What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/what-you-dont-get-about-the-job-search-voices-of-the-jobless/243942/

by mvs • 15 years ago

108 176 15 years ago

theatlantic.com

geekam7• 15 years ago

I actually can feel this. I am looking for one myself in NYC/Nj area.

alnayyir5• 15 years ago

Are you a programmer?

If not, what do you do?

mattdeboard2• 15 years ago

I can't imagine a world where a programmer in NYC can't find a job.

geekam7• 15 years ago

I am a programmer but I live near DC. Finding something from here is difficult.

hugh39• 15 years ago

I dislike headlines like this. It's phrased as a challenge, or almost an accusation. Why are you accusing me of not knowing what it's like to be jobless, Mister Theatlantic? You don't even know me!

And what does it turn out to be that I don't know about being jobless? Well here's what I learned:

1. It sucks

2. It's hard not having much money

3. Getting a job is hard

4. Don't do a degree in Women's Studies

I'm not sure any of this was a particularly new insight.

kstenerud4• 15 years ago

I think the real insight is sorely absent from the article.

It seems that most people who undergo higher education do so with the expectation that it will lead to a "higher" job, and that's magical thinking.

Sure, higher education is pretty much a requirement for certain classes of jobs, but it's not the only requirement, and it pales compared to the most important requirement: contacts.

This is a human world we live in, and humans by nature are friendlier to someone they know than to someone they don't know.

I, too, once believed in the entitlement that an education "should" bring, until I looked back at all of the jobs I landed (and the thousands I didn't), and realized that every single job I successfully interviewed for was a direct result of a contact in my network.

This is even more important in times of recession, because you're up against a whole army of faceless job seekers, all flooding potential employers with pieces of paper and lamenting the lack of response.

If an employer can't put a face to your name, you stand as much a chance of getting in as winning the lottery.

WeAreKnights• 15 years ago

I agree. But can you really blame people for believing what we're told our entire lives? Most of our childhood we're told to stop socializing and work hard so you can go to a good college and get a good job. When you become an adult you find out that those social contacts are more important than the degree you worked for.

sliverstorm• 15 years ago

The two can be combined. Lot of jobs I've landed were due both to knowledge gained in college, and networking gained via college.

powertower• 15 years ago

> It seems that most people who undergo higher education do so with the expectation that it will lead to a "higher" job, and that's magical thinking.

It's also false advertisement.

"Get a degree from us and you'll get a job" is how it's sold to us from the age of elementary school forwards.

Degrees are expensive and this industry earns 100s of billions every year. There is only 1 way they can market a degree to you, and that's to connect it directly with a job.

waterside81• 15 years ago

This really hit home for me. All too often we view the unemployed as a statistic, but this article really put a human face on the issue. As pundits & politicians argue about various macroeconomics theories, levels of taxations etc. there are real life people out there trying to find a way to live, never mind advance in life. It's gut wrenching.

danilocampos• 15 years ago

Bizarre to me to see this downvoted. Callous privilege of working in a booming industry while the rest of the economy is constipated, I suppose.

kubrickslair2• 15 years ago

Yes, but I also feel that things are not going to get any better for most of the general population who got laid off.

kubrickslair2• 15 years ago

Not sure why you are getting downvoted, except that your comment may come off as rather sentimental.

I distinctly remember few years in my middle school, when my family business was not doing that well. I could still get pretty much anything I wanted, but just the negative vibe at home had an impact on me.

ntkachov• 15 years ago

While reading this, This particular simpsons clip came to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE

especially when i was reading about the PH.D from Purdue working as a janitor.

rboyd• 15 years ago

Having been through periods of feeling down and out before, one thing I've learned is that you're in a lot of trouble as soon as you start to feel like the system owes you something.

The writing is on the wall. If you're not working to automate other jobs out of existence then someone is working to automate yours. Minor exceptions given for occupations that exist primarily to offer a human connection.

forensic5• 15 years ago

When you were 8 years old, did you believe that, in the future, people in America would be frantically playing musical chairs with their lives, trying to put other people out of a livelihood before others can do it to them?

When did the future turn into a game of Survivor?

When did the economy become a game of musical chairs? If you don't have a seat when the music stops, just kiss your life goodbye.

noonespecial• 15 years ago

If you don't have a seat when the music stops, just kiss your life goodbye.

That's the natural order. Scarcity and all that yap. We're fighting to do away with it. As it turns out, its freakin' hard.

potatolicious2• 15 years ago

> "When did the future turn into a game of Survivor?"

When we allowed 20% of the population to assume ownership of 80% of the wealth, forcing everyone else to scramble for scraps. When we've dismantled and made useless our social safety nets by a combination of poor policies and equally poor policing for abuse. When we've collectively moved to the right in economic and social policies, thereby not only disenfranchising the poor, but also make them hate themselves - the loudest complaints about "socialists" and "redistribution" seem to come from people who need it the most, but don't recognize it.

It happened when we started penalizing people for having anything less than perfect health. Have a chronic condition? Well, forget about entrepreneurialism and adding to the economy, pray for a worker-cog job for the rest of your days to keep the insurance flowing!

This may be a gross simplification of a complex issue - but it seems to me like the futured turned into a game of Survivor when we started treating everyone else like animals out to get us. The poor are lazy and out to game the system. The immigrants are out to steal our jobs. The unemployed are lazy and slovenly and want a free ride... etc etc.

The American public, IMO, needn't look much further than a mirror to see the cause of their woes.

hugh39• 15 years ago

When did the future turn into a game of Survivor?

I don't know, but the past turned into a game of Survivor roughly four billion years ago. If it hadn't, we never would have developed cell membranes, let alone multicellularity.

I'm not just being glib. The struggle to survive and to thrive, against members of other species or against members of your own, is a constant feature of all life across the Earth and probably throughout the universe. I don't know why people seem to think they should be immune from it.

tomjen32• 15 years ago

That is the same system we have been playing forever, ever since the bronze age when the stone tool makers where put out of business by the metal workers.

Your error, and it is a common one, is to assume that no new chairs are created.

The trouble right now is because we have gone from trying to create new and fundamentally better things to making existing things cheaper (this is a good and necessary thing too, or else we would only have cars for the rich but it assumes that new technologies exist that can be made cheaper).

We have too many bosses and not enough leaders.

danielpal• 15 years ago

This was a real shocker. As soon as I read that a PhD student from Purdue University couldn't find a job, it really shocked me. I too graduated from Purdue, but never had any trouble finding a job, but the truth is that we "computer scientists" are living in a bubble, while the rest of the people are having real trouble getting a job.

hugh39• 15 years ago

A PhD in education.

What is one supposed to do with a PhD in education anyway? Surely not become a teacher?

arethuza7• 15 years ago

Become an academic in that field - that is pretty much what a PhD is - credentialing for academic research.

yummyfajitas3• 15 years ago

Get a pay bump if you are already employed as a teacher in most public school systems.

If you are not already employed as a teacher in the public school systems, it makes it harder for you to find a job as such (at least during a budget crunch) since you come with a higher price tag.

bartonfink• 15 years ago

I had a teacher in high school who had her Ph. D in education. She was an immigrant from Greece, and did her Ph. D on ways education could help immigrants make the leap from immigrant to citizen based on her experiences (I don't recall the specifics - high school was a long time ago). For what it's worth, she was the government teacher.

I also have a friend who's getting his Ph. D in early childhood education largely because, after something like five years as a kindergarten teacher, he was astounded at how dumb the other teachers were (he tells stories of co-workers not being able to do basic arithmetic) and how much they depended on materials to actually do their instruction. He views the Ph. D largely as a way to get his foot in the door at someplace where he can design and produce early childhood curricula and help save kids from teachers who have no business in the classroom.

Then again, he also spoke frequently about how much he hated the professors when he was in college because many of them had literally never taught children. They got to college because they had good grades, went to grad school because they had good grades and got professorships because they did good research, but never had to apply what they were studying.

Honestly, it sounds a tremendous amount like computer science.

ChristianMarks• 15 years ago

Some of the schadenfreude is directed toward struggling MBAs and Ph.D.s in economics, whose patronizing platitudinous advice to the millions of unemployed to become more competitive in the new globalized economy has neither been forgotten, nor forgiven. They helped facilitate the collapse, and encouraged the upper one tenth of one percent to win asymmetric zero-sum games against the middle class. Now they have to become more competitive in minimum wage jobs.

chrismealy2• 15 years ago

I never get tired of quoting Mike Konczal:

And speaking as someone who has taken graduate coursework in “continental philosophy”, and been walked through the big hits of structural anthropology, Hegelian marxism and Freudian feminism, that graduate macroeconomics class was by far the most ideologically indoctrinating class I’ve ever seen. By a mile. There was like two weeks where the class just copied equations that said, if you speak math, “unemployment insurance makes people weak and slothful” over and over again. Hijacking poor Richard Bellman, the defining metaphor was that observation that if something is on an optimal path any subsection is also an optimal path, so government just needs to get out of the way as the macroeconomy is optimal absent absurdly defined shocks and our 9.6% unemployment is clearly optimal.

-- http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/blogging-and-the-e...

chrismealy2• 15 years ago

One more, from Philip Harvey:

There once was an island with a population of 100 dogs. Every day a plane flew overhead and dropped 95 bones onto the island. It was a dog paradise, except for the fact that every day 5 dogs went hungry. Hearing about the problem, a group of social scientists was sent to assess the situation and recommend remedies.

The social scientists ran a series of regressions and determined that bonelessness in the dog population was associated with lower levels of bone- seeking effort and that boneless dogs also lacked important skills in fighting for bones. As a remedy for the problem, some of the social scientists proposed that boneless dogs needed a good kick in the side, while others proposed that boneless dogs be provided special training in bone-fighting skills.

A bitter controversy ensued over which of these two strategies ought to be pursued. Over time, both strategies were tried, and both reported limited success in helping individual dogs overcome their bonelessness -- but despite this success, the bonelessness problem on the island never lessened in the aggregate. Every day, there were still five dogs who went hungry.

arethuza7• 15 years ago

You may be interested in this book:

"Economyths: Ten Ways Economics Gets It Wrong"

http://www.amazon.com/Economyths-Ways-Economics-Gets-Wrong/d...

This book explores the idea that classical economics, despite its severe case of physics-envy, may be "flat-out wrong". The author has a PhD in non-linear systems from Oxford, so I don't think he is a complete crank! I certainly find his arguments to be pretty plausible.

MrKurtHaeusler2• 15 years ago

It is a pretty one-sided negative article.

I always enjoyed being jobless, I finally get the time to catch up on things I want to do, and it is a good time to reflect and make life changes.

The general perception out there is that being jobless sucks, and this article reinforces that by focussing on negative reports. It would have been much more interesting to read a more balanced article.

martythemaniak• 15 years ago

I knew I could count on HN comments to give me a whiny out-of-touch yuppie.

prostoalex2• 15 years ago

Yep, nothing wrong with being jobless. It's being money-less that's annoying.

jinushaun• 15 years ago

Let me guess, you're probably young, single, male, already have money and excellent job prospects. Hey, I'm in the same boat. I know I can quit my job, backpack around the world for a year, come back and find a new job in a week. And I have done that before so I speak from experience. I love being unemployed.

But you know what? I'm thankful everyday for the fact that I have the option to do that. I'm privileged and I know it. I am not as naive as to think this is normal or good advice for the jobless. Tell that to someone with kids and a mortgage. Tell them to go use this time to party, pursue what they love, study, travel etc. That shit costs money and when you don't know when your next paycheck will come, that is a foolish waste of time and horrible advice.

MrKurtHaeusler2• 15 years ago

34, married, male, no money, one and a half kids, I rent.

However, the next best thing applies. I live in Germany. They pay me to be unemployed. In terms of total wealth, including time with kids, leisure, time to learn things, follow my interests and invest time in providing for my future, unemployment pays more than employment. (Financially it pays about 80% of employment, but apart from that employment basically puts personal growth, including preparing for a better future for my family, at a standstill.)

gexla4• 15 years ago

Quote by Morgan Freeman from Shawshank Redemption.

"These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized."

I wonder if that's what's happening to people these days. They go through the institution of education through their youth, and then the institution of higher education. When they graduate they go through the institution of the job search and sending out resumes.

People are told this is how things work all their lives. They saw their parents doing it and now they are doing the same thing. When the process starts to break down, they don't know what to do. In some cases people are shackled by the institution of home ownership (unable to move to the jobs.)

As others are saying, contacts are highly important. My level is success is dependent on the size of my virtual rolodex. People need to get around the institution.

Personally, I'm a freelancer living in a foreign country. Currently I'm living in a cozy house costing me less than $200 per month (third world tropical paradise!) I can move anywhere and work from anywhere. I get jobs, salaries, contracts and one-off quickies in the same industry and they are all the same to me. The only difference is in the payment model. I think everyone needs to start thinking like this. Don't be an employee looking for a job, be a business making the same sorts of decisions the other businesses are. You are offering a service and you need to be mobile in offerings and locations to survive.

grannyg00se• 15 years ago

Completely off topic, but you brought it up so I'm going to ask: How did you manage an entire house in paradise for $200 per month? Do you have access to decent food, in relative safety, and have a good reliable internet connection?

gexla4• 15 years ago

I'm living in the Philippines. I feel very safe here.

It's Asia, so the market for food here isn't as wide as the market for food in the U.S. For example, there are Germans here who have setup their own shops for food which I have never seen and has little demand from the locals. You will never see that sort of food in the grocery stores. The Philippines isn't known for it's food like Thailand is. Certainly food is a big part of happiness in life, but I'm happy here for the most part. There are some things I miss but there are American resto's which do a pretty good job of bridging the gap. In the largest cities here, you can find pretty much anything.

My internet connection is reliable enough. I do have plans in place for problems which occasionally pop up, but my area is stable enough that it hosts a lot of BPO's (call centers.)

Housing is relatively cheap here. The standards are also lower, but if you have lived in Asia for a while then you get used to the differences. I could get a nicer house for a lot more money but I'm content where I'm at and the price is right.

pstuart2• 15 years ago

And how do your kids feel about this lifestyle?

gexla4• 15 years ago

I don't have kids. My girlfriend has kids and they are locals. So they love it. ;)

georgieporgie2• 15 years ago

Personally, I'm a freelancer living in a foreign country.

When I see this, I always ask: what technologies do you work with?

gexla4• 15 years ago

Specifically, I'm a freelance web developer.

Because of possible brownouts and internet outages I try to stay as mobile and flexible as possible. I want to even be able to pop into an internet cafe to get work done if needed. Of course I have my own systems, but I may not always be able to plug in to a power source with a laptop.

OS: I build my work environment on Windows because if I need to grab a computer on the fly then it will be Windows.

Storage: For "on the go" I have a USB stick with everything I need on it.

Apps: On the drive I use portable apps because the package gives me access a lot of apps which have already been setup for portable usage without me having to research how to do this with all of them.

Truecrypt: I have everything except for the Truecrypt exe file stored in a Truecrypt file which I mount as a drive letter I know won't typically be used. This keeps allows for my portable apps to be associated with a drive letter without having to change a bunch of config files (if needed.) Of course the encryption means that I don't have to worry about losing my USB stick.

Super Flexible File Synchronizer: Also setup as portable and the only paid app that I use. This keeps my files synched between my USB stick, my Strongspace.com space and my other work stations. This also allows me to use the faster IO of local drives when I don't need to use the USB stick. It's easier to use on Windows than Rsync.

SCM: Msysgit portable.

Editor: Vim.

IM / Voice: Skype Portable.

Terminal: Putty

Dev server: Accelerator from Joyent which runs Solaris. This is where all my development ends up. I don't do development locally unless I really have to (Xampp etc.)

That's pretty much it. I try to keep it as simple and lean as possible. This makes syncs more bearable and I can copy my whole setup to other systems without taking up too much room. For example, a developer friend of mine has an office here decked out with workstations and he setup a space for me. I just use one of his stations and I copied my Truecrypt file to local storage. Then I fire up my sync app and fire away. If it gets accidentally deleted, no harm done.

I love the idea of being able to pack my workstation anywhere I go. It goes along with the idea of travelling light so that I can stay highly mobile.

holdenc2• 15 years ago

I am willing to risk my karma by saying that people complaining about these things don't seem to get the following:

- Going to college doesn't mean you deserve a job more than someone else. Got an ivy league degree? A PhD? Get over it.

- America is still a country where one can post up signs on a telephone pole to help someone move boxes, clean a house, or drive a car. Not ideal right? Maybe, but these people can earn $200 a day paid in cash if they work hard. Putting up signs and actually doing the work is usually a psychological barrier to many people though.

- Being poor sucks, sure. But guess what -- learning to withstand it is a good skill to have. Perhaps one of the most indispensable ones a serious independent risk taking entrepreneur can have. If one can learn to be poor and deal with the associated social and practical problems, you'll have a fearlessness and sense of freedom that few office workers know.

- Having a job does not mean someone is successful. And not having a job does not mean someone is a failure. People often tie their self worth to their job title, and therefore every sales person is now a "vice-president", and data entry workers are "analysts" -- title inflation is easier than salary inflation. In many cases, having one's time to do nothing but reflect and self-improve is preferable to one of these jobs.

scrod3• 15 years ago

Don't worry, I don't have any sympathy for you, either.

And in an unrelated point, a good companion to this article is Being Poor:

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

yummyfajitas3• 15 years ago

Scalzi's article describes a fairly atypical poverty experience. It's a very inaccurate description for most American poor people.

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

temphn7• 15 years ago

Exactly. Speaking as someone who was at one point unemployed, the first thing you need to do is take responsibility for your situation, rather than displacing the blame to anyone else.

A lot of people just don't want to work hard. One of the people in that article was bitching and moaning about working a few hours on weekends!

Beggars truly cannot be choosers. It is really not that hard to cut costs and live within your means when the internet provides infinite entertainment for free, as well as comparison price shopping, etcetera.

danssig15• 15 years ago

I'm forced to assume you haven't seen much of the world if you think working hard has some correlation to financial success. There are many, many factors that determine success/failure and they all overshadow hard work by a large margin (that's not to say you don't need to work at all. Doing no work at all will usually make success much harder).

Tichy7• 15 years ago

How old are you, and how hard do YOU work? It might simply not be sustainable after a while.

alecco• 15 years ago

But you are not considering the cost of living in those same places. The anxiety of those letters in the article is very well justified. The probability to fall into homelessness is much higher than what we'd like to believe. Go help in a soup kitchen or a shelter and get your dose of reality before labeling all these people you don't know lazy and entitled.

Tichy7• 15 years ago

I think you quickly reach a point where you can't move boxes anymore for health reasons. Hard work has a tendency to wear on the body.

Another problem is that while you are busy moving boxes, you can't look for a job that actually suits your skills. Sure, it beats starving, but "just do any job" might not actually be the best career advice in every situation.

hessenwolf3• 15 years ago

Having a job makes it so much easier to find another job. Even if you are slopping out the John in McDonald's, your self-esteem and, most importantly, your <i> ability to get things done</i> is much higher.

Of course, there is the difficulty of finding time to apply for other jobs to weigh it against, but I think the balance tips the other way.

tpatke• 15 years ago

>Going to college doesn't mean you deserve a job

I think the point was that this is affecting a wide range of people including the educated and hard working. I didn't see the entitlement slant.

>America is still a country where one can post up signs on a telephone pole

Sure. 9% of the working population can post a sign on a telephone pole. Let me know how that works out for you.

>Being poor sucks, sure. But guess what -- learning to withstand it is a good skill to have.

Ah, the benefits of a calcutta education! Maybe we can start a charity to help to these people realise how lucky they are?

>not having a job does not mean someone is a failure.

People are saying that when they have trouble paying their bills, that effects their self worth. This is different than saying that they are worthless because they are not a vice-president.

My guess is you don't have a family and you have never had to go without.

If you want to change the world, empathy would be a good skill to acquire.

holdenc2• 15 years ago

I don't expect to change the world. The occasional unsolicited advice is all I aspire to. I do have a family and have gone without, and I have posted signs on telephone poles to get work and make ends meet. This actually was a much better education than my ivy league college degree, or my employment as a computer programmer. Posting signs on a telephone pole to get work is of course not the solution to mass unemployment, but does get at the essence of how an individual creates value for others (by offering a paid service) in exchange for money.

Empathy is always a good skill. But I don't empathize with people who consider unemployment (in America) to be someone else's problem. While, people in America may not be happy with 9% unemployment, there are plenty of options for maintaining a quite good standard of living when compared to many countries where the median wage is much lower.

pnathan2• 15 years ago

Having no money is viciously hard to deal with, especially when you don't have any connections or a portfolio of work. When I graduated with my B.S.C.S in '06...

- I had no money to move. Any company that wanted me would have had to pay relocation.

- There are exactly 4 tech firms in the area, total employment of engineers is < 1000.

- I had studied general CS, generally trying not to be tied to a given TLA technology. This meant that I could not claim "years of experience with tech X".

- I had not had the time to do open-source work, I had been doing my studies. By the time I was aware enough to do interesting work, my studies were too intensive.

- I had had a bad semester immediately prior to graduation, and my GPA was not near 4. (over 3 tho).

- I had done academic summer research, not internships.

I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to. No. Luck.

I janitored for 6 months and dug up some university jobs, then back to graduate school, where I cadged the internship -> full-time transition.

I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.

To this day, I have a good deal of sympathy for people out of work.

Based on my personal experience, I encourage hiring managers and recruiters to look past the keywords to the possibilities that the candidate has. A good candidate can move into anything they need to be, if you give them a chance.

count3• 15 years ago

As a hiring manager, you've got to sell yourself. If you've got all these negatives and they're the only thing on your resume or in your cover letter, it's going to be difficult to give you some of my limited time to talk about how you really could be better.

Do me the favor and sell yourself - WHY should I hire you, of all people, when you're competing against potentially dozens or hundreds of people (who, mostly, just fire and forget resumes at monster and career builder).

Nearly anything you can do to stand out from the crowd will be in your best interests.

Network your ass off. Go to user groups, meetups, anything at all. I've never hired someone cold, from Monster or whatever. Why should I risk it, when I've got some similar with a personal recommendation from a known-quantity?

kragen3• 15 years ago

> I think there was also a culture factor, I was making a transition from a blue-collar culture to a white-collar one, and expectations & knowledge of expectations are different, in many subtle ways.

That happened to me, too, when I was 18. I had grown up in a white-collar family, but it still didn't occur to me that I could, say, take a taxi to get to work on time when I missed the train. Until my boss yelled the suggestion at me over the phone.

In the year before that, I'd been doing minimum-wage work and lazing about reading computer science textbooks and writing C++ in a local university computer lab.

patio114• 15 years ago

I played careerbuilder & monster.com like I was supposed to.

We need to have a How The World Works discussion with college students so that they understand that resume spray-and-pray is not actually how people get white collar jobs. Honestly I think that a good deal of the persistent unemployment problem is that people are doing cargo cult job searching and this checks their mental box for "making a good effort", when they should instead be making directed efforts to meet people with the authority to hire them and convincing them to make it happen.

Tichy7• 15 years ago

Fully agree. I have recommended "What Color Is Your Parachute" to job seekers several times, but they were so exhausted from sending out dozens of applications every day that they didn't even have time or interest to read it.

Not that I have personally tried the strategies in that book (admittedly), but it sounded very plausible to me :-/ At the very least, what is there to lose. If 100 job applications didn't work, does it really hurt to try something else for a week?

pnathan2• 15 years ago

Yes.

One thing I am unhappy about to this day is my experience with the career search arm of my alma mater.

It went like this...

Me, senior in college, on the job prowl. I walk in to the career services office, and they direct me to a window desk. The man sitting behind it has an immaculately put together suit. Boy, I think, this guy's a somewhat. No one else around here wears a suit.

I say, Hi, I'm looking for a job, what can you do for me. Immaculately Dressed Gentleman (IDG) rises majestically and hands me a flyer for an alma-mater-branded subdomain of monster.com. "Go to this website, and create an account".

Shocked, I stare at IDG and mumble my thanks and confirm that yes, I did know how to create accounts and other Internetty things.

ahlatimer• 15 years ago

I've written about this before [1]. It's really not that hard to get a job as a developer. Companies are dying for smart, capable engineers, and it's just a matter of directing your efforts in the right way.

Two points I'd like to address:

- Experience beats GPA. I don't even include my GPA on my resume (not because it's bad, but because I don't think it's relevant), and, so far, no one has asked for it. Experience, on the other hand, has opened far more doors than college has.

- Direct your efforts. It's amazing how many more responses I get when I specifically craft a cover letter/resume just for that position that I do when I just send out resumes blindly.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1809107

Edit: To be clear, I just graduated from college in May, and accepted an offer in SF two weeks after graduation (without sending out any applications). I also had no money to move and the area I'm from has practically no tech industry. I'm not particularly smart or talented; I just happened to do a few things that built on top of one another.

cageface• 15 years ago

Right now it's very easy to find a job as developer but it hasn't always been that way. If you'd graduated in 1992 like I did or in 2001-2 you might have had a very different experience.

FiddlerClamp2• 15 years ago

I've been briefly employed, underemployed, and unemployed for the last several years, supplementing it with freelance (writing) work.

It does take up all your time either searching for work, applying for work, or just worrying about work and the future. I know I can do good work, and I'm adaptable and humble, but the jobs just aren't out there for this 43-year-old....

count3• 15 years ago

If you can get freelance writing work, you're familiar with freelancing. Why not hustle that more, and look for freelance work, rather than a job? This is news.yc after all!

FiddlerClamp2• 15 years ago

Fair enough - I can never quite seem to get up the momentum of contracts I need to make a go of it. I'm not a sales type...

ak217• 15 years ago

The second comment...

I am over the bruises to my ego; I just ignore my mother-in-law completely now. The worst thing though is the impact on my kids. We were making $120K plus two years ago. Now, about $35K. Lost the house. Thankfully still in the same school. That said, the kids went from being respectably comfortable in their cohort to being comfortable if tattered (used clothes, battered rental, same old car, no summer trips, etc.). Thank God they are still young (just started third grade) but we're not having any sleepovers here no matter how much they ask. I am afraid for the social impact on them.

I have a very hard time sympathizing with this person. They ooze entitlement and crave validation in every sentence.

hugh39• 15 years ago

I didn't mind these folks so much. They're doing it rough, but they're working hard at taking care of their kids, at least they're not trying to blame someone else for their problems. I'm sure these folks will end up fine.

The folks who are shocked and disappointed that the universe has failed to reward them for all their hard work at a PhD in Womens' Studies, on the other hand, I fail to sympathise with.

kragen3• 15 years ago

Yeah, me too. I spent a couple of years of my childhood living in a trailer while attending a parochial school (because the local public schools sucked.)

blackguardx5• 15 years ago

I had a similar childhood. I didn't live in a trailer, but in bad apartment complexes. The local public schools sucked, so my parents sent me to a parochial school with a very affluent student population. My parents didn't make much money, so I got to go for free. I always felt different there for some reason, but I didn't realize why until later: I was the "poor" kid.

I remember a friend's mother giving me a box of his old clothes once. When I was wearing a shirt of his the next day and told him about it, he got very pissed off.

I was usually the only student in my classes who got free lunches. I was too young to be embarrassed, but I think I was treated differently because of it.

So I think being the poor kid can have a stigma, but I still had sleepovers.

tomjen32• 15 years ago

Agreed. When will people realize that denying them sleepovers will have a far greater impact on them socially than used clothing?

(Actually used clothing is awesome, I wouldn't have half as many nice shirts if I hadn't bought them used. Oh and you can get suits, ties, utensils, etc as well).

danssig15• 15 years ago

They weren't denying them sleepovers. He was denying letting other kids come to their house. I'm sure they would be happy to have their kids go to other people's house. They just can't let it get out that their kids have poor parents. This can be a really huge deal.

danssig15• 15 years ago

What on earth are you talking about? This sounds like projection to me because I didn't read anything like that in there.

It sounds to me like this person grew up poor and knows what it means. This stupid idea that poor = lazy/bad is so entrenched in the US society (and was when I was growing up too) that it can ruin your social life from very early on. If I were in his shape I would do anything I had to to make sure my children's peers thought of them as at least middle class so they would have better social connections later in life.

Failing that, I would just let my kids know that when they get college age we're moving somewhere so they can start a new life.

rick8884• 15 years ago

"This stupid idea that poor = lazy/bad is so entrenched in the US society (and was when I was growing up too) that it can ruin your social life from very early on"

If you aren't mentally or physically unable to do something (which is the case in a small percentage of the population), you shouldn't be poor. There are many opportunities in the US. I've been poor, had many poor friends, and now I'm doing much better.

Poor, many times, can be changed, but people aren't willing to change their lifestyles.

Many people have free time after work (if you aren't working, you have even more free time). I chose to learn a skill during that time. Many of my friends, who still aren't going anywhere in life, chose to drink, have fun, and party with their friends. I sacrificed that time (for awhile at least) for my career.

Many people also don't understand delayed gratification. They need to have everything now and as a result, suffer financially.

"least middle class so they would have better social connections later in life"

When you have more money, it becomes difficult to stay friends with people that are consistently poor. Many times because your problems, outlook on life, and hobbies change.

chairface2• 15 years ago

Please explain where you see entitlement or a need for validation anywhere in there? It feels to me like you copied and pasted the wrong quote.

temphn7• 15 years ago

Saw this in the article:

> "The most difficult part of the job search is waiting for permission to give up"

What exactly does it mean for someone to "give up" on a job search? Unless you have a significant other, won't you eventually starve and/or be kicked out of your residence? Or does "giving up" mean collecting unemployment insurance/welfare/disability insurance ad infinitum?

Genuinely curious here, do not mean this to be a loaded question.

robryan• 15 years ago

I was thinking that they might mean social pressures, waiting until they can give up without coming across as a complete failure or something like that.

temphn7• 15 years ago

Yes. But what do they do afterwards for food/rent?

blackguardx5• 15 years ago

I had a friend that was unemployed for a very long time and couldn't find work. She just stopped looking after awhile. To make ends meet, she borrowed money from friends, including me. After a few months, she found a new job and was able to pay everyone back.

Being jobless and desperate puts you into a deep hole emotionally. Sometimes you just need a break to get your head together again. Because you think that endless searching for jobs is your duty as an unemployed person, it often feels like you need "permission" from society to stop.

Just think how often people ask you what you do for a living. It happens all the time at parties and when meeting strangers. In our society, it is looked down upon to be unemployed. This circumstance is only a positive quality in the very wealthy (think how good "retiring early" sounds).

Tichy7• 15 years ago

I know it is a bit OT but another thing that depresses me that I suspect most people actually have pretty useless jobs. Like the one person wondering what she did wrong, living in a wealthy neighborhood. Yes, other people have nice cars and houses, but the reality is they are probably just doing some useless thing in their job. They just hacked themselves into the system somehow (the system is very ineffective). I don't think people do that out of a mean spirit, they just try to get by and work with the system. It just seems most of the world is fake at times, and it depresses me.

mannicken• 15 years ago

However, being ok and having skills to deal with unemployment gives you an important skill: Being able to openly say "Fuck you" to your employer or a client.

The part about desperation is not exactly right. I think those who are employed, unhappy and scared of unemployment are in a worse position. Unemployed are actually free, they have very little to lose. They have gotten out of zoo cages and roam the world, which while scary is much more interesting than a job.

If you wanna have an absolute security that you'll have food and a roof, go to jail or something.

grappler• 15 years ago

These quotes sound quite a bit like my dating life. Especially since I spend so much time working...

What You Don't Get About the Job Search: Voices of the Jobless

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