If you can substitute foreign labor then there is no shortage. If you can't substitute foreign labor then it's irrelevant.

You can't have a shortage of workers and falling wages. You can have uncompetitive US companies, but they are very profitable so the only thing left is irrational behavior.

Or insufficient capital investment and bad management holding down productivity. You can't pay a worker more than their productivity, but if the best you can get out of them is too little, it may not be worth their while. You could then plausibly see a shortage of workers, wage suppression, and stagnant productivity statistics at the same time.

But that can not be reconciled to "labor shortage".

A more fruitful line of research focuses on the growing power of monopoly, and the collapse of new business formation in the USA. Why don't companies with huge profits reinvest their profits? Why are most of the tech giants sitting on piles of cash? Monopoly could explain that, and would also explain a limit on wages that otherwise seems to defy market sense.

One thing which has substantially changed between '99 and now is employer expectation of availability. In '99, you may have worked 9-6, but when you left the office, you left the office. Sure, some tech folks, some traders, etc. may have had pagers back then - but now, the mobile phone is ubiquitous, and the universal expectation is that you are available and ready to work, even if it's 4am on Sunday and you got married yesterday.

It's purely anecdotal, but I am "in my prime", and have opted out of being a productive member of society for now, as being broke beats being broken. I'm not alone in this - in the past 18 months of peripateticism, I've met many others, mostly tech folks, in the same boat.

Bluntly, market price isn't enough to completely sacrifice any semblance of an existence outside of work.

Maybe among Silicon Valley startups. That has absolutely not been the case at any of my jobs at companies ranging from 5 to tens of thousands of employees.

There will always be some suckers who are pushed to work overnight and week end.

Companies with poor working conditions usually suffer from poor management, which causes burnout and high turnover. The problem is that poor management is so common that many people think burnout and high turnover are normal.

Employees tend to leave the job or the workforce altogether. The ones who did not yet are in short supply.

I know it's not an option open to everyone, and I'll be honest and say that a lot of the folks I've met have trod a similar path - startup, decade of unsustainable grind, total burnout, with maybe 0.1% of what we dreamed of to show for it.

I have however also met folks on the road who've thrown the towel in with no capital, who are finding ways of making it work - one couple even had two under-ten children, and were travelling, gigging, and educating their incredibly worldly and well informed kids, with a view to "maybe finding a ruin somewhere". It takes all sorts, but I think there are an increasing number of people "opting out".

So you became a farmer? How's that working out?

I also wouldn’t call myself a farmer - rather a smallholder experimenting with permaculture. Cost of living here is low if you buy food from local markets, etc., so I’ve a few years to make it work before I end up totally broke.

That’s just off the cuff though.

And this is after we swore we would never let another Rwanda or another Serbia happen.

Actually, this raises a very interesting point to parallel the author’s. By the same logic, a pacifist society must be willing to go to war to protect that pacifism.

What on earth does this have to do with health insurance?

US government spends more per capita on healthcare than eg UK government, and doesn't have universal coverage and has worse results across a range of indicators.

https://visual.ons.gov.uk/how-does-uk-healthcare-spending-co...

US tax-payers are subsidising the US's terrible healthcare.

One possible explanation is that a lot of money is spent on healthcare toward the end of life, and much of it is just chasing a sliver of hope. In a system where people spend according to their priorities, instead of to improve some statistical indicator of system-wide efficacy, 'irrational' spending like this could be much higher in the US.

The landscape is changing so fast that any competitive advantage that unfolds over multiple years, such as treating your employees well, fostering junior developers etc, doesn't have much of an effect. There's too much chaos and reinvention going on.

Trump would be right to constrict access to H1B1 visas for foreign workers in the US, in this case.

But we also have a problem of access to those coding bootcamps - everyone has a smartphone, not everyone has a modern desktop/laptop. As far as coding bootcamps, there's also this: https://medium.com/@melissamcewen/who-killed-the-junior-deve...

The same in the field of law: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/opinion/too-many-law-stud...

Here's what employers are saying: https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/03/28/surveys-find...

But a realistic explanation? Monopsony: too few employers competing for workers with any given skill set. https://slate.com/business/2018/01/after-all-the-talk-about-...

Monopsony is getting some attention: https://www.thenation.com/article/does-monopoly-power-explai...

And here: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/ask-the-headhunter/ask-...

The overall conclusion was that automation (and, we can assume, globalization) was essentially digging away at "middle-skilled" jobs, like manufacturing. These are jobs where employees must invest a certain amount of time and training to be paid well, and then they find that their entire industry is drying up. They are faced with a few choices, and many of those lead towards a less attractive, lower-paying job than they had before.

With a social safety net, many are simply exiting the job market and relying on disability or other means to get by rather than take a crap job at crap wages.

Although the age group here is different, a lot of the same forces are likely at play. US employers do not see labor as an investment, and haven't for a long time (if ever); they are generally unwilling to hire lower-skilled employees and invest in training them. Instead, they cry constantly that there isn't a large enough pool of skilled labor to draw from (and in the tech sector, this is why they think they need lots of H-1Bs).

Meanwhile, potential employees are faced with a market where, if they work very hard and teach themselves some skill at their own cost, they might be able to get a job working for an employer who will pay them as little as they can get away with paying them (the wage pressure), and potentially also having to pay off student loans. Alternatively, they can forego this rat race and get some middle-skill job -- something between food service and senior software developer -- and make enough to get by, and with less debt, and spend whatever extra money they've got left over on cheap entertainment.

They certainly aren't going to be able to afford a house on their wages, that hasn't been possible since the 60s.

This is a complex issue with manifold causes and effects and, as the article I linked points out, nobody seems to have a solid handle on all of it yet. There's lots of ideology but not clear enough data yet.

When I see teenagers with iPhones and their parents buying Tesla cars I can see why they will never afford a house. Average American is unable to save money, most overspend. Combine this with poor education and unwillingness to learn or relocate.

I have been openly asked about my politics at an interview for a Y Combinator startup (Starsky Robotics). "We need to make sure you are not a horrible person." One of my references later told me that the co-founder was on the phone almost 20 minutes asking probing questions about me. No offer, no feedback. Who stands a chance with that level of scrutiny?

However since this is the case everywhere I think it's better to think about ways to mitigate this problem than try to solve it via some sort of gatekeeping. Even Google with their rigorous process has this problem.

Personally I think the inability to fire-fast because of lack of a social safety net is a core part of the problem.

Yeah ok guys, that's pretty inflated, innit /s?

A ground worker is the PC term what's known in civil engineering as a "navvy"

Oh and the ground worker would get OT

What exactly are the requirements for a "web developer" with 3-5 years experience? More or less than a registered nurse with 3-5 years experience (~$60k)?

If you want to fill a shortage, you need to start by raising wages substantially. If for no other reason than to at least allow new students some hope of ever repaying the always-increasing college costs required to enter these fields.

Many of the new positions being created in startups have no defined market rate, which causes more malinvestment (overpaying workers who don't produce well enough) or shortage of labor due to insufficient perceived compensation.

Businesses will almost always err on the side of shortage of labor and keeping costs down when they can (though you could argue otherwise in the current ridiculous VC-backed industry), so this will always be a "problem" in the market.