Struggle Finding New Employees.

[boosted]

I love their are lots of statistics but none you can find readily at hand

We will have to do some extrapolation, but FRED does have those statistics. You are only looking at one piece of the data.

Home construction has slowed down, but it has also outpaced population growth...

 

[gustafson]

Nice, two graphs that do not cover the same time period and use incompatible units of measure

Chart of the Day: Housing Unit Growth v. Population Growth

Someone (apologies for I forget who) Tweeted out this report from the Met Council called simply “We Still Need More Housing” the other day. It’s got some great charts in it. Here …

streets.mn

For instance
or:

Population growth has outpaced home construction for 20 years - USAFacts

Home construction is increasing since the Great Recession but still down 55% from 2006.

usafacts.org

 

[CarbideBob]

Housing... what.
Back to OP track, why is it hard to find guys to work for you that are decent or up to you level of expectations?
This a real problem for many.
How often I hear this from shop owners.
First is the kids now that do not want to work. Second is handouts so they do not understand working for a paycheck.

 

[gustafson]

Housing... what.
Back to OP track, why is it hard to find guys to work for you that are decent or up to you level of expectations?
This a real problem for many.
How often I hear this from shop owners.
First is the kids now that do not want to work. Second is handouts so they do not understand working for a paycheck.

I think that complaint goes back to Aristotle

 

[Garwood]

I love their are lots of statistics but none you can find readily at hand
View attachment 389495

What is this graph showing?

I don't understand "New housing units divided by civilian population".

Shouldn't it be net new housing created / net population increase?

 

[BoxcarPete]

What is this graph showing?

I don't understand "New housing units divided by civilian population".

Shouldn't it be net new housing created / net population increase?

That's what you'd get if you normalize it against population growth - the graph boosted included in post #121.

You'd have [new housing / existing people] / [new people / existing people] and the [existing people] term cancels out.

Overall they're pretty close, but to my finely calibrated eyeballs it looks like population growth is a bit higher on average for the timeline displayed.

 

[William Payne]

One thing I expect but rarely get from employers. If I come to you as an employee with a number that I want to earn, you should be able to tell me what is expected of me to earn that figure.

Employers constantly go on about value but they can’t actually say why someone is or isn’t worth a number.

You should be able to take a skill set and say that skill is worth X. Anyone who can do that is worth X.

 

[john.k]

The only workers Ive seen who can name their hourly rate are industrial painters ....and only some of them.

 

[EndlessWaltz]

I also left engineering to be a machinist, but not because I wanted to work with my hands. I left because as an engineer the pay was shit and the job was boring. I started my own shop to make competing products to the company I used to work for. I wanted to start a business and I figured I should do what I know (which was mostly product design and less machining at the time).

These days it's software engineering or bust. Mechanical, electrical and manufacturing engineering doesn't pay much more than machining these days and often engineers actually make less than machinists. In my first job as an engineer after graduation I was making close to 14/hr and many of my coworkers were making less if you counted the hours they worked. I was working 60+ hour weeks shoulder to shoulder with other engineers in a standing bullpen-style office that was literally a repurposed boiler room in the windowless basement of a pharmaceutical plant writing completely meaningless quality documents for a new line they were putting in. We were standing on concrete floors for 12 hours each day making revisions to documents on our laptops because they were too cheap to give us chairs or desks. As employees we were treated like totally disposable trash and threatened with dismissal if we complained or talked back. That was the worst job I ever had and will admit that it is far from the norm. I am thankful for the experience since it had a big impact on my thinking about work and put me on the road to starting my own business many years later.

Everybody stop. This is hilarious. Why? Because corporations are still doing this. Seriously. It's 2023, and these guys still think people are this dumb. These young engineers fall for this shit maybe for a couple years tops. That is the "problem". The internet , like this great forum, lets people know they are being taken advantage of. The best part, us machinists know most of the meaningless paperwork is just that and these corps paid for it lol. We are in a Great Reset.

 

[EndlessWaltz]

Not sure about that...degreed engineers start out in the $75k-$100k range now.

And engineers are in huge demand, especially manufacturing engineers. The Boomer engineers are retiring, taking a lot of tribal knowledge and experience with them.

Just like a machinist, an engineer can get a job anywhere these days...

{After graduating from VT with a BS in industrial engineering, I too left a career in manufacturing engineering after 7 years, and started my own CNC shop. Been at it 26 years this month!}

{{I did it for two reasons: I'm a very hands-on guy who loves machinery and machining, and for the money!}}

ToolCat

What do you think "manufacturing engineers" are really being hired for these days.....

 

[Garwood]

One thing I expect but rarely get from employers. If I come to you as an employee with a number that I want to earn, you should be able to tell me what is expected of me to earn that figure.

Employers constantly go on about value but they can’t actually say why someone is or isn’t worth a number.

You should be able to take a skill set and say that skill is worth X. Anyone who can do that is worth X.

Really?

That's what I have always done. "If you can do XXXX, XXXXX, XXXX, and XXXX you are worth $XX/hr to me. If you can learn to do XXXX and XXXX you are worth $XX."

I have no problem whatsoever telling someone they are or are not worth such and such hourly rate.

 

[William Payne]

Really?

That's what I have always done. "If you can do XXXX, XXXXX, XXXX, and XXXX you are worth $XX/hr to me. If you can learn to do XXXX and XXXX you are worth $XX."

I have no problem whatsoever telling someone they are or are not worth such and such hourly rate.

I wish I could get employers to do it. I don't use it as a thing of demanding money. I use it as a training guide. I can come up with a number and by being able to know what is expected of that number that gives me the ability to look at my own skillset regarding my strengths and weaknesses and where to improve. Once I feel I have attained those skill sets at the required level then I can go back and talk numbers and negotiate.

 

[jccaclimber]

What do you think "manufacturing engineers" are really being hired for these days.....

Depends. Looking back at those I’ve worked with the good ones are doing process development and making problems stay gone or launching new stuff. The middle half are knob turning and spending their time manually plotting process yields in Excel to hand to management because they haven’t bothered to learn to automate their reports or their employer is to cheap to digitize their data sources.
The rest are doing paperwork or socializing at the water cooler.

 

[gustafson]

That's what you'd get if you normalize it against population growth - the graph boosted included in post #121.

You'd have [new housing / existing people] / [new people / existing people] and the [existing people] term cancels out.

Overall they're pretty close, but to my finely calibrated eyeballs it looks like population growth is a bit higher on average for the timeline displayed.

All things, markets, traffic, jobs, are defined by the last x.x percent
If you have 1000 jobs and 999 people wages will rise
IF you have 1000 widgets and 999 customers prices will fall[or you sit one that last widget and profit falls]
If you have a road that can carry 999 cars a minute and you put 1000 cars on it, traffic comes to a dead stop

Point being, when you have fewer housing units being produced[which is the facts on the ground despite arguments to the contrary] than people being created, prices will rise. Period, full stop

 

[chad883]

Seems like a bad idea to compare these two numbers. Population goes up, but those numbers will not need housing for about 20 years. Also how many people live alone? Seems like the housing should only need to increase by about half the population increase.

 

[gustafson]

Seems like a bad idea to compare these two numbers. Population goes up, but those numbers will not need housing for about 20 years. Also how many people live alone? Seems like the housing should only need to increase by about half the population increase.

I let my kids live outside till they get out of high school, but that might not be for everyone..........

 

[BoxcarPete]

Chad is right, it's not directly applicable. However, the missing piece of information is average family size under one roof which is well known to be declining, i.e. fewer people are cramming families of seven into a three or four bedroom home. That's probably a stronger driver of demand than the shortfall of population overall.

Another major price driver is the interest rate. If it's cheap to borrow money, the highest allowable purchase price for a particular consumer goes up. Look at the etymology of the word "mortgage" from Latin via French: the root of the word is "death pledge," originally a deal made by figuring how much you can pay until you die. So you take these mortgages, and the monthly payment is what most people shop by. Artificially depressed interest rates will make the principal (purchase price) swell.

 

[gustafson]

Chad is right, it's not directly applicable.

No that is not correct
First an increase in population is not directly related to babies.
It is also internal movement and immigration
Even when it is baby related, many people lived as married couples in a 1 bedroom apartment until they have a kid, when that is no longer tenable.
While a time delay might factor in, it is not 20 years by any stretch

If there is no housing shortage, where are all the apartments going empty
Supply
Demand
Price

 

[BoxcarPete]

No that is not correct
First an increase in population is not directly related to babies.
It is also internal movement and immigration
Even when it is baby related, many people lived as married couples in a 1 bedroom apartment until they have a kid, when that is no longer tenable.
While a time delay might factor in, it is not 20 years by any stretch

If there is no housing shortage, where are all the apartments going empty
Supply
Demand
Price

Where did I say there isn't a shortage? I took the position that simple population vs. units available isn't sufficient to determine whether there is a shortage or not. I then added the factor which I felt made the analysis more accurate: the average family size. With that considered, you have families getting smaller AND population going up, which increases demand for individual housing units more than simple population growth.

It doesn't really matter if there is a time delay or not, because average family size with dependents is calculated now, as a result of family planning decisions made years ago. That's the number to look at, and it's usable as is because it's calculated with current family sizes. Once you get to population-level statistics, the individual stories are more or less lost in the wash because there are plenty of those to go around and many of them contradict each other.

 

[Hightemp]

The fact that the OP liked posts complaining about govt benefits for the unemployed and none of the posts expressing points about the completely different dynamics facing young workers today tells me quite a bit about why he's having difficulty hiring.