school wasn’t in session, much less work around her activities. When she said something to her manager, her manager said “your job should be the most important thing in your life.” To a high schooler! A job at Target is not the most important thing in the life of college bound high school senior. Heck, it probably doesn’t make the top FIVE.

416

Yeah, Sam, that was a LONG time ago. I got into IT the same way - PCs were “new” and nobody really knew anything - someone who was smart and willing to figure things out went a long way.

It still happens, but its not nearly as likely to happen. There are fewer “Mom and Pop” grocery stores willing to put someone in as manager because they’ve worked their way up. A young friend of mine got a job during Covid working at a fast food place. They loved him - hard worker, showed up. In no time at all he was promoted to assistant manager! So they could pay him a salary. And they strung him along for three more years with “we are going to make you a manager.” Manager jobs opened up during that time - and they hired people with college degrees - which my friend hadn’t finished. They finally told him “it isn’t going to happen unless you go back to school.” He’s back in school now because fast food is a dead end without a college degree.

417

Well, consider the math of $16 times 40 hours per week, vs $7 times 40 hours per week. Used to be, if you wanted to make about as much as the $16/hour guy in the same week, you needed two different $7/hour jobs. We know lots of people used to work 2 or 3 minimum wage jobs, for 60, 70, 80 hours per week, because that’s what they needed to do to pay rent. How many of those people are now working just one such job? Even just a 10% change would leave lots of jobs unfilled.

418

And the original point was, sure, one person in a hundred might move up, but there’s no room for anyone else. If every person who ever worked there hustled their butts, and opened their own store, you’d have a city with 10,000 convenience stores - and most of them would be losing money every day they were open.

419

Some of them are dead. In the US, somewhere between 400,000 and 600,000 working age people have died from COVID. That skews low-wage, so disproportionately has taken out fast-food and retail workers.

420

That’s true - but it’s also true that there’s a limit and not everyone can leverage it into something better. When I was working, we had one supervisor for every 7 entry level professionals. One manager for three supervisors ( so 21 entry level) . One regional director for every six managers and so on. Which meant that only 1 person out of 7 would become a supervisor and so on. Not everyone who worked with your mother when she was first hired could have become a manager, no matter how good they were , not even if they all stayed for years.