Yikes!

Employees ave unions to fix pay, so why not employers? It's a bit underhand though!!

Why are you surprised?

In a sellers market during the boom years highly skilled professionals command a decent salary and most big employers prefer to poach fully trained staff from their smaller competitors rather than train up fresh (post) graduates. They have no choice but to pay the rate needed to get the skilled staff that they want/need for expansion and falling behind the pay curve loses the best staff to competitors *very* fast.

In a buyers market they can collude to drive the price of skilled labour into the ground - they have 50 applicants or more for every vacancy. Why pay more than you have to? Willing buyer willing seller. Chances are the potential employee is mortgaged to the hilt and in practice has no real choice when an offer is made.

Market forces - the potential employee is not obliged to accept the job offered. The company that I first worked for would consider anyone who accepted their opening offer a fool (and that was back in the old days when recruitment consultants still had some rudimentary ethics).

What is exceedingly dim is for a cartel to leave any kind of provable (virtual) paper trail. I wonder how good their slimy fat lawyers are?

Or is it you are complaining that someone has noticed how this happens?

What *is* most surprising is that the same rules do not apply on Wall Street. They get paid ever increasing loadsamoney win or lose.

Regards, Martin Brown

Because what they are doing is illegal, and they have legal staffs that are suppose to keep them from doing illegal stuff.

Now they face bad publicity and class-action damages, and some very unhappy employees. Plain stupid.

It's sure not a buyers market on the SF peninsula these days.

I don't recall complaining. "Yikes!" is merely an expression of surprise.

John

Their legal staffs are in place to intimidate victims who would otherwise complain of chronic violations of law. That is their only purpose.

If an executive isn't involved in a felony, he isn't considered very effective in this valley.

Not at all. The Fortune 500 own your lawyer and the judge. The employees aren't 'unhappy'. They are scared literally out of their minds.

? There are *lots* of us talented, motivated productive folks that have been out of work for a very long time and would jump at the chance to work. It's a classic 'buyers market'.

They are very good, backed by sophisticated technology that can cause electronic evidence to disappear.

Don't bother complaining. It'll get you blackballed.

--Winston

Because collusion between unions is not illegal?

A bit?

Apparently not. After all, most of the politicians and bureaucrats are in their employ.

Thanks! Rich

With the political/business environment these days, I'm kind of surprised that you're surprised. :-)

Cheers! Rich

No. They have legal advisers to tell them precisely how close to the wind they can sail and what they must never write down. Business cartels in all but name are more common than you would like to admit.

Most times we only find out about it when something triggers a situation where one party grasses the other up to avoid prosecution - eg the recent price fixing fuel surcharge scam of BA & Virgin:

Their duty is to maximise profits to shareholders - and nothing else.

I don't expect it will bother the hard nosed ones much. Golden rule applies.

You don't get out much do you? Several large players have recently announced significant layoffs.

It was ambiguous. In the UK Yikes is more like running scared/afraid. (almost archaic - that might be used in 1960's boys comics stories)

Regards, Martin Brown

..

es.

ur

hy

he

From Apple's [very American] dictionary:

yikes |y=C4=ABks| exclamation informal expressing shock and alarm, often for humorous effect : I had a dip in the 40-degree pool (yikes!). ORIGIN 1970s: of unknown origin

Let them blackball me. Phhhhbbbbtttt!

John

I certainly try not to.

That happens. Other large and small players are hiring more. SOMA, the heart of the .com boom and bust, is getting so crowded with webby companies that they are moving into Union Square, alongside Macy*s and Hermes. Commercial real estate rental prices are rising fast, numbers like $33/sqft-yr now for dumpy spaces.

We're trying to hire embedded systems programmers, and to contract out some web design. Both are very difficult to find, especially web designers. I know some serious players in the internet business, people who owe us favors and are trying to help, and they say that decent web designers are in incredible demand.

We'll probably have to import the embedded programmers from out of state. We're flying in kids from Washington and Virginia.

It's probably going to get worse. Twitter is moving in three blocks away and expects to hire 3K more people. There goes the neighborhood. Imagine trying to get a seat at our favorite tiny Japanese restaurant when a couple thousand twitterati break for lunch.

We don't do scared/afraid as much here in the Wild West.

John

Unions are not subject to antitrust law in the US. Businesses are.

Businesses adjust to the asymmetry by moving their operations to friendlier countries.

John

Your "help wanted" ad is a good one, John; sorry it's not producing better returns.

When you read Rob's backstory and how difficult he found it to find a job, it's amazing how much things have changed since 2003, especially given the overall still-weak state of the economy.

I have a sample size of one (someone I know) whose company has had the same problem -- people who'll do web design are a dime are dozen; those who can do it *well* are much harder to find.

Feel free to move on up to Oregon? The greater Portland area is awfully nice? :-)

---Joel

What difference does it make if you add twitterati to existing ignorati ?:-) ...Jim Thompson

Same on the other side of the bay if you need a good HW engineer.

$33sqft/year in S.F.? That sounds dirt cheap to me. Even out here we pay half of that for somewhat decent space.

You can find tons of former script kiddies. Problem is, they'll mess up your site. Keep it simple. I get about 2-3 emails/calls/week from someone who wants to improve my web site. Thanks, but no thanks.

There's a lot of good ones in Europe but that'll mean a whole big visa procedure, and I remember you guys weren't too enthused in one case. Yet sometimes that is the only way to get a good engineer.

It'll blow over some day, dot com goes in cycles :-)

Out here they use that expression to signal disgust, shortly before spitting into the sand ;-)

Cartoons or Batman, or maybe another TV show like the Monkeys or that chimpanzee thing.

Etymology is obscure though possiblly a sound alike from fox hunting. Best online source I could find was:

exclamation of alarm or surprise, by 1953; perhaps from yoicks, a call in fox-hunting, attested from c.1770. Yike "a fight" is slang attested from 1940, of uncertain connection

This reference suggests it was in common usage in the UK mid 1950's.

The earliest I could find it in print was in an 1967 Eagle annual cartoon "Cornelius Dimworthy Puts the Clock Back" p28 - where it is actually spelt "Yiiikkkkkkke!" singular as the baddy trips over a dog lead. This was the Eagle comics answer to Billy Bunter set in a public school (in the US would be called a private fee paying school).

I think it may have originally come from Billy Bunter stories before that but can't recall any earlier occurrences in print. It isn't in his online list of catch phrases unlike "ouch yaroooh".

Regards, Martin Brown

It actually means "Ecowabunga!"

where the initial E is silent, of course.

John

Or states. There are a lot of car manufacturers within a couple of hundred miles of here.