> With 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 each day, businesses are scrambling to find ways to slow an exodus of the most experienced employees and ensure that they pass along their knowledge before they leave.
Knowledge transfer should be baked into the day-to-day culture of work, not something desperately scrambled for during someone's last week. Those few companies with meaningful training and mentoring programs know this.
> The plant [...] has an apprentice program for millennials, but there’s a shortage of Generation X workers. “We’ve got a big gap in the middle, so we have to keep talented people in their 60s a little longer,”
Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good. Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just offer a little more money to find skilled mid-career workers nowadays.
With so many people under-employed or out of work, it borders on insulting to claim there's a shortage of workers.
It reminds me of the Porsche 911 shortage I'm facing around here. I've been to dealer after dealer and I just can't find one who'll sell me one. I've got the $33k that I'm told an average new car costs and am ready to buy today... but nothing.
You can't say shortage without factoring price. For enough money (probably not even that much compared to what I've seen business waste on frivolities) there'd be a line of retirees looking to get back into the biz.
We could call it the 911-B program. I suppose we should write the law such that you have to prove you checked out the local dealerships first. You could even pay someone to look and then not bother checking to see if they actually did:
Outstanding. Do you suppose I could just lease it for a few years at a fraction of the ordinary monthly payments? That way I can drive it extra hard and skip changing the oil and all that annoying stuff and then at the end of the lease, I just send it back. That'd be fantastic.
Of course, of course. Otherwise, what would be the point? The best part is eventually the local dealerships will have to offer the same prices and same, eh, liberal maintenance policies if they want to have any hope of selling their wares.
Actually, there ain't one except that you'll have to pay fees/taxes on the importation, and probably some special checks/certifications to be able to put it on the road.
In the end, it's a lot of troubles and it may be more expensive than getting one locally.
[Note: I'm still talking about getting that car, the comparison with labour, if any, is purely accidental.]
My father used to tell me stories about the days when India was heavily aligned with the Soviet Union. Apparently, there would be approximately 5 people to stamp your visa.
The excesses of socialism are never lost on me, because of this story.
> Apparently, there would be approximately 5 people to stamp your visa.
I'd say that this is still the case. Last time I visited India, when I was exiting the parking garage at the airport, there was an automated machine to let you out. Give them the ticket, put money in, the barrier opens, and you drive out.
But there were also five people by this machine. One to take the ticket, another to take the money, and then another three to watch this process.
And it wasn't just that instance - there were quite a few instances during my travel when I noticed significantly more people assigned to a job than required.
What did you expect? India has a huge population. They all need jobs to support their families. So the local gov't has it covered. Would you prefer three of those five people being engaged in a riot and the other two, on gov't payroll, beating the shit out of them? I guess this pretty much ilustrates the difference between East and West. Mr. Rushdie has a book with short stories on that.
> India has a huge population. They all need jobs to support their families. So the local gov't has it covered.
Yup, completely agree.
> Would you prefer three of those five people being engaged in a riot and the other two, on gov't payroll, beating the shit out of them?
To clarify, in this scenario, are you saying that there are three unemployed people rioting and two other people on a government payroll (presumably po-po?) who are beating the shit out of the rioters?
Honestly, _ideally_, I'd want to see universal basic income so that people who don't have jobs don't feel the need to riot. I'd want to see everyone's basic needs supported.
Having said that, that's my idealism showing and I don't know how this would realistically work. My background in economics is weak to put it simply and I don't know if this could scale to a population the size of India's.
> Mr. Rushdie has a book with short stories on that.
Taking a look at his bibliography[0], he's written quite a few novels, any specific one(s) that you'd recommend?
I doubt basic income would work. People with too much time on their hands will riot anyway, eventually. Work keeps people busy, even if it's low paid work, provided work conditions are okay.
East, West is a nice collection of short stories that would give you a taste of his writing style. Also The Groung Beneath her Feet is quite popular.
You've posted many uncivil and/or unsubstantive comments to HN, and we've had to warn you about this more than once before. I actually just banned your account for this, but on reflection, decided to unban you since many of your comments are also the civil, substantive kind. The latter are the kind we want here. Would you please restrict yourself to those?
I feel it's a cycle of mistrust. Companies don't want to spend as much time training junior workers or apprentices because they often leave shortly after achieving proficiency. But this lack of perceived loyalty comes from a rational viewpoint. After the shift in business culture in the 80s, where workers were laid off in bulk even if the company was in good financial health, workers woke up to the new reality. (To be fair, the era of the "company man" only encompasses half a century, so it's not necessarily a right or natural phenomenon)
I remember in the 80s and early 90s it was common for a salaried worker to stay at the same company for decades. Since the 2000s, it appears to be less prevalent.
The solution would appear to be to make conditions good and wages competitive for the newly-trained junior workers to improve retention. However, some industries risk their competitiveness with labor costs above a certain level. I wonder how much of the shortage is due to the intransigence of capital versus true limits for competitive pay. I suspect the former for almost all specialized positions experiencing shortfalls, such as pilots, machinists, CNC operators, and millwrights. For unskilled labor I suspect that the wages cannot climb much higher without harming profits or risking competition from overseas.
I read in the newspaper that Boeing has a skills gap with their machinists. The skilled older ones are retiring, and the younger ones aren't experienced enough. There are few in the middle.
What happened? When they had layoffs, the machinist union rules specified the ones with the least number of years of service got laid off first. This left Boeing with a very unbalanced workforce.
Yep, same with my aerospace employer. Massive layoffs in the early 90's, and the young ones were let go due to union seniority. Now there is a sharp bimodal age distribution from the mass hiring to replace the retirees.
Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors. One reason why I am skeptical when people say unions built the middle class. Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.
If a company has a bimodal age distribution, the question to be asking is "Why didn't they think about hiring someone occasionally over the last 15-20 years?" Of course, the answer is that no corporate manager wanted to miss his number by hiring another person.
So, the managers kicked the problem down the road and hoped that someone else would take the hit.
> Seems like unions benefit just the insiders and seniors.
Everybody gets old, you know.
Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.
> Employer competition probably does more for that than unions.
Agreed. But the same anti-union people are also against anti-monopoly regulations.
> Unions implemented this policy because companies were wiping out older workers because they were more expensive in terms of wage and healthcare.
This is essentially what GP is saying. Unions kept the expensive older worker at the expense of firing the younger workers. If the workers they keep are more expensive, then they have to fire proportionally more younger workers to make it up.
It probably would have been prudent to do a long term ROI on those layoffs. Slashing the executive bonus pool may have reduced those layoffs significantly and saved the company far more down the line.
Well, suppose for a moment the position or job really was "dying", though. (Which is hard to predict accurately, but everybody gets pessimistic in times of huge layoffs.)
Arguably the older workers are the more-vulnerable section, since they have fewer opportunities (and lifetime) to re-train.
It's easy to keep people after training, just pay them more and avoid toxic environments. Companies don't do this because they make bank underpaying people and burning them out.
Companies don't make bank burning people out. Burning people out is a sign of organizational... corruption. There are more incompetent managers than competent ones, so you get things like this due to that.
In some, end-of-life organizations, burning people out can be a ... semi-rational decision, but .. it's an end-of-life company...
Even in creative fields. All those young actors spending years on underpaid bit parts on off-Broadway and low budget Hollywood productions. Most of them make less than an average blue collar job.
See also college athletes. A lineman at a top-tier football school in the U.S. ends up with all sorts of chronic injuries, possibly including brain damage. Very few of them make it to the pros. None are supposed to be paid at all except in kind for degrees, room, and board.
Blue collar jobs pay reasonably well after a few years. You might have to work pretty hard and hustle to move up the food chain. Trades gigs can be "nice house and a boat" levels of lucrative.
This is exactly why I think those football programs should be professionalized. The program should be licensed by the school - logos and all - but completely financially independent. Obviously, the money says otherwise ( football donors are a very significant stream of income ). And you'd quickly develop a "New York Yankees' problem - wealthy programs would have more money.
I have a Son In Law Candidate who is physically arranged like a left offensive tackle. Even in high school, the six hour practices put him off it.
Part of me says that "the love of the game" should be encouraged, but as you note... the costs are substantial. And I think the real money in sports is trading on the player's name, anyway.
The only people I know from either were from Perot Systems or EDS before, which is largely extinct. They didn't have it so bad.
I am sure it's a cause of pain for people but somehow, game dev. work being that way seems inevitable. My own exposure to the antediluvian music business ( back in them '80s ) was that it was The Island of the Lost Boys from "Pinocchio".
There is also some outright "pickyness" coming from the younger generations against work that's seen as manual and unsophisticated, at least I perceived this in the architecture school I went to for a number of years. I remember very clearly many professors lamenting the fact that with each passing year the student body grew more reliant on technology and computer-assisted crafting and grew less interested in manual handicraft.
It's going to sound cliche but younger folks are more attracted to work that looks attractive. Everyone wants to be able to tell others at a party that he works a respectable job for a well-known company. The media doesn't idolize craftsmen and truck drivers as much as tech whizzes, so something drops under the radar.
Oddly enough, in my industry, we've been making technology easy to use, that once required understanding the nuts and bolts. As a result, we can't hire people who understand the nuts and bolts any more.
We make electronic measurement instruments. "Back in the day," sophisticated instruments evolved from laboratory curiosities to industrial products, but still required experts to set up, operate, and in some cases program.
Cycle of mistrust or not, this would likely work better than gradually increasing the retirement age as it happens in Europe. The free market always provides better solutions than state or superstate bureaucrats. In the EU they just throw regulation at any problem.
Disagree here, consider health care. Free market solutions here have led to healthcare being tied to your job, and only big employers able to gain any negotiation leverage, so individuals and small companies get screwed, big company employees are scared to leave, sometimes for this issue alone, and in effect, the desired "insurance" effect is undermined as people get sliced into smaller and smaller buckets.
Despite what conservative propaganda would have you believe, nationalized health care does not preclude private health care on top, and in fact it makes the market for that care much more competitive and reasonable for individuals who seek it.
>Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price-
That is actually the truth for many niche skilled labor positions. Manufacturing plants are starving for a lack of experienced E&I (electronics and instrumentation) technicians but they can't even attract the next generation despite offering ~$25/hr to apprentices.
Being an E&I tech in a chemical plant is a dirty job but not in a back breaking way. Someone willing to take the apprenticeship will be making ~$35/hr plus as much overtime as they want since the shortage isn't likely to dry up anytime soon.
The only logical reason why younger generations are refusing to consider these jobs is that they know what their ultimate income cap is going in to such a position. The next, and usually only, rung on the ladder is that of maintenance manager and there can only be one manager for their team of ~5+. Their proven skillsset is also less transferable to another role at another company like those of a typical office drone. Therefore, ~$75,000 without overtime is about all they can ever aspire to without channeling an entrepreneurial spirit that just isn't part of most people's psyche. That said, the career ladder of an office drone is nothing like what it used to be. Most of the people sacrificing that stable F~$75,000/yr as a skilled laborer will earn less over their lifetime as they'll eventually get stuck one rung under somebody who likes to kick down.
Interesting take. Most government positions are pretty flat as well, but come with decent incentive packages to make up for the perceived lower pay. For example; insurance, civil service rules, unions, pensions, stable working hours, etc.
Now let's talk about railroads, utility companies, and other "blue collar" work that requires an apprenticeship. First of all, layoffs happen quite often and seniority determines who is laid off. Not horrible and expected in a wide range of professions, but my neighbor is laid off way more often than I would be comfortable with (Union Pacific). Such is the ebbs and tides of business.
Then there is the rampant nepotism and other forms of preferential treatment to even get these jobs. To work for the Electric company, you had better know someone that is a respected IBEW member who will vouch for you. Same goes for the natural gas utility and just about all the people I know who work for utility companies in my city.
I say all that to say, these are still dead-end jobs unless you are lucky enough to pass the subjective management tests. Like you said, there is an upper limit on the wages you can earn without overtime. That sucks because you are going to absolutely destroy your body working most of these jobs. Why settle for that? The outcome is predetermined... additionally the work may be boring as shit after 10 years or so, then what?
In many places, total value of compensation of a civil service gigs is way higher than you think.
A senior IT guy makes like $110k where I live. Sounds shitty, but then again you get primo healthcare that costs $100/mo for family, retiree health coverage, 60% pension at 55 in many cases, high PTO accumulation, etc.
I helped a friend calculate total compensation when he was looking for a job. The pension present value alone was $4M. When you combine it with the PTO, it made total value of his compensation more like $190k. If you price in the retiree healthcare, you could probably add another $10-20k of value.
Knowledge transfer should be baked into the day-to-day culture of work, not something desperately scrambled for during someone's last week. Those few companies with meaningful training and mentoring programs know this.
In my observation, it's very few companies. Also, I don't think it's as easy as just saying it should happen. For one thing, hiring has changed. A lot of tech workers from my generation tended to be fairly multi-disciplinary, but as a company matures, they tend to hire from standardized skill sets such as the mainstream branches of engineering.
Case in point, I'm 52, and I was hired kinda by accident because I had a connection and was in the right place at the right time. Nobody ever asked for my skill set. My knowledge is based on having a pretty good understanding of optics, electronics, mechanics, math, computation, and so forth. But we haven't ever deliberately hired anybody like that, so there's nobody whom I can even transfer my knowledge to.
My job involves solving a lot of really weird problems under pressure, such as when a production line goes down and nobody knows why. I kind of thrive on it, plus it's a niche that I was able to carve out, to make myself employable without a mainstream engineering degree. But I can't think of why somebody would even want to learn my job.
The best thing to do with us old guys, is let us keep working, to do the stuff that you don't want to burden the bright young kids with.
Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good.
Indeed. A labor shortage is the same as wage inflation. Show me the money.
Great point. I'm in my thirties, my boss when I started was a mainframe systems programmer for years. They had critical business process on an unsupported platform and this guy and a colleague wrote a pretty decent TCP/IP stack for it. They also were experts in some random business processes that were ridiculously important. They were jack of all trades. When I got there they had moved into monitoring and management and were reasonably capable NT and HPUX performance guys.
Now there's literally a platoon of BAs, java programmers and others maintaining the successor system.
Now thinking about it a bit, there may be a sort of survivor bias thing going on. The "older tech workers" are largely the ones who stayed in tech, rather than going into management. We're the ones who managed to keep ourselves competitive, and survive the politics, for a few decades.
You see it with old timer SEs from companies like IBM and HP and even Apple... these are folks that love solving problems and are adept at it. They are also always fighting management who is completely clueless.
One guy from one of those companies figured out a huge problem and probably generated $30M of sales. They laid him off in a random culling of the herd.
The only place you see those types of folks getting developed now are in cloud services where some of the cast off junior SEs from the big companies are doing similar things there.
>Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage
Pretty sure they mean they have plenty of 60 years who have been working there for 40 years and plenty of 20 year olds who just started but not a lot of 40 year old with 20 years experience to keep the transfer of knowledge smooth.
which unless some one has a time machine is a thing you can't find at literally any price.
Look at the short term, do what you need to achieve those objectives. Oh, the long term matters now. Ooops, I'll add get some "20-years experience guys" to the next sprint.
Presumably there are people with industry experience, just not experience in your particular company, and they would easily integrate (there are of course exceptions). It then again becomes a matter of how much are you willing to pay to attract them. Additionally, you could pay extra for a substandard 30 year experience person or an excellent 10-15 year person to fill those gaps. This is supply and demand.
Based on some of the other commenters, depending on the industry there may NOT be people with industry experience because of the layoffs and hiring ramps of the 80s and 90s at certain types of companies, people in the middle never gained the 20 years of experience in that field
With so many people under-employed or out of work...
The concept of "under-employed or out of work" is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're willing to take for that work. Unless they're saying they literally can't find work at any price-That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just accept a little less money to find work nowadays.
I actually agree with you to an extent. We need to start talking about this in terms of a market that can't efficiently set a price--not in terms of a "shortage of workers".
Price is the measure of where a buyer and seller agree. If sellers are rejecting bids because "Why bust your ass to live in your patents basement anyway?" then the price could never be that low.
The new business model of efficiency at all costs means that hiring has been lean since the 90s.
At my employer, that means that the good senior people are in their 50s and 60s and retiring away, being replaced by 20-30 somethings. The people in their 40s are left behind as they got stuck in the middle too long.
> Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good. Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just offer a little more money to find skilled mid-career workers nowadays.
By that rationale, there's no food shortage in Venezuela. "There is food, people just need to offer more money for it."
Most of the really experienced people at companies I have worked for where surprised when I asked about what they did and why. They somehow assumed someone else was supposed to be training me. They were the only ones who knew answers to particular questions I had. They were shocked and sometimes didn't believe me that I asked everyone but them first. I don't blame these experienced workers for not sharing their knowledge, someone should have told them, though, that they are expected to do it, there are no systems in place at most places. Most companies seem to believe that knowledge transfer just happens magically,or should.
I think in my case it did, I did learn from the experienced workers but that was apparently not the norm there. I hope you are right that that is what happens most places.
I've often thought that after a certain age, instead of getting some percent increase in salary, it would be preferable instead to work some percentage fewer days or hours. Seems like the idea is finally catching on. I hope I get to enjoy it when the time comes.
I have always said that when I get to "X" income, I'd rather have more time than more money. Of course "X" changes over time, but I have definitely hit it before.
This is what consulting/contracting lets you determine, but I hear you, it'd be nice to have the option coupled with the safety and job opportunities of employment.
There's a gap there because the firms didn't want to pay the GenX generation after they got trained. They hopped on to the next company and progressed their careers.
Take better care of your employees, pay them their market value, factor in some work-life-balance, and they will stay.
"A shortage of gen-x workers" is exactly the case at my facility. I'm 45, which is the valley in the bimodal age distribution. People are either in their 60's or 20's, and those two generations do not get along.
Recently I've heard two different stories about this exact problem. Two specialized trades, two experts of their crafts about to retire, and two companies unsure how they'll replace them.
I wish I remembered more details about the experts themselves, I believe one was a specialized glass worker.
Shortage is defined as a situation where price cannot rise, such as the government setting a price ceiling. If price can rise then a shortage is impossible.
So if right at this moment the world had only enough doctors to care for half the population, regardless of the price, that wouldn't be a shortage of doctors?
If there were a severe drought and only enough food to keep half of us alive, but prices weren't capped... That wouldn't be a food shortage?
If there are only 10,000 people in a field who are under the age of 70 but have at least 20 years of experience, and the industry needs 50,000 of them to function efficiently - that's not a shortage of experienced skilled workers?
Not everything is a commodity. Not every commodity experiences a drop in demand as the price rises. Some things are needs that people continue to have demand for even if they can't afford them due to shortages. Even commodities have limits to their production. And some things can't be produced quickly enough to address a short or medium term shortage.
Markets aren't magic. They have inefficiencies and externalities and logic limits. Econ 101 deals only in simplifications and spherical cows. And people with specific skill sets aren't spherical cows.
> So if right at this moment the world had only enough doctors to care for half the population, regardless of the price, that wouldn't be a shortage of doctors?
Doctors may not be the best example. Where I live, at least, the government really does set a price ceiling for doctors, so a shortage is very much possible. Ignoring that, simply not being able to afford a doctor does not mean there is a shortage of them. That means you cannot afford a doctor. Which is a problem in its own right, but not a problem defined by shortage. Not all problems are shortage problems.
> If there are only 10,000 people in a field who are under the age of 70 but have at least 20 years of experience, and the industry needs 50,000 of them to function efficiently - that's not a shortage of experienced skilled workers?
No, because as price rises, that 50,000 number will decline. There is only so much money willing to be spent. At some price point, businesses will only be able to afford 10,000 people and the demand will be met exactly by the number of people available to work. Or if the job really requires 50,000 people absolutely, they will decide it no longer needs to be done, leaving the the need at 0 people.
> Not every commodity experiences a drop in demand as the price rises.
How can that be? Not everyone has the same resources available. Like the businesses above, as price rises, some can no longer afford the good or service. That takes them out of the market. Demand does not simply mean what you want to have. Price is always a component. Like that great earlier comment here about Porches, there isn't shortage of Porches because every poor man who admires the car can't afford one. They are simply not in the market for one in the first place, no matter how much they dream about owning one.
> Markets aren't magic.
Nobody said they were. The scenarios you point out, where price is able to rise, are something, but not shortages.
That seems to me like a strange, limited, and impractical definition of a shortage.
When the supply of something is insufficient to support effective operation (or to support existing life), that's a shortage.
Yes, perhaps prices will rise until no more people can afford it than the supply will support. But perhaps that supply isn't enough to keep the industry from collapsing or to keep the population from collapsing, etc.
Regardless of whether the price rises to keep the resource out of the hands of everyone who needs it, the insufficient supply for effective function is still damaging - to a population, an industry, an economy. I would most definitely consider that a shortage.
> That seems to me like a strange, limited, and impractical definition of a shortage.
Well, that's its definition, for better or worse. I didn't write the economics dictionary. I only can repeat it.
Is there reason to overload this particular word? While the implications of the scenarios you describe are clear, I'm not sure why it has to be "shortage" that represents it. Why not another word or term that encompasses those cases – unaffordable, perhaps – while leaving shortage to mean what it means?
> If price can rise then a shortage is impossible.
In the long term I agree. In the short term, the markets are not perfect and goods and labor are not perfectly fungible. It takes time to retool, even if prices are sending signals.
While your points are certainly true, I'm not sure that state is characterized by shortage. Shortage occurs when price does not rise. When price does rise, demand wanes.
Hypothetically, if there was only one programmer in the world, the price would rise to the point where that programmer is no longer willing to change jobs with the offers being given. At that point, the additional demand goes away. Those businesses are no longer in the market for a programmer. It really doesn't matter if it takes time to retool, as far as shortages go, because the demand has met the supply. A shortage does not mean not being able to get what you want at a price you are willing to pay.
On the other hand, where I come from the government sets the price that doctors must charge. We really can run into the issue of doctor shortages. I can't go to my doctor and say, "I know you are completely booked and can't see me, but here is $100,000 above your regular rate to cancel those appointments and take care of me instead". The doctor is required, by law, to reject my offer.
If price was able to rise, the doctor would be able to take my offer, allowing me to get what I want as indicated by price, and those who aren't willing to pay $100K more to have the doctor look at their common cold exit the market. Equilibrium is reached. That scenario certainly comes with its own set of issues – and why our government defines the price to not allow market-based preferential treatment – the issue would not be that of a shortage.
I'm not arguing that government action can prevent prices from rising and that such activity can cause shortages. I agree with your arguments about the doctors.
What I'm arguing is that, because many goods (in particular labor) aren't fungible and liquid, that an increasing price doesn't (in the short term) solve shortages with these types of goods.
Knowledge transfer should be baked into the day-to-day culture of work, not something desperately scrambled for during someone's last week. Those few companies with meaningful training and mentoring programs know this.
> The plant [...] has an apprentice program for millennials, but there’s a shortage of Generation X workers. “We’ve got a big gap in the middle, so we have to keep talented people in their 60s a little longer,”
Here we go again with the "shortage of workers". In one article it's tech workers. Here it's GenX workers. A "shortage" of a good is pretty meaningless if you don't mention the price you're offering to pay for that good. Unless they're saying they literally can't find qualified GenX workers at any price--That would be a real shortage. Otherwise, maybe you need to just offer a little more money to find skilled mid-career workers nowadays.
With so many people under-employed or out of work, it borders on insulting to claim there's a shortage of workers.