Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Unemployment numbers don't measure quality. We have tons of available jobs, but low quality. And/or the people looking for jobs don't have the skills required for high quality jobs.
Edit: Here's an income quintile graph from 2016 that shows quality of jobs (scroll down):
Its part of the very wealthy keeping all the money - if nobody has a skilled job, we don't get (much) income, and wealth inequality zooms onward.
A better measure of employment would be, how much total payroll is across the country. Per capita if you like. That would tell us how we're doing. Not just a total of whom 'has a job'.
Pretty sure it's mostly the other way: They're low status because they're low paid.
Jobs are low paid when there is a big supply of people who can and want to do them. Which is pretty much equivalent to the jobs being low skilled.
Since everyone can flip a burger, you don't have to pay much to find someone to do it.
Admittedly this is relatively expensive sit-down restaurant service we're talking about here, which is different from the fast food market.
...at least that's the knee-jerk defense you hear from the priests of our current system (most mislead or benefiting from the corruption). If you don't support our current broken form of capitalism, you're labeled a blasphemer.
Heaven forbid we, as a society, re-evaluate the functionality of something adopted hundreds of years ago and adapt/change it without offering an impossibly proven successful alternative. Because, you know, the current economic system we have was proven successful before it was adopted.
It won't necessarily be trivial or painless but it will be less painful than it will at a later date, unless we want to pass the burden down to future generations.
What more can you ask, whether you're ranting in favor of or against socialism? Risk free returns maintain your purchasing power, while at the same time, you get essentially nothing for taking no risk with capital. This seems exactly how it should work in a perfect system...doesn't it?
If the published number spikes, so does the COL adjustments for social security. This would easily put the government underwater.
The smallest reform to the healthcare system that I think would be substantially beneficial, is just to let ACA plans compete for employed people on an equal basis. It's unreasonable that once you have a job then you have to pay way more for a marketplace plan. I'm nowhere near my deductible for the forseeable future, but certain office visits doubled in price just because I have a job with a temp agency that provides shitty insurance that effectively disqualifies me for an ACA plan.
When does it start trickling down Mr Reagan?! When does it start trickling down!?
Buybacks allow shareholders to time capital gain better.
By that logic, you should be made to give everything you have to the people of Congo. Since when is morality determined by the size of one’s wallet?
I don't think it's reasonable to measure a society's morality by its tax rates only or to draw an equivalence between taxes and theft.
It's true that minimal government and taxes worked well in the US's early history. But if you think about it, that was an agricultural society where the main source of capital, land, was practically free. It's not surprising that relatively pure capitalism worked OK then, but historically it seems to have worked out less well in almost all other circumstances.
These days a lot of capital is in stocks in global corporations, with barriers to entry measured in the billions of dollars. It's not as simple as moving to the frontier and finding your own plot of land.
I think an ideal society delivers broad-based prosperity and individual freedoms with a dynamic market economy. And tax policy should preserve incentives to work and invest efficiently. But if there is a conflict between broad-based prosperity and zero tax rates / income redistribution, like in the example society above, the former should definitely be chosen over the latter.
I think going the other way around, rather than leading to a capitalist paradise, will only lead to the rise of ideologies that advocate heavy-handed state control of the economy, probably to the detriment of everyone.
These days it seems like non-professionals are priced out of all the most booming cities (despite there being plenty of non-professional work available). I don't think it's a coincidence that it's currently very difficult to get permission to build in many of those places (in 2014 Tokyo permitted 70% more housing units than all of California, despite having 1/3 the population). The under-supply of housing in places California of course increases the demand elsewhere too since those people that would otherwise live in California have to live somewhere.
Basic income could help mobility too since it makes it easier for lower-income people to move to where the jobs are (where they may not have a family safety net). Currently internal US migration is at a historically low level.
I think that is key here. The NYT article assumes that if you have had a job in the past, you must be qualified for a similar job. However, that is just not the case. Some people are not a good fit for a job, and they move on (fired, laid off, quit, lateral transfer or role change within the same company, many ways this can happen). If someone is terrible at their job, and they move on, it's not a given that they should be able to find another similar job.
I can give an (extreme) example that fits the fact of the first person talked about in the article. We hired a Project Manager at one company I worked at. The role was meant to be a contract position, but once people were convinced the position was important to create we would have made it full time. They turned out to be impossible to work with, they would scream and cry during meetings, lash out and publicly insult and blame others. It turned into a really weird and bad situation, and eventually they were fired. They had consulted for a ton of big, top companies in the past. I'm sure they keep landing consulting work here and there, but they never can get a full time job because companies always call references for those, and if you are trying to get a job via contract-to-fulltime positions you have to (at a minimum) be able to not act like a lunatic for the duration of your initial contract.
On the other hand, the value of advertising might be less nowadays, or at least more of the value is captured by Google/FB and a few big advertising firms, so perhaps there is no more need for someone with her skills from advertising work.
I've noticed why:
1. Companies don't dare to value creativity [1]. University is so liberal and the job market is so the opposite.
2. Most companies can't value a CS degree. The exception is when enough people in the company did a CS degree and that's a lot more rare than I thought.
3. University didn't teach me to focus on a portfolio and I got distracted with doing multiple degrees all at the same time fast-tracked (nobody cares that I fast-tracked), which (as you can see in point 2) proves that I'm worth very little. It taught me a lot personally and made me smarter (in terms of crystalized intelligence). But my portfolio is rather terrible compared to what I'm capable of.
I'll fix it, but right now I'm just tired of being not called back (50% of the time) or rejected (the other 50%). I know I'm capable, and pass the bar. I'm not perfect, I'm not the best, but I'm capable.
[1] I created an app called Doodledocs which is a Canvas-based app that allows P2P privacy free collaborative doodling with a pressure sensitive stylus. In my interviews with companies they don't trust enough that I'd be capable helping along with CRUD applications, because I didn't do any CRUD in the Doodledocs app. And I'm just thinking: figuring out how to do WebRTC for free in a serverless manner (while seeing all of it for the first time) is a lot tougher than writing some models for a basic login system that you already know about (the same can be said for poking around in VMs in view libraries like Glimmer). Anyways, it's on a show HN right now see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21399910 -- also for anyone who wants to do free WebRTC, check the Bugout library, it's really cool. If you have any questions about it, I can walk you through it (I understand most to all of it). My email is my hn username at gmail.
One of the reasons is: when you look at my resume (I'm Googleable), I am simply just starting out. And just doing the grind for 2 or more years would ground me in what I've experienced the past 8 years during my studies and jobs I did while studying.
Are you? Then put together some CRUD line of business stuff. You may actually find you don't like it, or get 'too creative', or... whatever.
Build a small CRM. Allow people to add doodles to the user records. Case solved...
I'm a bit different in that sense as challenging programming hurts my brain a lot (and yet I still continue with it, no pain no gain they say). Which is why I think I might like CRUD because that doesn't hurt my brain a lot, yet you still get to create beautiful things.
Based on my own experience, in most cases when I tried to move too fast things went fine. And sometimes they went horribly wrong (but since other times it went fine on average it was always pretty good). So there's a bit of risk involved.
What happened in the world for people not daring to take risk?
But alright, I'll build a nice looking CRUD app. I suppose I should build it in at least 5 languages, because if you can do it NodeJS that doesn't mean that people trust you to be able to do it in C#.
If you're a real risk-taker, you don't apply for a job working for someone else. You go build something and blaze your own path.
Companies usually value predictability over risk-taking. You'll learn that lesson once your own assets are at stake: you'll likely hire someone to execute on what you want, rather than someone who "takes risks" and does their own thing.
In fact, if fast-tracking cost you even 1/10 of a GPA point, it is actively hurting you - if they’re comparing somebody with a 3.9 GPA to somebody with a 4.0 GPA, whether the second candidate got that extra 0.1 because he was only taking one class per semester doesn’t come into consideration.
I'm happy at least one company did.
In the US, graduating a semester or two early translates into serious money saved. At a very conservative estimate, that's around $10k of debt that you can avoid, and could mean 20, 30, 40k, depending on the situation.
That has been my experience.
I have no clue.
People are also intimidated and see you as a liability.
I was actively told this while studying.
I'm sorry you have to go through/perhaps still go through that. I hope you can spin it into something positive.
Some nuance: I'm a CS grad, so this perspective is relative to that.
Weak: SQL optimization, I have no clue.
Mediocre: SQL itself, I understand everything at sqlteaching.com and I never had an issue at work doing SQL.
Strong-ish: ORMs, read the API documentation and then it's just programming. I've experienced SQLAlchemy (Python) on a side project, Hibernate (Java) at work and Sequelize (NodeJS) when I taught at a bootcamp.
But the challenge was to write and run a query in a matter of minutes and not hours, or days, or weeks, and not to spend time on false starts or elaborate queries that left you uncertain if your results were correct.
When I first started, I would write something, and start it running, and wait. And then after five minutes, you're thinking, well, I have to finish this within half an hour, is it going to take 10 minutes or weeks, in which case I need to try something different? But then, if I cancel it, was it about to finish, in which case I wasted five minutes, and if I do that three times, it's going to be late? I've seen queries where the time estimate goes in reverse and it starts out predicting 2 minutes to finish and 10 minutes later it's saying days or weeks. And the results were needed ten minutes ago.
Optimization becomes important when you're talking about several orders of magnitude, and opportunities are all around in a business environment. I was given a report script in T-SQL once that did the job it was supposed to adequately on a few hundred (maybe thousand) documents but my manager wanted to run it on all the things - millions of documents on hundreds of databases. It turned out to be very doable, but required changing a largely procedural script that ran SQL in a loop to a single query that was something like 10,000 times faster.
Worrying about 6ms -> 6s -> 6min isn't the environment I'm used to. It was always about human scale time - will it be done in 15 minutes, will it be done by the court deadline tomorrow, will it be done this week, or this month.
What I learned from an inhumanly talented analyst was that the Oracle optimizer is the enemy of performance and predictability, and the way to get reliable, fast results is to break down things into simple queries and temp tables and ignore gurus like Tom Kyte that say all those fancy database features are there for a reason and you should write beautiful multipage masses of SQL. (someone like Kyte would also say if the optimizer is fighting you the database is configured wrong, which might be true but is utterly unhelpful in what I consider the real world where the admins exist to tell you "no" or ignore you)
We had tests that ran for up to 24 hours, but, when optimizing, it didn’t matter if I could make it run faster, unless I could get it down below 8 hours, because that was the next fastest time scale.
A few problems you should be working on:
> nobody cares that I fast-tracked
> in terms of crystalized intelligence
> But my portfolio is rather terrible
> compared to what I'm capable of [*hint: Unless you did something that you can't show publicly, what you are capable of is nothing if what you did in terms of production is nothing]
I think you are over-confident when it comes to your skills.
I thought I was a really good programmer leaving university.
Now I know I was useless the first 3 years. I only became someone I would consider hiring now after 5-7 years.
He came back from that a little, not much, but a little.
I wonder how you were useless and why you couldn't see that beforehand. Because I would like to be capable of diagnosing whether I'd be useless for the first 3 years.
As in: what am I not seeing?
1. It's not about writing code that works. That's the bare minimum. The real game is writing readable and maintainable code.
2. I had no clue that the most important thing isn't writing the code, but to work well as a team.
Also, I was just plain inexperienced. I had written a fair amount of code, but nothing like what you learn from doing in 40h/week, year after year. Raw talent is good, but it can't beat raw talent + experience.
I think I only respect things that truly seem not learnable or understandable. Anything that I can learn, I lose some respect for, because I can just use my brain and it'll be mine.
But today I told myself that's a dangerous attitude to have, because it completely devalues the fact to do a job well, which is a skill in itself.
But another part is the security courses I did at my university. When you're performing rowhammer, meltdown and all those type of things, then a lot of other forms of programming feel a lot easier. There's a ton of stuff in programming that I have a lot of respect for but CRUD apps isn't one of them. Concurrency, compilers, algorithms, AI at the PhD level or security (not a comprehensive list), those things are actually tough.
With that said, thanks for stating so clearly that you think I'm overconfident. I hope to find out ASAP if this is true.
How would I find it out?
Another reason is that I'm a digital creator at heart, not a programmer. Ultimately, I don't care about programming, I care about putting whatever is in my mind into the real world (despite that I did my best to learn CS as I did find it a valuable form of knowledge). And I find programming to be the most effective way to do that. I think creating CRUD apps is quite close to digital creation.
It's less of a headache (compared to other types of programming) and more visual (if you're full-stack or frontend).
Focusing on this and working "value creation" in to it will come across a lot better than anything that could be interpreted as "CRUD apps are easy and I'm looking to bludge for a while before I bail to something challenging again".
1. an ios app called Wordpin (I made it for a person who really wanted it)
2. an ios app called SIVT (psychology research thingy, it was a lot of fun)
3. A computer graphics engine (2012, still one of my best memories, Doodledocs is a close second): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH6-dLvZEiA -- it was for a course but I spent a lot of time in it
4. Unfinished things like: https://melvinroest.github.io/Interactive-Neural-Networks/
5. Way too many scrapers (I like data), the most fun one was a scraper that scraped a website in order to get a restaurant reservation (it was really tough getting in and I knew a foodie who really wanted a reservation there and I wanted to try out Selenium for any excuse imaginable)
6. Some games: one in Unity3D, one in GameMaker (with the scripting engine obviously) and one in Game Salad
7. A lot of websites, small websites most of the time but they add up. I remember I made a CRUD app that tracked all hackathons in The Netherlands. I liked making the app more than tracking all the hackathons.
I suppose that's about it.
Oh, 8. Doodledocs.com
30 EU
20 US
I have no illusions about the US, but I try anyway.
The tone of your description of their "CRUD applications" comes across as dismissive. What the company wants is people who are happy to work there or at least not unhappy enough to leave (and, even better, will keep their unhappiness to themselves). The company wants this more than technical ability. You might be really talented but it seems like you'd be unhappy there. Perhaps that's not the case and you're just bitter about the rejection?
But don't make the mistake that the the sole purpose of recruiting is to find the most technically capable people. It's not. It never was and it never will be. It's to find people who will fit the company's goal of coming to work, doing their job, going home and doing the same thing day in and day out.
You may well be bored developing CRUD apps. If I was an interviewer for that company I'd certainly be worried about that. Isn't that a possibility here?
I described one reason why I'd be fine with CRUD apps.
There's another reason: at university I was always breaking my brain when I tried to learn programming. That intensified when I tried to learn security.
I think it'd be nice to have a break and not break my brain that much. I'm not saying I wouldn't think at all when I'd do CRUD, or not face difficult situations, because I probably will. But compared to what I've experienced at uni, it's a pretty nice walk around the park and a lot less of a headache (from what I've experienced during my freelance gigs).
People talk about all sorts of things they supposedly need to have satisfaction in their work, but they are mostly red herrings. People get obsessed with benefits and qualifications and pay and titles and status and all sorts of nebulous things when they know they are missing something, but don't know what.
What matters is a sense that you are doing meaningful work. All the other stuff, like the technologies you work with, the quality of your co-workers and management, the free coffee and lunch or lack thereof, will not provide substitutes in the long run.
And, by "meaningful", I don't mean glamorous, change-the-world stuff that appeals to vanity. Clearing out drains (or the IT equivalent) is useful and meaningful. By lack of meaning, I'm talking about anything that amounts to digging ditches to fill them in again.
Unfortunately, most job ads and recruiters assume that who you work for and why don't matter much at all - they just are looking for someone with a list of tech skills to plug in to a machine.
So, I would say what's worked to some extent for me is temping and volunteering and getting to know different people and organizations.
- No university student actually knows how to code until they prove otherwise, this is why a portfolio is so important. University assignments count too if they’re complex enough.
- If I’m going to hire them they’d better be here for a few years because I’m going to spend months getting them up to speed, so someone that clearly doesn’t like working on my stuff is out (of course I’m aware we make boring software, but you need to at least show some enthusiasm for the process if not the result).
- I don’t give more than a passing glance to academic qualifications. Especially in the Netherlands, if you finish uni I have a pretty good idea what you are capable off in general terms. A fast track would be nice if you otherwise know what to do, but that last is way more important.
There are plenty of challenges in building CRUD apps, and none of them have to do with coding. In fact, I’d argue that most of the challenge of development of anything does not come from coding at all once you reach a certain degree of competence (expectation management, time management, etc.)
Anyhow, most of the valuable software in the world is a CRUD app (think Facebook?), so it’s one of the most likely things you’ll work on.
CRUD is to development what a hammer is to a carpenter or someone framing a house. It's just a tool you use to get the job done, not the part of the job you find rewarding (building the product).
If you want some unsolicited advice, stop looking at CRUD jobs or jobs that mention it extensively. Go out and find an industry that interests you and look for engineering roles at companies in that industry you'd like to work at. It may involve CRUD, it may not. Regardless, it's weird to focus on that part of the gig exclusively.
Personally, all my jobs have been independent of the tech stack or what they use to solve the problem. I've done backend stuff, embedded, a bit of GUI design, desktop apps... all of it was motivated by the industries that the companies were focused on and the products they made. Not the tech they used to build them.
Going to college is about getting an education, it's not directly preparing you for a specific career. You're expected to learn enough about a subject matter that you "learn how to learn," and more specifically, that you learn how to adapt to what the job market in your chosen career wants.
So, you need to adapt! Some strategies are:
Talk to family members with similar career paths to what you want to take. My cousin gave me very valuable resume (CV) advice when I was in a similar situation to you. (Basically, half of what my school told me about resume writing was wrong.)
Talk about your situation with friends and find out what they did to get their jobs. In my case, a fraternity brother of mine told me that he posted his resume on a particular job site, and just got a call. I posted my resume on the same job site, and got my first job out of school.
It also doesn't hurt to get a "beer money" job. I started working at a local retail store so I wouldn't go broke. I was only there for a few weeks.
Some things that I haven't had to do, but you might need to do:
Be more entrepreneurial! If no one will hire you to work for their company, why not try to run your own business?
Consider a career change: I've interviewed A LOT of candidates, and some candidates just are in the wrong career. There's a certain "smell." They just misunderstand certain concepts, and appear to have a lot of trouble getting a job in software development. It's not my place to tell them they're in the wrong career as an interviewer.
(BTW, I suspect that Laura Ward, from the article, is in a similar situation. She just might be trying to follow the wrong career path.)
I'm not sure how it ties in yet, but I think the strong opinions differ a lot.
Thanks for the food for thought. I kind of know what you mean with the "smell" thing. It's also clearly visible when I go to a company that I have no culture fit with.
It's not really a cultural fit.
I'll try to say it differently: Sometimes I suspect that candidates are struggling with mental health issues. It's not why we (the company) rejected those candidates. (We reject them because they can't do the job.) But, I suspect if those candidates took care of their mental health issues, they would be stronger candidates overall.
[Edit] I'm not a doctor, so it's not my place to judge or diagnose anybody for their mental health issues.
Yet that's exactly what you just did.
I suspect that your mental health cop out is nothing but a rationalization for your unfounded biases.
I can tell you that these were very obvious "no" situations.
In one case, the candidate was incompetent and only made it to on-site because of a horrible HR snafu. The resume shouldn't have made it past screening.
In another case, the candidate nearly started an argument with me over what was essentially a game of "let's pretend" so I could ask some very mundane SQL questions.
Both of these candidates were extremely slovenly in their appearance.
> I suspect that your mental health cop out is nothing but a rationalization for your unfounded biases.
I think you also need to inspect your biases. Both of these candidates were fundamentally unfit for office work; not cases of someone failing an interview because they didn't write fizzbuzz exactly the way I would.
Best of luck.
This is the sort of thing that sounds very bleak to people who imagine being judged the same way, possibly unfairly. And it's even more painful because someone on the cusp may not be sure themselves that they can or can't function.
However, it can be empowering, in that someone recovering from health issues can realize that technical chops are almost entirely irrelevant; the task is just to convince the interviewer that they can and want to come to work every day and grind it out, and if a person truly knows their own ability to do so, it is possible to convince other people.
Unfortunately it's terrifying to hear that success depends on belief, because bootstrapping yourself from not being employable seems like a contradiction in terms. It can make people very bitter when they believe their only chance of survival is to behave in a way they don't feel.
This means being able to make it through a job interview without having a temper tantrum.
As an example, we're hired a graduate just a few days ago because he shown us good understanding of Angular and did an assessment well. Last year another graduate was hired because of the same reason. My wife doesn't have a CS degree, she studied programming for a year and a half from basics at home, put about 3-4 pet projects on github and also got hired within 2 months during a dead season for job market (july-august).
So if you want to be hired, you should pick some popular amongst business language and framework (WebRTC is nice but it's a very niche), polish your skills, create a few simple pet projects, polish your CV (it doesn't need to be fancy and long, just clean and to the point) and you'll succeed. Also don't be afraid to ask feedback after you was rejected or not called back. May be there is something you don't notice which leads to rejection.
I do find it interesting to note that I'm not getting an algorithm/data structures vibe in The Netherlands as much, and your story just seems to support that idea. However, that US-centric narrative is a bit of a mainstream narrative on HN.
I’ve had a huge baseline fallacy.
You should move to the US, it'll be much easier to find work
It's tough as a European CS grad to do that (or I suppose at least when you're me). You can't just move to the US. Not as an above average CS grad with some experience in web development and code bootcamp instructor.
I even applied to Full Stack Academy 2 years ago while I was still teaching at The New York Code + Design Academy as a lead instructor, they never sent anything, and I think that's mostly because a H1B visa is hard to get for a company, not because I lacked the skills (that's my optimistic guess anyways).
I'm a team lead and do a fair number of interviews. It's amazing how many people can talk about their experience and make a ton of really impressive statements that makes it appear as though they are knowledgeable and then that person can't perform a simple coding exercise. On the other hand, it's equally amazing how a person can do an excellent job coding but not be able to get through basic day to day human interactions with their peers.
If a candidate falls into either of these camps, they are an easy no hire. If a hiring manager ends up hiring a candidate that is difficult to work with either because they can't code or because they have poor social skills, it can be very costly. It often takes several months to find out that you made a bad hire. By the time you figure it out it's often taken a large toll on the team and can lead to productive team members leaving.
When you finally find out that you've got a problem most companies have a huge process to go through for firing that person and that process is super intensive and takes months. Not to mention how emotionally difficult it is to tell someone they are so bad they have to be fired.
All that to say, the cost benefit analysis is clear only hire people that will over time be a net gain. Don’t take any risks ever.
If I were a recently graduated software engineer, I would be hedging against these risks in every way. I would produce a lot of code in the area I’m seeking to be hired. I would work a lot on being friendly and carefully choosing my words, so I don’t sound like a know it all or a person who enjoys conflict. I would prepare statements about my goals of how I fully intend to spend at least 3 years at this job if conditions allow, and I would practice being humble.
No one actually expects you to spend the next 3 years at a job if it’s not going well, you just need a way to express that if it’s a good fit you intend to stay put and do a great work. 3 years is just an arbitrary number.
1. I understand the conservatism now. Just imagining emotionally drained people feels a bit exhausting.
2. The strategy you outline makes a lot of sense. They all follow the principle: don't be a risk, and don't come across as one either. If you are a risk, then de-risk yourself.
i5htij+7j7md3ohoms1c@sharklasers.com temp email address
For personality traits if someone is setting off red flags that they would cause a lot of conflict and issues it's an easy pass. It's extremely difficult and unreliable to attempt to coach someone into changing their personality. It's also just really emotionally draining for the person that has to do the work.
If you would like to get in touch I would be happy to provide some Job hunting coaching free of cost.
Send an email to my temp email account i5kjl5+8ydjdw8gaoikw@sharklasers.com
Being laid off puts kind of a stink on you, even if slight, that requires a bit of interview time be spent clarifying WHY you got laid off instead of entirely being able to focus on experience, accomplishments etc. When I was moving from one place to another, there seemed to be a noticeable sense of urgency on the new company's part to recruit me away.
However, as long as you get your story straight I think it’s easier to explain a stretch of unemployment more now than it used to be. I can appreciate that I'm probably saying this from a place of privilege working in tech-orbit. I bet my tone changes if I suffer a layoff in my older age.
I feel lay offs are easy to explain. Firing is different.
I was "fired" once (well, twice, in the 90s) because I wasn't pulling my weight. I was 'laid off' once (in the 2000s) because the company was running out of money, and had to lay off around half the company. That wasn't really anything to do with my performance or ability - it was the company's finances.
Explaining "I was part of the 50% of the company laid off due to financial pressures" (or "laid off after a corporate merger") wouldn't generally have the same negative connotation.
Which is why I'll repeat the advice: the best time to find a new job is when you've already got one. Layoffs very rarely come without any warning, so if things start to look even a little dicey, not a bad idea to at least put your resume out there.
You're not wrong. Certainly people think "well, there must have been a reason you were let go..." and yeah, sometimes it may mean you were stackranked out. With smaller companies that's probably harder to do, or... there are bigger factors at play (more immediate cashflow in our situation).
And yes, always be looking.
Positions are made redundant, not people. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are if the company no longer has work for someone who does the thing you do, or in the location you do it.
Some unethical companies do use layoffs as a cover for stack ranking but that’s an easy ruse to see through and reflects on them, not you.
Again, obviously that doesn't always apply in all situations (e.g. the closure of an entire business unit, or the loss of a big customer), but it also obviously applies in many situations. Furthermore, since on HN we like to think that skills matter, wouldn't we want it to? I mean, if there is a fantastic developer that just happens to be on a project that gets cancelled, wouldn't you want the company to figure out how to keep them over someone who is much less productive working on a project that just happened to not get cancelled?
Also, there's the whole long-standing goal among managers to keep their head-counts as high as possible. Managers also don't want to become redundant, so, it makes sense to lay off the more expensive people as much as possible, to keep their headcounts high and avoid the unwelcome situation of having a team too small to justify their continued existence as managers.
And, of course, for morale, it is better to convince anyone left that they were left because they are the stars, not because of their low likelihood of looking elsewhere.
Then there is a gradual added stink as your laid off cohort gets smaller. If it was just you, you got fired, and that's a problem.
Not my experience. It’s just a fact of working life nowadays. Companies have financial disasters all the time, or take part in fads like outsourcing or offshoring.
I've spent far more time on the interviewer side of the table than the interviewee and I can promise we all have some stink on us :)
This has got to be the most repeated statistic in reporting on hardship, but the actual responses seem way less dire: https://twitter.com/p_millerd/status/1118071142311288838?lan...
That is still a damn scary statistic that still illustrates how close to the edge so many people live.
That's pretty much exactly how I interpreted the original.
I've met more than a few people who are just mentally unable to save money. The second they get money, they spend it, regardless of the actual need.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/05/1-in-6-millennials-have-1000...
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/05/1-in-6-millennials-have-1000...
Either way there’s nothing preventing you from “touching” 401k savings. You pay a 10% penalty.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/03/11/how-much-money-americans...
Your best bet if you’re younger than 40 is to get rid of all your debt and have a viable exit strategy from the workforce.
If you’re younger and reading this just remember your replacement will be along shortly.
Age discrimination is real and unstoppable and coming for your job.
Hell yes it is! Throughout all of my life I've tended to look much younger than my age, and was actually somewhat treated disrespectfully. Often, i was treated like the bottom rung of interns even though i had years of experience in the workplace. I've heard people secretly refer to me as the "young punk kid", and get passed up for promotions, opportunities, etc. My youthful appearance has persisted even now as a 45-year old...But i was always brought up to respect EVERYONE no matter what, including my elders. But most recently the team that I work on (at my dayjob), they're all younger than me - all mid-to-late 30s (and one of them is 40). I guess i was never "the only old guy" on the team until recently. My boss in fact is 5 years younger than me. All was going ok with the team until it came out casually that I'm the oldest on the team - yikes even "older than the team's boss"! Well, after that, things changed. They're subtle things, but really messed up things; things that have lost me numerous opportunities within my current employer. So, in my youth i got discriminated because of assumptions that i could not possibly have the experience that i have had. And, now its discrimination on the other end - at least once my age is discovered. There's very little that i can do about this, that is, if i wish to remain at my role within the team (and I really like the job/role, but not this team because of their behavior here). So, my options are to leave to another team in this same company, or jump to another employer...either way, it sucks big time...So, age discrimination, yeah its real, raw, and awful. My heart goes out to all those affected - young and older.
It seems the great recession broke their fragile HR minds.
Completely true. If you don't immediately and perfectly know the most efficient algo to solve graph inversion or whatever random problem they found on leetcode that day, kiss any chances of a callback goodbye.
Oh and be prepared for a hundred rounds of relentless grilling.
I don't know why it gets peddled around that it's easy to find jobs in CS. It seems as hard as finding a break in hollywood.
Well put!
Also, it doesn't seem plausible that an asset bubble is the reason healthcare is expensive.
A bit of a tangent but these are the most obnoxious things whenever I search for a job. Because there seems to be a dozen of these for each "real" job posting.
Aha. Re-define what 'job' means, problem solved.
the "low" unemployment is a result of nearly-unemployed people working small jobs which aren't enough to cover their basic needs rather than a genuinely improving economic situation. remember: 5% unemployment is normal and ideal because it representes structural unemployment plus the churn of people moving from job to job. we're lower than that now, which means that either our metric is not reflecting the scenario (as i believe) or that the fundamental amount of churn and structural unemployment has decreased, which i think nobody will try to argue.
the people knocked out of the labor force in 2009 have had an extremely difficult time getting back in, and the jobs they occupied have been destroyed permanently by the looks of it. in other words, while unemployment is very low, compared to then, the economy either has 2-3% fewer open jobs compared to the number of jobseekers (who may be employed), or employers are substantially more reluctant to take on new employees when those employees are not already participants in the labor force. or both.
there's two additional problems here. the first is that employers are unwilling to give unemployed and marginally employed workers a shot because they're tainted. this is especially true in "professional" and "high quality" jobs. the second additional problem is that middle-class people tend to hold out for a "good job" rather than taking any job which they could reasonably do, like waiting tables etc. knowing this, employers often refuse to take these people for those roles...
If there's a chance to not let their talents rot, how does one nudge the employer to give them a good faith chance?
If the choice is to write them off, then how does one make it less painful for the written off?
Either way, it does no good to do nothing for people caught on the wrong end of employment or nothing towards employers that write people off.
Also the system is rigged against minimum wage workers. They have to work weeks longer than $100k wage employees to qualify for coverage.
I'm not saying such degrees or programs shouldn't exist. I'm saying that if colleges cared about students' life outcomes they would be up front about the fact that this is not a degree or program of study with any earning potential benefit and discourage people who can't afford it from studying these areas (at least as a major, electives are fine).
You would still have a few who just totally want to study that and don't care, but they should know what they are signing up for and be fully aware of the implications. I feel like a ton of people were not, and we should not expect 18 year olds to show a 35 year olds' level of maturity when it comes to doing their own homework and career planning.
I guess part of the issue is that I think of a university as a public interest institution that should be looking out for the students, not a purely for-profit institution looking to monetize the students.
The thing is, no one (who's responsible) will hire a project manager who has no experience in the field. At least in software, I'd never work for a project manager who has no experience as a software developer. There are just too many cases where naive assumptions are wrong.
I suspect that Laura Ward (from the article) is in such a situation. She's trying to enter jobs in a management role where she's fundamentally unfit.
Articles touting employment as a meaningful number are about as meaningful as the articles touting the good graces of anonymous donors paying for medical procedures, sometimes for the insured.
So, yes, possible, but you first have to install Firefox.
Conditions are pretty much maxed out.
1. Open the Dev Console. (Ctrl Shift Eye)
2. Click Settings on the Menu. (F1)
3. Look for 'Disable Javascript'
4. Refresh page and click on Disable Javascript before paywall loads.
1. Pay for a subscription.
No 2. 3. or 4.
1. Just never go on or support any website with a paywall
No 2. 3. or 4.
Correct.
> news site that isn't an ad-infested mess
Thanks to uBlock, no website I go on has ads.
This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
He ended up being a very valuable and (and liked) employee for like 7 years.
And that nervousness - not really visible at all, after he got to know the people at our site.
So: My recommendation if you think have a potentially great but also very nervous job candidate: Take your time. Change the scenery. Etc.
(In this particular case I was pretty sure he was smart, just based on his application.)
A common trap in the current era is to go back for more education when the job market isn't working out, missing a year or more of wages and taking on further debt... And then finding things aren't much better on the other side of the degree.
This happened to one of my parents: got one awful job at a tiny company for about a year after getting the master's, then was fired for trying to be ethical (refusing to lie about the results of security audit for the benefit of a large customer), and now can't find anything else... woohoo.