Comment by TeMPOraL

3 months ago

> 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.