"Number of available jobs" is a meaningless statistic.

HN-ready example: I'd like to do a web start-up, if only I could find skilled engineers. I'm willing to pay 100 experienced, skilled Java programmers $10/hr to build the site. What? No takers? Not one?? Well, there you go! 100 jobs unfilled. Skills gap!

You can't offer poverty-level wages for skilled jobs, then complain that "we don't have the skilled workers" when college educated workers instead choose to go sell shoes at the mall.

This is a terrible analogy; If I were a Java programmer who was unemployed, struggling to find any job at all, I would take your shitty $10/hr programming job in a heartbeat.

Of course I am not under/un-employed, so I have the luxury of telling you to take your shitty job offering and shove it. Your little scenario seems absurd to all of us because we all know that there are plenty of far better programming jobs available. We are not looking at a job shortage.

Unless you were collecting unemployment, in which case the shitty $10/hour job would result in a net loss.

Or the Java market is in the process of undergoing systemic changes and you're not yet a Java programmer, just someone with some technical skill who could spend time and money to becoming proficient.

More than worth closing the resume employment gap.

There are better programming jobs out there precisely because there are fewer capable programmers than there are jobs. If we had more programmers than jobs, you would be looking at the $10/hr job right now, because if you didn't take it, someone else would jump all over it.

That argument is a bit disingenuous if you ask me.

A company that legitimately needs worker would be forced to raise their offered wages until they can find employees or would be forced to go out of business.

I think the problem is that society has told young people that if they have a 4-year degree they should be making mid to high wages right out of school just because they have a degree. In the real world employers need people with skills not people with a piece of paper.

If you were to learn a skill right out of high-school you could live off of $10 to $12 per hour for a few years while you live with parents or roommates and overtime as your skills improve you should be able to earn much more and become independent. But no people would rather goof off at university for four years and have their high wages handed to them.

I think you might be a wee bit disingenuous as well. There are a few issues with so called "skilled labor" right out of high school:

1. Skilled jobs are hard jobs. They are often limited to men strictly due to the physical ability required (I used to work as a diesel mechanic and it was simply not a job that could be done by most women). This is obviously not universally true: machining, some welding, virtually all engineering can be done by women, but there's still a limiter for lots of jobs.

2. The work is hard. This isn't just an issue of "people preferring to goof off". It's hard labor. Given the choice of going to school and continuing that backbreaking work, I made the (wise) choice to go to school.

3. Because it's hard, it's not work for middle aged people. I live in North Dakota, a state that's attracting a lot of skilled labor right now, and it's predominantly young men because men into their 40s and 50s simply can't do it anymore. We need to consider the long term impacts of a workforce that doesn't extend into their 70s.

4. It's not always work that transfers well. Someone who is a computer programmer might be able to work for a long time and in many places, but a skilled laborer is more limited in their options. A machinist in Seattle when Boeing left? Tough break, move or find something else. Obviously this is true with many careers, and many skilled jobs have greater options (mechanics, some welders, engineers) but a skilled laborer is much more subject to the whims of nature than a white collar worker who's skills might be more transferable.

I think it's as unfair to say young people want to goof off at college as it is to say that companies want to screw over workers. Young people make decisions for lots of reasons and though I agree that the systems in place to help them make those decisions (parents, school counselors, etc.) could advise them better, it's certainly not because they are goof offs who want a free ride.

Can you clarify #4? I'm actually struggling to see how my programming skills can apply to other jobs in any meaningful way outside of the realm of programming.

I mean, sure, if Microsoft left Seattle today, I could probably find another software company in town to work for. However, I expect at one point in time, machinists could walk into another shop with ease too. There is no reason to believe programmers will always be in high demand.

I think that most "skilled labor" is more specialized than people realize. As a diesel mechanic I could go a lot of places (urban areas were generally out; I would need to live in the suburbs, where there were truck stops). A programmer, on the other hand, has the option to freelance, work from home, even start his own business with limited or no capital. Any company of any decent size probably hires programmers once and a while or even has a few on staff, but it's not really that easy if your specialty is hyperbaric welding (which you can make a small fortune doing, to be fair). No one "bootstraps" a mechanic's shop, too much space and specialized equipment.

But that's still pretty flexible. I'm thinking about all these super industry specific jobs Rowe talks about on his show. Agricultural specialties, oil rig workers, aircraft mechanics and so on. Just not that easy to live close to home and family and do that for a living.

A friend of mine is also a diesel mechanic. He has been freelancing for a couple of local farmers and has used that money to bootstrap his own shop. I think there are actually a lot of parallels with the opportunities programmers have.

As an added bonus, he had to learn about driving trucks, farming, etc. in order to do the job. If mechanical work suddenly disappeared, there are many things he could transition into with ease. I'm still not sure where my programming skills can be used, other than for programming. I suppose I've picked up some general computer skills by way of having to use a computer to do the job, but it seems like everyone has those skills these days.

You do bring up a good point about location though. It would be quite difficult for him to do the same in a heart of a metro area. However, the inverse is true in many ways for programmers. The opportunities for a programmer on the farm are limited compared to someone doing the same in the city.

Rowe didn't mention it, but I think that in addition to a number of people who simply aren't willing to work hard, there are a number of people who aren't willing to move to where the work is. This is another change from 40–50 years ago.

This is a big deal! A documented major shift in US society is that we are no longer moving around as much.

It has been fascinating looking around and seeing the mentality differences between people willing to move (aka adapt) to the world they live in and the jobs they want and the people who are unwilling. IMO, the adaptable people do remarkably better.

@stinkytaco fair point. "Goof off" was a poor choice of words.

You pointed out that the work is very hard. I agree but why is that bad? I think that is one of Rowe's biggest points. Doing hard work should be glorified, it should be honorable, it should be something we admire. But American culture has made it a bad thing that should be avoided at any cost. I don't think that is a good thing in the long run.

It's bad because it cause physical damage. Virtually every long-term practitioner of a "hard work" job is damaged: back, knees, neck, hands. It's very often a career that you can't outside past 50.

A good deal of that is alleviated and managed by care at the job site and personal fitness. Growing up around construction workers, all too many of them did not take care of themselves and the debt was called in later in life. Quite sad, but largely preventable. Of course, this does not protect from non-mitigatable risks, which are non-negligable.

Which (when true--lifting heavy things on a daily basis is eventually deleterious even when one uses proper technique) takes time, which reduces productivity, which isn't acceptable because money.

It is economically smart to burn out people doing "hard work". And it's not like we're going to do much to help them.

Churn and burn joints trying to crank maximum effort at maximum speed do exist in the trades. My observation is that as people acquire skill, they try to avoid avoid such companies. It's simply bad quality output, bad morale, and lousy work conditions.

And that's great! It really is. Except for when you take into account all the other people who aren't so fortunate. That's why I have no real problem with the cultural aversion to that "hard work"--because somebody ends up at the bottom and being at the bottom means they get screwed.

Can you give us an example of how this is preventable? Repeatedly physical stress wears down the body. This is why you see long time weight lifters and runners with worn out joints in middle age.

"long time weight lifters"

Who?

I was into lifting when I was younger. The gossip and locker room wisdom I heard was is if I screwed up a ligament or muscle or joint by doing something really stupid at age 18 I'd heal perhaps three to ten times faster than the old retired guys. Quite a few of the old lifters were damaged goods; because their OT told them to start lifting or get used to being permanently bedridden in the future; they were damaged goods before they started not because of lifting which was medically therapeutic.

So ... doing something stupid has a higher cost for older folks. One interesting solution to that problem, which most HN readers think applies to them, is to apply a high IQ to not doing something stupid. And/or identifying coworkers who are idiots and avoiding working with them.

Anecdotes about individual extreme roid users are not terribly useful unless you're suggesting everyone who gets involved much inherently become an extreme roid user. Amongst the clean rank and file, general health levels were much higher than the general population.

There are a large number of people who have terrible fitness and are 50+ pounds overweight. Many people smoke. I don't have numbers on the correlation with socioeconomic status, but I'm pretty sure that worse fitness and smoking correlate with lower status to a degree (can't recall the news articles on such things, I've read occasional notes on such things). That's borne out by my personal observation.

So basically, if you take the intersection of "bad habits" and "physical work", you wind up with "worse body" as a result. On the other hand, careful maintenance of your body & health habits allows you to do better than your unmaintained colleague. It's hard, but doable.

There is a difference between doing hard work and working hard. Hard work (of various sorts) for an extended period of time often has a long term negative impact on one's health. The people who do it should be respected, definitely, but glorified? Seems like a bad idea especially considering the lack of transference to other fields and growing automation.

Rowe addresses this in his article. He describes many of the available jobs as being well above minimum wage. Granted it's anecdotal data, but in the absence of better data, number of available jobs seems to be the best way to determine whether there's a skills gap.

Wow, six figures for a welder in the Dakotas is poverty level? I can't imagine what you consider a livable wage.

Except they're not shitty jobs. You start low, yes, but you work your way up. Most of them are union. Soon you're making $25+ / hour with benefits and overtime. Yes, God forbid, what a horrible life.

Anytime I hear "we have a shortage of workers" my first thought is, "for what jobs, and at what wage/working conditions?"

Usually when a person says "I have a shortage of workers" they mean "I can't find enough chumps/desperate people to work for the ridiculously low wage I want to pay."

There is also the difference between jobs and careers. For many it is not enough to have a job that pays decently. They need one that is stable. Preferably with benefits that can make future planning easy. (And, by easy, I mean possible.)

Are these the us labor stats that you are referring to? http://www.bls.gov/iag/tgs/iag23.htm. Because, if so, it seems they paint a more nuanced picture than either side (shocker!). There are plenty of openings (113k), but the median pay is in the 40k/year range, not 55k starting mentioned. The unemployment rate is also higher than the national average.

Not a bad career, but hardly the land of milk and honey.