The bus has been no end of problems this year.

1: Our Governor activated the National Guard for school bus drivers.

I can't do that so I just drive him.

I thought it was a good article too -- or, at least it fit my preconceptions and other reading. I feel fortunate that I haven't been impacted as badly -- though I wonder if CA's higher minimum wage ($14) means that even a not good job is worth taking, particularly now that unemployment has run out.

I do see a lot of help wanted signs in windows (particularly restaurants, for back of house), but since I'm still only getting takeout, I'm not really affected by a lack of bussers and servers.

Vox is dying, right? Fewer and fewer articles daily, begging for "audience support," names off to their inevitable career cappers at the Times.

They probably just need to loosen their hiring standards.

They're going to live at a nice farm upstate.

Mrs y comments: 100 years ago there was a pandemic just as bad or worse than this, and it came on the tail of a monstrous war. But you don't hear about labour shortages in the 20s; you hear about mass unemployment. So what's changed? Are employers just being insanely picky?

I find the Recode piece really unsatisfying. Are we really saying that employers have forgotten how to hire people?

I don't even see human resources.

8: The end of the monstrous war meant that there were millions of veterans that had to find jobs.

9: They just aren't used to having to entice people to work. The old system was to make it as hard as possible for people to be hired, so that the few who got work would be properly grateful.

Or provide jobs to valets while solving murders.

There was a piece in the Post the other day about the staffing crisis in childcare that said 1/3 of providers intend to quit or close their businesses during the next year. The disruption that would cause is difficult to even conceptualize.

The disruption conceptualizer left for better wages.

People not wanting to work under particular conditions or wages -- that I get. The idea that resumes are getting lost in the HR department strikes me as a bit hard to fathom.

The first time I ever participated in hiring a person, my boss and I and an HR person talked to three people. My boss and I agreed on one person and HR person said one of the others was more qualified despite not understanding what the fuck the qualifications were. Fortunately, the wrong person quit before their first day. After that, my boss started having to ask questions to get the HR person to check boxes in the right way.

Her entire motivation was to not get blamed for anything.

I mean, that's my motivation too, but I can get blamed for things not being finished.

Yeah, I have had my own experiences with HR in that regard -- but I've learned to circumvent them as necessary.

I'm thinking the circumventing hacks that work really well when hiring 5 programmers don't work as well if you need 186 bus drivers.

I'm just trying to grasp the idea that the hiring process has suddenly become more stupid. It seems like an unlikely result of the pandemic.

Anecdotes from a tourist economy town: a guy I played tennis with a few weeks ago runs four local California Pizza restaurants, and said that they were super busy and had trouble hiring, so he was working harder than he ever had, and decided to close one restaurant for the weekend just so the workers could have a day off, which I guess he had done at another location, too, for the same reason. He also said the owners had cleared $350,000 profit this year (profit, not gross) and I am not in that business but I guess it was a huge number and they gave this manager guy a 10K bonus. The restaurant my wife and I went out to for our anniversary (outside dining) was also understaffed and crazy busy.

Also the restaurant my older son is delivering pizza for is paying him $4 an hour plus tips so on one recent shift he had no deliveries and made like $13 after taxes for a four hour shift.

From those two anecdotes I'm thinking a lot of the labor shortage is owners reluctant to raise wages. Inertia combined with self-righteousness.

It's not getting stupider. The environment has shifted so that previous levels of stupid are now dangerous.

There was a piece in the Post the other day about the staffing crisis in childcare that said 1/3 of providers intend to quit or close their businesses during the next year. The disruption that would cause is difficult to even conceptualize.

We have exploited childcare workers so grossly for so long that this is a long time coming. Unfortunately, instead of reckoning, it will just pile on the shoulders of low income parents, mostly mothers.

I think along with aggressively screening applications is the real reduction in on-the-job training. You'd have a lot more qualified applicants if they only had to qualify for a three month on-the-job training period.

From those two anecdotes I'm thinking a lot of the labor shortage is owners reluctant to raise wages. Inertia combined with self-righteousness.

This is my opinion. (For low-skills jobs.)

What is the base rate for quitting though? Seems like an industry with lots of turnover regardless.

The NYT had a piece about the broken child care industry model and claimed that even though they exploit their labor and charge parents the same as private schools they're barely scraping by because of required staffing ratios and real estate costs in locations where the workers are who need to drop off their kids. I don't know, maybe they relax the ratios or something. Of course my first suspicion is that it's a typical NYT "Won't someone think of the poor business owners" hack job.

Is this the thread to ask whether I should change jobs? I've been approached about a possibly great opportunity. But my current job is also really good and less risk than changing.

That's probably not the best president to pick for this.

30: Think about how much money it would take for it to be an easy decision to change jobs, and ask for that from the prospective new employer.

29: One of those places wasn't making a lot of money. I do think the cost of daycare should be socialized like school so that it doesn't all fall on parents. That way they could raise pay and have good vacations. A lot of parents don't want to pay for a week when their kid isn't there, but that ongoing revenue stream is needed to keep people paid and the lights on. A lot of fixed costs.

Private schools (day) are now like $54k, and they have endowments, so I suspect they don't have a flood model for providing good care to young children that parents can afford. Again, this should be socialized.

I previously mentioned early retirements in the context of health care - looks like early retirement is also having a macro effect.

Old people can barely use macros.

32- It's not that straightforward. I have can compare base salary if I decide to pursue a full interview and they make an offer. But current place has guaranteed stock incentives that may fluctuate a bit but will be worth a significant amount. New place would be a startup with early options so could be a jackpot or nothing. So I can say a stock jackpot would be a no brainer to move but how do you assess the chance of that?
Current place has a clear career trajectory for 5-7 years. Startup could be bust in 3 years or could lead to future roles if successful. It is what I want to do eventually just not for another five years or so.
So far I've just had an informational discussion with one of the founders and need to decide if I want to express interest and interview with VCs and other founders.

Since our schools are cutting hours due to staffing shortages, I sent an email saying as much to 100 advanced teacher training students and got 5 queries about how to apply in the first hour-- before I sent a revised email linking to the school system substitute teacher application. So whatever they were doing to attract the people they said they couldn't find didn't include advertising in the teacher training programs in the university in the city, even though a lot of them have already been background checked and the like. Not impressed.

And now waiting to hear how many are automatically rejected by an automated HR system that hasn't heard they're desperate for warm bodies. Or get discouraged by an application designed for full time workers even though what they most urgently need seems to be people to cover lunch and dismissal and the like.

What are your responsibilities and therefore your risk tolerance? If you're a single parent with three kids to put through college, you probably want the sure thing. Conversely, if you're single with a healthy retirement account already, taking a risk seems reasonable.

36 What about quality of life? Would the new gig give you more time or less to kayak with friends etc?

IMO, HR is all defense and no offense. They might be fine (well, marginally adequate) at protecting the company or at protecting themselves, by why would anyone want to outsource anything affirmative to them?

34 has me worried not so much about the economy but if a bunch of people not really old enough to retire are sitting around the house with not enough to do, they might really feed the monster that is Qanon.

36: If the prospective Startup Bonanza goes bust, will you be ok with that, and will you be in a position to get a new job afterward?

Because -- as I presume you know -- that's what startups do. The VCs mostly do ok (though obviously sometimes they go bust too) not least because their portfolio isn't just Bonanza, it's also Bananaza, Fananaza, Fofanza, to say nothing of Fee-Fi-Momanza, and if any of them make it big, they're good.

What do things look like if Bonanza goes the way of most startups?

40. HR protecting themselves is spot on. They might be useful for checking out references, criminal records, etc., but why are they even allowed to comment on applicants' professional competence, let alone veto the judgment of the relevant manager defeats me. Moby's story upthread makes me wonder whether the people who run the company know what they're doing, if they allow that sort of situation to arise.

It was the state of Ohio, so no they didn't.

re: 43

I hire people, fairly regularly, both in the private sector and when I used to work for a university. HR mostly just handled paperwork, and ensured (at the university) that a job was being advertised at the appropriate salary/grade, etc. They had _zero_ input into who I hired, but they were responsible for ensuring that I completed all of the paperwork and that I could tell the right story in terms of scores relative to various grading criteria* if some candidate complained that they should have been hired over someone else.**

I do have problems hiring people, which is a combination of a lack of people with the relevant skills, and the relative premium paid for those skills in London. I need some "10x"*** React developer, or whatever, or someone who is good with machine learning, but I can't compete with fintech companies, some corporates and some startups.

* criteria I wrote, but I couldn't put together a list of 10 desirable things, and then appoint someone who scored lower on all 10 than someone else.
** quite a lot of internal hiring and politics, so this wasn't just potentially possible, it happened quite a lot.
*** used ironically, I hate the term/concept

The NYT is right about childcare. I've seen the accounting records of the nonprofit center my kids went to because was on the board at one point. It was 1) extremely expensive, 2) barely paying it's workers decently (more than most other childcare centers in the area, but that's an extremely low bar), 3) only breaking even because of significant subsidies from my university (which it got in turn for reserving 50% of spaces for university employees), and 4) still had a waitlist so long that you could get on it while pregnant and probably not get offered a spot until your kid turned 2 - which is, not coincidentally, when required ratios get much less restrictive. The preK rooms essentially subsidize the infant rooms, because the ratio is so much higher, but not enough to actually make the whole thing work without a subsidy.

Another major shortage is paraprofessional workers who serve as aides for kids with disabilities. About half of the kids in my district who are supposed to have an aide just...don't. A group of us are working on filing a lawsuit to force the district to raise wages to the level sufficient to fill the positions. But the real issue is that their own HR office is massively understaffed, so they rely on temp agencies to fill these positions, but their contracts with the temp agencies don't allow them to directly set a floor for the wages advertised. They *can* hire directly, but the process takes forever, so in practice they seldom do. So in this case, it really is the case that they've forgotten how to hire people. And the temp agencies have contracts with bad incentives - they'd rather leave a position unfilled than hire for it at the actual market wage.

We have a lower unemployment rate here than before the pandemic, help wanted signs everywhere, restaurants closing one or two days a week for staffing reasons. Also virtually no housing for people making less than $25/hr. Construction seems to be running at about capacity for materials and labor. (Developers whine, but there's nothing to that: if they're making $1.75 on their dollar they whine because they're not making $2.00). Although we're hemmed in on most sides by mountains, there's a ton of low-production agriculture on land that's worth more housing people, and it's getting converted. Water is finite, of course, and that'll end up being a limiting factor . . .

I don't think anyone has any idea how this ends up.

At least we have this guy trying to channel people to Bozeman instead: https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/what-to-do-in-bozeman-montana

Thanks LB, CC, Doug! Those are good questions I've been trying to work out by talking to others I know who are more familiar with the general role.
38- I have responsibilities but am in a pretty secure position. My partner has a decent paying and essentially completely secure job. We have good savings for projected expenses. I could probably absorb a year or more of unemployment without too much of a negative impact. Given that I sometimes feel like I'm too risk averse, but maybe I'm in a good place because I've been careful.
39- This is what I just don't know. It's a C position so it's more "always on"- but that's kind of how I am anyway. But I think I'd also get to set the culture to some extent.
42- Let me play out the financials. Say right now my base salary is x. Where I am with stock incentives and bonus, this year I'll make about 1.5x; next year 1.75x; the next year 2x, and all future years without a promotion 2.25x. From my initial queries around my network, base salary at new role is probably about 1.5x. Let's say stock option for Bonanza is 10x but more likely 0x. Either way I'm doing fine, but moving has a lower median expected value with a high upside.
I also have the perhaps incorrect perception that once you've had a C role in this area there are a fair number of opportunities unless you're a total fuckup or con artist, and even then you'll have a celebrity trial. However it would burn some bridges because I'm being well supported at my current place and leaving them hanging might cone back to hurt in the future.

I also have the perhaps incorrect perception that once you've had a C role in this area there are a fair number of opportunities unless you're a total fuckup or con artist, and even then you'll have a celebrity trial.

I thought those were prerequisites.

Obviously we're all wired differently, but it seems to me that using money as the yardstick, past the point where needs and wants are mostly taken care of, creates a risk of going astray. Your time is limited -- whether measured weekly or over the whole long haul. If the new gig represents a whole big trade-off of time for maybe money, is it even worth it if you win? Which you say is unlikely.

Thanks, that's a good point. Longer term this is more of the kind of thing I'd want to do because I can have more room for my own ideas. It's just early in my life to do it. If I had this opportunity 5 years from now I think it would be an easy decision. I'm guessing there will be similar opportunities but I keep thinking what if there aren't and I missed the boat. Which as noted is still a pretty good life on this side of the river.

The question to ask yourself is, "Which path makes it most likely you could be a super villain should you ever desire to be a super villain?"

A lot of low skill Labour as vanished into the gig economy, which is extremely low productivity. Basically working part time at Subway can't compete with delivery for subway where you can at least take a day off whenever you want. (I also suspect most of them are not paying taxes on this income, continuing to qualify for Medicaid etc.)

The Subway by me did have everyone quit the same day.

Of course, I stopped going when they stopped cutting a wedge out of the bread and just sliced it like any asshole can do.

HH: "It's just early in my life to do it."

Huh. I know a number of people who left it to too late, to jump to a startup. Eventually they said "if we're gonna have kids by year N, I have to either do this now, or never." Given your description of your financial situation, honestly, if you really want to do something like this, I wonder why sooner isn't better? [which isn't saying you -should- do something like this: I'm only commenting on the career-trajectory timing] Different people have different risk profiles overall, and different assessments of the likelihood of a startup working out well. My own is pretty dour, but I'm intentionally setting that aside in this .... uh ..... assessment.

Is there a reason why you think you'd be more successful if you waited until later in your career to do this? It could be, for instance, that you want to amass greater skills in key areas, before you jump? That might make sense.

P.S. Again, I just wanna say, I'm -not- recommending that you take this jump. And my own assessment of risk is so .... skewed towards safety, that nobody should take my advice on judging risk. I'm just asking whether, if you plan on doing a startup sometime, it isn't better to do it early in your career, rather than later.

"that you want to amass greater skills in key areas, before you jump"
Exactly. I'm very well qualified for one aspect of the new job. Maybe one of the best couple dozen in the world for the specific technology. But other parts I'd have to learn on the fly and it's not clear I'd be in a position to do that very well. At the same time, the career path I'm on at my current place would include the opportunity to learn all that.

8: it really depended where you were. The US had an epic boom right up to 1929 and the great crash. The UK did a whole bunch of crazy shit - boom immediately postwar and then trying to crush prices and wages back to...Normalcy!...trying to lock onto the gold standard exchange rate, wrenching deflation, then things improved gradually before the depression cluebatted us again. France did something similar but skipped the whole "let's go on gold as if nothing had happened", instead locking in a much lower exchange rate and having a great time until much further into the 30s. Germany spent the first half hyperinflating and having a slow civil war, then had a boom, then crashed hard and went Full Hoover. Agricultural export countries had boomed like hell for a generation but now there was a glut of their stuff and industrial prices were up. The same problem played out inside the Soviet Union. So...pick your poison. I mean policy.

Agricultural export countries had boomed like hell for a generation but now there was a glut of their stuff and industrial prices were up.

Yes. My grandfather left the farm for the big city only to have to move back after the Depression started.

I had to look up cluebat.

HH, I think part of it is just whether you function well when you get in over your head.

In my own experience, I have twice made a significant leap into the unknown, and it came out well both times, but really well the second time. That time, I was incentivized by the fact that my old, stable, respected company was going through tough times, and I felt a bit threatened. And the startup that I joined (eight years after it started up) has prospered, but I don't think I would have joined it if I'd felt safe where I was.

The startup was trying to poach me, and I felt comfortable saying no, so I basically insisted on a large enough pay package that I couldn't turn it down -- and they gave it to me.

I got laid off and went into consulting by accident. Worked great.

58. The gold nonsense was Winston Churchill's fault. He was Chancellor and he went and did it. My grandmother, who was middle aged at the time never forgave him, WWII or not.

I always assumed that it was just rich people wanting to buy foreign assets and luxury goods not wanting to have to pay more.

@Herbert Hoover I think valuing the stock at its current value is a good rule of thumb.

Various anecdotes:
1. My sister is actually a childcare worker and a gig economy worker, she nannies for two families part time and walks dogs otherwise. I wouldn't say she's barely scraping by, but she would be in bad shape if she didn't have occasional family cash inputs, and help with emergencies. The dog walking pays pretty well, and the scheduling dovetails with her needs. Still, she's got no benefits (has public health care of course) or security or prospects for advancement.
2. I just accepted a new job at my firm. De minimus client contact, so that's the big pull. Speaking to my new manager, I was struck by how pathetically grateful he was that I took the job. There are a lot of open positions at my firm and we're bringing on a new training class in my current department this fall. Labor hasn't had this kind of power for a while, if they would only realize it.

My in-laws were talking about the other side of things. Long retired but still in contact with restaurant owners who can't get workers.

They don't seem to be negotiating. The workforce is just leaving to other sectors.

I guess I could have asked if they were negotiating before they left.

OT: Is "soaking" for real? As in people involved in doing it think that it doesn't count as sex.

Wow, so it's not all just that people would rather stay home and collect unemployment. I'll have to inform the people I play pickleball with.

Whining fucking old people fucking suck beyond all measure.

I do wonder if drops in immigration and just the demos of the larger cohort reaching retirement age (in addition to the accelerated retirement mentioned in 34).

I wonder if part of the accelerated retirement isn't because the stock market is fucking nuts that people feel rich after looking at their 401k statements.

73 And looking at what Zillow says their house is worth.

My current theory is that a bunch of back of the house/unskilled Burger King type workers have ended up as door dash etc delivery drivers. No boss, probably make as much, flexible hours (ie, you don't get paid if you take a night off on short notice but you don't get fired either).

Paid by the app, so there's no wage theft. Cash tips undeclared. If you have a car, why would you prefer to drive to a job at Burger King?

Just learned from TikTok that (allegedly) a woman in Sandusky, OH has combined influence and threats to become the middleperson for all TNC rides in Sandusky, OH - no driver accepts a ride without her OK.

What's a TNC?

The new, less euphemistic word for Uber and Lyft. "Transportation Network Companies."

That's pretty euphemistic still.

Anyway, what kind of a city names itself after a sex offender from one state over?

81: Hey! That's my wife's hometown!

Everyone has to start somewhere.

I guess it looks like the U.S. has bent the curve on new cases for the third wave, but maybe we will pass Italy in deaths per capita on the momentum we've already got going.

Galaxy brain: Put the vaccine in the horse de-worming medicine instead of the salad dressing. If the vaccine can be administered orally.