Comment by DannyBee
3 months ago
There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive. It's a super US-centric view, and not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).
Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?
In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.
Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.
It's totally non-obvious this is true.
Maybe we should TRY paying people more. Like just once. Just to see what happens.
We do? Is there a reason you believe otherwise?
There are nearly infinite studies in infinite fields on this, and despite claims here, the results are mixed at best.
Certainly not the utopia consistently predicted.
I'm sure someone will next just say it's not enough money, rather than bother to read any of the studies and whether they tried to account for this or not, or ...
I'm going to ignore those comments, since it doesn't seem like a discussion anyone wants to learn anything in.
If you want to push your preferred position, that's sort of silly. There is no winning or losing here. If you want to actually learn something, happy to discuss it for real.
We don't? I.e. if "10% more" doesn't seem to affect anything, we should maybe try "10x more" instead, and if that doesn't do anything, then conclude there's no more relevant labor left in the pool.
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Why not at least try to pay people more? Everyone gives exactly your argument without ever trying to raise the base salary for new hires and give existing workers a boost in pay.
You can't say it doesn't work until you've raised the median salary in the field and observed the effect. Managers and bean counters aren't willing to do this so it will never happen.
Again, we have?
I knew, of course, this would be the response. But i'm not sure why, in the history of the world, people assume we haven't tried paying people more in various fields, and that "managers and bean counters aren't willing to do it".
It's amazingly silly.
It would take you less than 60 seconds to find at least 100 studies on this, across tons of fields.
The next thing that happens is that when you point out studies (and there are plenty good and bad), they will start arguing with any study that doesn't support their already preferred position, rather than trying to ever spend time considering alternatives.
There are nearly infinite studies on infinite fields and the results are fairly mixed.
Certainly not the amazingly positive expected value that constantly gets paraded around.
Some of y'all are so money driven you just can't possibly contemplate that not everyone is driven by money.
All salient things being equal, which pretty much have to be the case for ATC (it will always have very high demands), adding more compensation will get more applicants.
Do you have other ideas on what constraints can be relaxed?
> Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely
Pay cuts are not important; profit is! If I get paid 100 less, and spend 90 less because of no commuting, I'm gaining more than before.
This is completely true.
I make less working remotely in a LCOL area than I would in the HCOL area where my office resides. The differential in COL, though, is so high that I'm saving a lot more. In other words, I'm making less but I'm building more wealth.
Most of the money that goes into living in a HCOL area and commuting to office is just pure waste to satisfy the egos of upper managers who want to preside over a big floor of workers.
That seem like a reductive take on why people live in HCOL areas. Those areas cost a lot because most people believe the quality of life is better, which raises the cost of living due to competition for real estate.
If every part of the US became equally expensive and convenient for work, VHCOL areas like the Bay Area would still be immediately oversubscribed for reasons unrelated to work.
The Bay Area has arguably the best climate (cool Mediterranean) of any major city, unique proximity to a diverse set of outdoor recreation (Big Sur, Napa, Yosemite, Tahoe just to name a few), and all the desirable amenities of a major metro area.
That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly happy life in other areas if you have different preferences, but the cost of living is ultimately a market, driven by the aggregate preferences of all people.
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i think you have your numbers flipped, but for me personally no commute is worth the drop in stress and increase in free time
> i think you have your numbers flipped
I think you are right.
Bruh
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
This is true for individuals.
With a sample size large enough, the probability that no one will be up for it given the increased pay, is extremely low, tending to zero.
Sure, but increasing that sample size would require doing more than just paying them more.
IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.
It is more useful, for example, to take the people who wanted to do this, and you stopped from doing this before for dumb reasons, and offer them more money to go back to doing this.
> Sure, but increasing that sample size would require doing more than just paying them more.
Citation needed, because...
> IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.
...if you're asserting that offering one quadrillion dollars as the salary for ATCs would not decisively solve the problem, that's insane and there can't be further discussion.
However, if your point is that this might be true, but the statement isn't useful, that's false too - it is useful to say this, because if true, then it means that there some function that describes the relationship between compensation and qualified applicants. And now that we've agreed that there is a function, we can then have a reasonable discussion about the inputs, and specifically the tradeoff between making the compensation higher vs. changing the way the training is structured and the artificial constraints on supply.
If you can say "to increase trained ATCs by 50% you can either make the salary $450k higher for 1k employees, or you can do a tech modernization that will cost $10M and keep your tech recent for the next decade" and provide a specific tradeoff between financial compensation vs non-salary factors, then you'll be able to have a logical argument about the two. And if the numbers are as skewed as in my example, you'll be able to convince the majority of logical people that increasing the salary is the suboptimal strategy.
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
Would you mind listing 2 or 3 examples? All the jobs that I do not want to do that I can think of, are actually poorly compensated.
I'm from the US, and the ATC problem is in the US, so a US-centric view is completely in play.
Plenty of people in the US have finical goals, and providing them a means to more quickly reach their goals will motivate them. Will you convince everyone to apply to a job with more pay? No, but you really just need to convince a few more qualified people.
> In fact – plenty of [smart] people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
Yep, I dropped to a 4-day week prorated (so a 20% cut, a little less if you consider that changed my position with respect to tax boundaries, for 20% less work) a while back, to deal with family health issues and my own burn-out. As things are fixing up I'm considering keeping to this routine despite the fact the extra money would be useful – the extra time is _very_ nice too.
[Not sure how far into “smart” territory I'd be considered though :)]
Do you think this is a counterargument? The implication is that for 20% + n% you'd go back to a 5 day week.
I thought I was agreeing. What were you thinking I was thinking I was countering?
There are three forms of pay cut: reducing pay for the same time spent working, reducing pay for the same work done (when pay is awarded piecemeal rather than by time), or indirectly by a reducing in work. Ask anyone on a zero-hours contract who unexpectedly gets a zero-hours week: it feels like a pay cut to them more than a joyful temporary freedom from work.
There are a number of companies experimenting with a 4-day working week with no change in pay or other conditions, some are finding the reduction in working time often doesn't reduce useful work output. A 20%-ish drop in income for a 4-day week is a pay cut when compared to that.
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> not surprisingly, it does not have an amazing history of working out (especially compared to other mechanisms).
So, you're claiming that there's empirical evidence that supports your claim. Please link it.
>why would they do this, even if you paid more?
The complaints in the article were all about too many hours. More pay, more workers, less hours.
I didn't see anything about not liking the job. At least not in the article.
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
If you think that, you aren't considering paying them enough money.
> Given the people in question have good other options, why would they do this, even if you paid more?
You ain't thinking about offering them enough money. Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have.
> In fact - plenty of smart people will take pay cuts for better qualify of life.
True, but also the same people will take quality of life cuts if you offer enough money.
Also, in general, the best way to improve one's quality of life is... through more money.
> Example: Plenty of folks take pay cuts to work remotely from places they like more, and because they find it a better quality of life.
Counterexample: add four zeros to the salary offered, and watch how many of them won't be happy to uproot and move with their whole family to your location within 24 hours.
> Not everyone is money driven, and the assumption that here is that the intersection of "money driven, capable of doing this job, etc" is large enough that increasing the amount of money will make the result larger.
This assumption is sound in theory and almost always true in practice, it's just rarely attempted, because you need to spend money, which people absolutely hate.
Almost all cases of skilled staff shortage can be solved with multiplying the payment by 2-10x (and convincing people you mean it - at the 10x end, people may start having doubts, precisely because it's so uncommon to see). Do that, and you'll have your competitors' staff jumping ship, and a wave of skilled applicants from abroad, committed to relocate if you let them. If the market for the skill is growing and you're able to sustain the pay bump, people will retrain and entrepreneurs will start schools for future candidates.
And yes, with that much extra money available, other entrepreneurs will try and pitch all kinds of software and hardware that will reduce your need for skilled labor, hoping you pay them instead.
Of course, 2-10x bump might make the whole endeavor stop making business sense on your end. It's often the case. But in this situation, saying there's shortage of labor is a lie. It's only a shortage at the price you're willing to pay.
This all just follows the same dynamics everything else in the economy does. If you believe employment is a special case where this doesn't apply, you're still not imagining paying enough money :).
This is again, so reductive i don't know where to begin.
You really just assume everyone, at their core, is money driven enough. So to you, everything is about whether they are beign offered enough money. You even use the amazingly circular reasoning that if you discover them saying no, it just means you weren't trying to pay them enough.
There is apparently no limit to this, and anything gets solved by more money. This of course, can't possibly be disproven, since you will just say to increase the limits.
Meanwhile, as I've said, this is an intensely researched thing. I have yet to see a single person constantly pushing the infinite money angle make any reasoned argument, backed up by any study or data.
As I've said, plenty of studies have explored the effect and limits of giving more money on happiness, on recruitment, etc, on tons and tons and tons of fields.
Rather than just making reductive arguments that don't really get us anywhere, why don't you make a reasoned one?
also consider, just for a second, the possibility that not everyone is this money driven. Seriously.
"Enough money means as much as it takes to make your offer better than any other option they have."
That doesn't always exist. That's the whole thing about not everyone being money driven.
You know what's extremely reductive and dishonest? Shifting the goalposts from "if you offer enough pay, you can get enough applicants" to "if you offer enough pay, you can get a specific person to take the job".
The original claim was this:
> Only 10% of applicants are physically and mentally qualified? Sounds like you need more applicants? Want to attract more applicants? Offer more compensation.
You then dishonestly moved the goalposts:
> There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
> The notion that if you just pay enough, people who are otherwise qualified will do anything, is amazingly reductive.
Maybe before accusing people of being reductive, you should respond to the actual point being made instead of moving the goalposts.
> As I've said, plenty of studies have explored the effect and limits of giving more money on happiness, on recruitment, etc, on tons and tons and tons of fields.
None of which you have linked. Go ahead, link a study that says that even offering an unbounded amount of money isn't enough to get enough applicants within the amount of time it takes to go through the training pipeline.
>There are plenty of jobs that you can't pay people enough money to want to do.
Name a few.