I forgot to mention that. He applied at large and small companies but, the kicker is, he's all set for retirement, doesn't need the money, and only wants to bring in about $20K to $30K so he can help fund a non-profit he likes.
I've wondered about this. I often do interviews and say, "This guy isn't gangbusters, but he could help us out with <grunt work that's piling up> if he's willing to work for the right price."
My bosses usually wince at that sentiment, probably because I'm underestimating how much overhead is or something, but there should be a number that makes it worth it, right? And if the guy ends up being smart and reliable, you could ask him to retrain for a job with more responsibility.
Am I missing something? How else are we going to get all these unemployed men retrained in another field, especially growing ones like tech?
If your company is having that discussion in the context of full time employment, the indirect costs (i.e. non-salary things like health insurance, 401(k) matching, etc) are a significant factor in the equation. As salary drops, these (relatively fixed) indirect costs become a larger percentage of the cost of retaining someone.
If you measure the value of the employee by the salary you pay him or her, the ratio of total costs incurred by the company to value derived by the company for this one employee increases as that employee's salary drops. This is one of the major reasons that temporary jobs and part time work have become popular solutions to this problem: the indirect costs associated with these types of hires are lower.
What we really need, in an ideal world, is a set of personal benefit programs (health & life insurance are the big ones) which are completely uncorrelated with your employment status or location. Forcing employers to shoulder the burden for personal benefits leads down a dark and dysfunctional path where the programs are not controlled and managed by those who have an interest in them for what they provide, but by those who have an interest in minimizing the costs of such programs.
Retraining an unemployed philosophy major to run tests and route bug reports seems feasible as well. There are armies of people that would kill to be a barrista (with benefits) or an administrative assistant. Are you saying Starbucks can find a way to make them more productive than they cost, but engineering organizations can't?
