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Comment by guylhem | Hacker News Reader

I sincerely wish you the best, in both your personal life and your career, but "when you have a large skill set and are willing to do anything" you DO find work.

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

That being said, however being in a weak position is a self reinforcing spiral where you get fewer and fewer opportunities and become less productive. And small hits take a tremendous toll - one who has not experienced what you have should at least read Scalzi's "On being poor" - http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

Yet for some reason you found the strength to get back on your feet. Once again, I sincerely wish you the best, and hope you can give a hand to other people. We all need help at one time or the other, and it's better when you are on the giving end :-)

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but "when you have a large skill set and are willing to do anything" you DO find work.

I think that's the point he's making. HN has a can-do, make your own opportunities mindset that can often lead to us forget that we are living in deep recession. Depending on where you are in the world it is still extremely hard to find work, no matter how clever or willing you are.

True, which is why I'm happy to be at a point in life where 'making my own opportunities' includes packing my bags and leaving for greener pastures. I truly feel for those who don't have that option, and are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

Not everyone in the world who's good at something gets paid for it.

And while it's great that you got rewarded for being productive, that doesn't mean it will always happen for everyone else.

The dark side to "Make your own success" is that "You're on your own."

viz., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4940848

You really shouldn't read Scalzi's "On being poor" - it's not particularly informative. The typical poor American is vastly better off than what Scalzi describes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461

The "typical poor" American may be. That does not make it either uninformative or--unbelievably!--not worth reading. I know, personally, numerous people who have mentioned either in passing or in detail stories that would not be out of place in what Scalzi (or many of the comments) wrote. Who am I--or who are you--to dismiss them because the teller may be worse off than your declared "typical poor"?

I am fortunate to not be among those with stories like that. So regardless of whether it is the "typical poor American", I suspect that it is quite informative for me, and I would hazard a guess for many others, to read it and remain cognizant of it.

if the economy is restructuring itself to provide work only to people who are "damn good at what they do", it makes it all the more imperative to have alternative means of providing for the remaining people.

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

Yes, yes, yes. We've heard this before. For some X, the top X% of society by skill/productivity/motivation will always be able to find remunerative work.

The question is: what's the value of X? For some fields it has always been very small, like in philosophy.

However, our entire notion of "democratic capitalism" has always depended on the notion that over all fields and the entire population taken as a whole, the value of X would be a fairly large majority. There has always been some notion that the bottom Y%, where Y = 100-X, will inevitably have trouble finding jobs, but nobody outside the radical Left has ever really faced up to the notion that at some point Y might range between 20%-50%.

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