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Bottom line: laziness, greed, and unreasonable expectations.
That's the disease that's pandemic with employers today. Precious few are immune.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/podcast/at-work/tech-careers/why-bad-jobsor-no-jobshappen-to-good-workers/
Please read the entire interview. But here's some juicy bits:
Steven Cherry: Employers can’t find workers at the going wage. True or false?
Peter Cappelli: That’s false, and that’s almost by definition the case, because we know how markets work, and markets adjust and wages adjust. I had an employer write to me the other day saying they had a skills gap, and they really did. It wasn’t wages, because they did market wage surveys, and they were paying what everybody else was paying, and all the employers, by the way, are having a skills gap, so it’s a big problem. Well, if everybody’s got the same problem, and you’re all paying the same wage, it’s probably the case that you’re not paying enough. So the way markets work isn’t you set the wage and say, “Well, this is good enough.” You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it, right? You wouldn’t say, for example, that there’s a shortage of diamonds. Diamonds are very expensive. They cost a lot, but you can buy all the diamonds you want as long as you’re willing to pay.
(snip)
Steven Cherry: And do you think that could work in high tech as well?
Peter Cappelli: Yeah, you know, the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.
But now the problems these companies have in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is that it’s hard to find those people, and everybody wants the same people at the same time. They keep hoping that the engineering schools will turn out what they want, but it’s kind of bizarre if you think about it: if you were, say, a computer company, and you had a product that was all based on this particular chip. You didn’t build the chip yourself. You were expecting to buy it on the outside, and your expectation was just that you’ll be able, as soon as you’re ready, to buy this chip on the outside in the quantity you want at the price you want to pay. You’re just expecting the market will kick it up to you, and that’s pretty much what happens with labor, right? The software engineers, the systems architects, are often the key component in these companies, expecting to hire them right out of college, and they don’t really have much relationships with the colleges, you know. They don’t get close to their suppliers; they’re just hoping it will come up. If you did that with a chip, your board of directors would probably fire you for terrible risk management, but when it comes to skills and employees, it seems to be kind of a standard practice. Now, you leave the U.S., you don’t see that. If you go to India, for example, where the IT companies are booming, those folks are growing all their talent from within. They’re doing it because they have to, but it’s not rocket science as to how you can do it.
Peter Cappelli: That’s false, and that’s almost by definition the case, because we know how markets work, and markets adjust and wages adjust. I had an employer write to me the other day saying they had a skills gap, and they really did. It wasn’t wages, because they did market wage surveys, and they were paying what everybody else was paying, and all the employers, by the way, are having a skills gap, so it’s a big problem. Well, if everybody’s got the same problem, and you’re all paying the same wage, it’s probably the case that you’re not paying enough. So the way markets work isn’t you set the wage and say, “Well, this is good enough.” You pay what it takes to get the people you need, and if wages have to go up, then so be it, right? You wouldn’t say, for example, that there’s a shortage of diamonds. Diamonds are very expensive. They cost a lot, but you can buy all the diamonds you want as long as you’re willing to pay.
(snip)
Steven Cherry: And do you think that could work in high tech as well?
Peter Cappelli: Yeah, you know, the craziest thing about high tech is the Silicon Valley model, which sort of became dominant in the U.S., replaced the model where IT people used to be groomed and trained from within. And the Silicon Valley model of hiring just in time for what you need came about largely because they were able to poach talent away from these bigger companies that had spent a lot of time training and developing people.
But now the problems these companies have in Silicon Valley and elsewhere is that it’s hard to find those people, and everybody wants the same people at the same time. They keep hoping that the engineering schools will turn out what they want, but it’s kind of bizarre if you think about it: if you were, say, a computer company, and you had a product that was all based on this particular chip. You didn’t build the chip yourself. You were expecting to buy it on the outside, and your expectation was just that you’ll be able, as soon as you’re ready, to buy this chip on the outside in the quantity you want at the price you want to pay. You’re just expecting the market will kick it up to you, and that’s pretty much what happens with labor, right? The software engineers, the systems architects, are often the key component in these companies, expecting to hire them right out of college, and they don’t really have much relationships with the colleges, you know. They don’t get close to their suppliers; they’re just hoping it will come up. If you did that with a chip, your board of directors would probably fire you for terrible risk management, but when it comes to skills and employees, it seems to be kind of a standard practice. Now, you leave the U.S., you don’t see that. If you go to India, for example, where the IT companies are booming, those folks are growing all their talent from within. They’re doing it because they have to, but it’s not rocket science as to how you can do it.
