Also coming from the place of big-brotherly-introvert love: if you are aware that networking is important and networking takes place at events that you don't go to, this suggests a fairly obvious strategy that actually works.
- Getting married. - Having children. - Studying any more, whether that means grad school, law school, or even just night classes at a random community college."
So let's go through this step by step:
1) Getting married doesn't require money if you find the right wife, the kind you REALLY want. My wife and I were married by a justice of the peace in a living room with nobody watching. Why? Because we didn't have money, and post 2008, our families didn't either. We "eloped" so that we could be the bad guys, and eliminate the guilt from our families about not being able to pay for a wedding. It worked great. Her parents and mine felt zero guilt, although there was temporary anger towards us. Having zero guests made sure there was no envy between relatives, and all is well now.
2) Having children: Interesting how white, middle class people think having kids is the most expensive thing ever. It's not. My wife was considered to be so infertile that the Dr. wouldn't even prescribe her birth control. She wasn't even having periods. She got pregnant through some crazy and awesome quirk, and we became parents when we hadn't planned on it at all. At first we freaked, but then when I met neighborhood kids (El Salvadoran) in the barrio (very safe by the way) we were living in, and realized how well they were doing in school, life, and health, I realized you don't have to be rich to have kids. You just have to be smart enough to realize that kids need love, patience, shelter, and food. They DON'T need $800 strollers, $400 cribs, a nursery, NEW clothes. NEW anything. You can get all of it at the thrift shop. I make decent money now, but I didn't then. LEARN from immigrants. You live in fucking Canada, and like the U.S. your nation is filled with people who know how to stretch a buck and be happy. Your parents didn't know how to do either thing nearly as well, IMHO. (I'm speaking generically about the baby boomer generation, who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents. I exclude my Dad from this, because he taught me to live on the cheap my whole life.)
3)Studying any more: If you think that law school, or grad school are what it takes to get ahead from your situation, you are a fucking fool. Both are rip offs even IF you HAVE the money and time. You are much better served by going to night classes at community college (provided you have access to one that works with the private sector business community to train in valuable, marketable skills). Or you can go online and educate yourself in the arcane technological arts which are guaranteed to get "your foot in the door" of a business. I got into my field as a lowly programmer. Now I do IT strategy, data governance, business analysis, as well as the fun techy stuff that I choose to focus on. Point is this: if i wanted to, I could just be the business guy that most people want to be. But I got my foot in the door on a weird skill that universities suck at teaching in a time and cost efficient manner. Where did I learn said skills? Online classes that cost me $300 a pop. A total of 4 over the course of a year. I attended a major university. I loved it, but compared to the new generation of online education, it was a fucking rip off.
Stop whining, and start learning from others who have made a life for themselves. We are not the baby boomers. The house in the suburbs doesn't really make sense. Kids don't need their own yard if they can go to a park that's the size of a 100 yards and filled with 100 kids for them to play with, instead of 1 yard where they play by themselves.
Exactly.
Our child's clothing, toys and books come from:
1. Yard sales 2. Helping hands 3. Friends and neighbors 4. Craigslist and Freecycle
Guess what? We give 100% of those things away in time. We've taught our son the concept of not holding onto physical things. All of his things came from someone else, and he gives all of his things to someone else.
He's completely good with that; at 9 years of age, he'll bring a bag of toys and books to the car and say that he'd like to give these away.
Our biggest child related expense is where we're living. We wanted an excellent public school, so we're living in Mountain View, where it's CRAZY expensive, instead of somewhere else that's cheaper.
We are fortunate that we have very solid and affordable health care through my company, though he has needed very little of it.
Thanks, JPKab, for pointing this out.
I agree, also except for mine, who was for all intents an purposes an immigrant.
This was a really great post. Look to the people who grew up with nothing to learn that it really isn't that bad to have "nothing". (I wish I could make those quotes even more sarcastic).
I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.
Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on building 'on spec' relationships with relevant companies.
EDIT:
> At this point, you're probably wondering why I'm not looking at retail, restaurant, or coffee shop jobs. The truth is that I am, but due to my resume, experience, and other such things, these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up.
Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.
If you worked with someone for a few years, they will remember you when a job opens up and call you. Or at least help you when you call them.
Ideally you will have a job/internship with these people, but it works pretty well in a partnership or customer/client relationship. It even works within an open source project (though that is fairly CS specific).
Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example:
The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up.
The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.
Even events like SXSWi, which are definitely not free, can be made free. Its simple, just get on a panel or speak there. Before someone says that a 29 year old wouldn't be able to do that, I say look at who is really giving the panels there. About 50% of them are under 30. Every year I have a dozen ~25 year old friends speak there. There's expenses involved in getting there of course, but if you attend SXSWi as a speaker and don't get at least one job offer you've probably done it wrong.
Does Portugal have a minimum wage enforced by the government? Lots of people would hire workers for, let's say $8/hour, but if the law says you have to pay them $12/hr, then maybe there won't be any hiring going on.
I sent out 15 highly targeted applications and got a 100% response rate. All of them were polite, mostly manually written rejections. I got one interview that went nowhere. That's when I decided I'd be better off starting my own business.
Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to
and then it needs to get followed with "convince the person with hiring authority in the company to hire you." The resume is designed to be rejected.
For example, I consult, and while in principle I could attempt to sell anyone with authority to write a check on consulting engagements, I don't. If I meet someone at a party and he says "I don't have a website but..." there is no possible end to that sentence whatsoever under which he is a good prospect for business in the near term. If you want a Rails programmer? Nope, sorry, I'm probably not your guy. If you're a software company with $10k in the bank, you can't afford a formal engagement with me. Strongly qualified leads for me tend to, e.g., have over 10 employees, profitable software businesses with revenue in the millions to tens of millions, multiple opportunities for things I can do for them, a business model which suggests ample opportunity for positive ROI at the rates I charge, and some reason to have personal trust for me.
To the extent that I do active sales work (e.g. flying out to a city to meet with your CEO, creating proposals, etc), I focus my active sales work on qualified leads, rather than "any business I could possibly think of."
Applying this to a job search: he's sending resumes to places which are not hiring. That isn't a strongly qualified lead. That's like me soliciting five figure checks off every passerby in Ogaki Station. Total waste of time.
So I think Patrick is arguing that more qualification is necessary - it sounds like employers are seeing this resume as a low quality lead. Meet some people who can help you, do something that tells an employer "this person might make me more money!", etc.
Operationally, answering the question: "Are you selling what they are looking to buy?"
The more sense it makes for both parties, the higher the probability for the deal to get into more advanced stages.
He says he could get a job worth $36,000. But he thinks he's worth more. Maybe, but it's not clear why, from the article. I think our current system creates a mismatch between skills and expectations for new liberal arts grads.
"(survey) on young Canadians’ expectations of what they would be earning 10 years after graduation, and what they were actually earning 10 years after graduation. The expectations: Totally in line with Carrick’s letter-writer — about $90,000 a year, with, one would assume, the tailored suits, fancy cars, power and prestige to match.
The reality: $31,648. Considerably less than the self-pitying letter-writer’s $36,000."
The world is not the tech industry. Not everybody has the same perspective as you. In fact, more people find themselves in this chap's shoes than in yours.
You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur. How can you build a successful product if you can't put yourself in another's position?
But this guy also isn't representative of the rest of the economy.
My brother has an architecture degree. He graduated college in 2008. That is about the worst major you can have right now, and the unemployement rate for that degree is very high right now. To add insult to injury, architecture is a 5 year degree so he gave up 1 year of earning potential and tacked on more debt.
He was interning at an architecture firm before graduation, and started working there full time after graduation. About 6 months later, they went bankrupt and he was unemployed.
He got another job tangentially related to architecture and construction for the last 3 years, but wasn't very happy with the salary.
Meanwhile he has been applying for better jobs. Not 100+ like the author of this article, but networking through people at school and work. He interviewed with 3 or 4 major companies that would have been 'good' jobs. They all basically said, we are impressed with your resume and you personally, but we have a glut of people applying with 10 years of experience and you effectively have 0.
Finally in the last two weeks, one of those interviews came through. He was given an offer at a salary far lower than he would like, but it's in the industry he wants to work in. He took the job, at least he will now build experience.
It's a long freaking road sometimes, but throwing your hands up and saying 'my life is over' at age 29 won't get you anywhere.
And even with all the trials and tribulations - a 5 year degree and 3.5 years of work experience, my brother is only 27. So he still has 2 years before he turns into this guy. What the heck are you doing looking for your first job at 29?
People do strange things when times get desperate. I'm saddened that some people here can't seem understand this.
It sounds to me that this fellow's problem is this:
>" I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect, and the power."
Yet he wants that opportunity to be given to him, rather than going out and making it happen. He seems entitled, after graduating from University, to these opportunities. That ship has sailed. Our (my generation) father's worked in labour and helped create the middle class of North America. Why are we so against it?
Clearly this guy feels that he is entitled to be at an executive level even though he hasn't built up much real experience. He doesnt want to pay any dues and scoffs at a $36k/year job. I lived in Chicago working for $18k/year making photocopies with an evening job cleaning offices, barely able to pay my bills. I did that for 4 years and was able to use that experience to get a decent job. (probably could have moved up sooner had I been looking during those years) A few more years at the new gig and I made a more significant bump.
I would have killed for a $36k first job . (even with inflation it's much better than my 18k gig - I'm not that old!)
I'm doing very well now but it was a lot of work to build up the career that I now have. I probably could have moved up faster, but even still I needed that first crappy job to start the ball rolling. Ironically I'm starting to think about being unemployable due too being old, since tech can tend to be a young persons field. Maybe I'm just too old to relate, but things were not any easier back then.
There are a hundred useful paths he could be taking to learn marketable skills. And yet he managed to write this whole essay without mentioning one.
This isn't just tech industry bias speaking. He could go to one of the natural gas boom towns and easily find work. They're having a major labor shortage, so wages are good. He could learn carpentry, or plumbing, or any number of things. Instead he keeps sending out futile resumes.
He's limited by his own faulty self-image. He sees himself in a suit, wielding power, but he doesn't see himself actually doing anything that produces value. That's his problem.
If he really wants to work & make money, well companies are desperate for workers in the Bakken Oil Shale. I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S. many of the craft trades are also desperate for young people to get started. For example, in Illinois the average age of a plumber was 58 (it might be older now, I read that statistic a couple of years ago.) Young people aren't going into the trades apparently because it's not an acceptable profession. Everyone here knows about the needs in the tech industry so I won't go over them.
Lastly, his approach to finding a job is terrible (this is not necessarily his fault.) I've said this before & I will continue to say this (and I tell any young people this when I get a chance), when looking for a job you do not lead w/ your resume. It does not matter how well you researched the company, if you have not talked to people @ the firm or the hiring manager you do not know what they need.
So do something else.
At 29, he's had 15 solid working years behind him. Not a single job in that time? (less a couple of short contracts - which are still jobs, so the headline is a bit of a misnomer) The economy hasn't been bad for that long, and arguably still isn't that bad, at least in Canada.
I get the impression that he decided to spend the first 20-some-odd years of his life focusing on himself, which is fine, I respect that if done without any illusions, but now he's scrambling to catch up thinking he should be at the same level as his peers who have spent years focusing on their careers. The world doesn't work that way.
If that is not his situation, it wasn't clear from the article.
This is a recurring theme in many applicants that walk through our doors. There's tons of degrees I've never heard of that make me think "There's a degree in that!?" Most have no applicable skills. Most don't even know what they need to know. Finally, most don't have a way to learn it without a mentor to guide them.
When people would work one or two different jobs their entire life, it was a wise business investment to hire good kids with huge gaps in their skills just like the young man you're describing and do their job training.
With people changing jobs every 5 years, it's very difficult to square up the reasoning behind that job training investment.
There's a ton of people I know who did poorly in their coursework but their design skills and ability are bar none. I don't look at GPA as much of an indicator anymore. It shows potential, only.
That's U.S. entitlement for you. 500 square feet is perfectly reasonable, I live on about the same, and I rent it (and I'm 31 years old).
A 500 square feet small apartment in Barcelona is about 200.000 euros right now, and 80.000 here in Uruguay.
I agree that it's not ideal for raising kids, but it's not something to whine about.
Edit: as others pointed out, most have a lot of work experience by 29 years old. I had 8 years' experience at the time and I expect people in the U.S. to have even more since they graduate earlier and have summer jobs and all that.
Also, he says he can make 36.000 dollars/year?, well you can save a bit and try your hand overseas. During hard times, people emigrated in the past. My grandparents did, and endured hardships. In the U.S., you might have read about pilgrims. I doubt they complained about not being able to afford a dog. And being a foreigner has a charm that will make you popular with girls (not to mention the U.S. passport if it comes to that).
There is absolutely a sense of entitlement in North America that seems pretty odd if you've lived in other countries.
My place is lot bigger than 500 sq feet but I've also been working since I was 14, left the US for Asia at 23 and have worked my ass off every day since college.
Beyond getting laid being a foreigner isn't usually a net gain in my experience. For every door is might open it closes one or more. My first company had heavy staff requirements (which meant lots of salaries, lots of HR time and lots of rent) but no bank would even talk to me (and my partners) because we were foreigners. We had to bootstrap the company with will alone.
Where the advantage lies is the perspective emigrating gives you. It allows you to better see how things truly are and focus on what's important. As screwed up as the US economy might be I have many Asian friends who have emigrated there in the last decade and have done very well for themselves. Why? Because they were willing to work their assess off.
So much to this, their are so many dry-cleaners and Chinese food store owners who are millionaires because of this.
If he's complaining about not being able to afford a >500 sq ft apartment in Manhattan, I agree that'd be pretty entitled, analogous to the Barcelona example. I'm guessing he's not in Manhattan, though.
I've been to Toronto, and it's basically the U.S. (I know you think it's different, but from the outside, it's not).
Salaries are lower there, but there are chances to raise yourself if you want to ... my brother migrated to Toronto at age 25, started at a KFC, went to community college and graduated, started at the bottom of a marketing firm, worked hard and networked a lot, got a better offer at another firm, then made it to manager at yet another firm... and now he got a humungous job offer in Dubai, and emigrated there a few months ago.
So, the 29 year-old is 4 years older than my brother when he started, but if he wants to, he can go to community college, graduate in a career with demand (I was offered a starting salary of 4.000 canadian dollars a month as a programmer if I moved there. There are other high demand careers, like for example welding), and start moving upwards.
He can also go to Alberta, some time ago there was high demand at the oil sands. He doesn't even have to move out of Canada.
Or he can try what many here do, a startup :) . Or a small business (I was impressed at how much the KFC my brother worked for pulled, and it was owned by an inmigrant).
Imagine if you were laid off and no convenience stores, chem labs, or whatever you could find simply didn't exist. Instead of weeks to get back to you, it took months, and the factory never called you back. Then, someone from an older generation started with the same rhetoric you're on now.
I'm not saying that's the case, but just as you want 20-somethings to have some perspective, accept the possibility that it could just be worse now even compared to the struggles you had.
I won't go into exhaustive detail, but if you wanted to compare economic conditions, consider this: 1) My first job (paperboy at age 12) was during the Nixon years. Price and waged controls, going off the gold standard, etc. Didn't affect me--I was working locally, delivering the freaking paper, not existing in some statistical milieu. 2) My next job (dishwasher, age 15) was during Ford years. Whip Inflation Now buttons, anyone? Irrelevant--I had my head in a sink. 3) My next job (cashier, age 18) was during Carter years. Insane levels of inflation, stagflation, and a president lecturing us that we were all in a national malaise. Screw you, Carter, I was working and finishing high school, regardless of wider economic conditions. 4) Next job (factory, age 19-24) was during Carter and then Reagan years. End of stagflation, let the Stockman budget battles begin. Irrelevant--I was working my butt off, multiple jobs if I had time, and going to school. 5) Next jobs (IT, age 25-now) I have worked through all the ups and downs of the economy, including the current supposedly impossible economy. I am competing against the 20-somethings and the offshore developers. I don't think it's easy for anyone (myself included) and I don't take my current hourly contract for granted. Yes, hourly contract. I am one manager's decision away from not having a paycheck. I could either a) panic or b) make sure I deliver value, all the time. And of course hope for the best:-)
So the perspective I suggest is one of perhaps being aware of larger economic conditions as a point of interest, but not telling yourself that the unemployment rate, the dearth of new jobs, the shift to overseas labor, etc. is going to control your destiny. YOU control it. Nothing but crappy jobs out there? Fine, take two, they're small. What's that, I'm an insensitive clod and there are not even any crappy jobs to be had? Oh, then I assume you have broadened your search out to 50 miles, then 100, then 150. And I don't mean emailing resumes. Nothing like showing up in person to demonstrate seriousness. Oh, and now new jobs? Well, why not go take an existing job from some sad sack who is just marking time? Every company has them. Don't ask for openings--make openings.
As long as this is, it is incomplete. I'm sure a determined complainer could pick holes in it easily, and trump me with some difficulty that I haven't included. But that's the difference in perspective. I accept difficulties as part of life, and set out to survive at the very least, prosper if possible, and triumph (even if in only small ways, and only in my mind where I keep score in a game no one else knows we are playing).
So yes, there's the disconnect.
As far as I can see, the economy is fine. Your mileage will almost certainly vary.
I practically have a job offer at a firm in New Tork and I'm a year from graduating and I've a decent shot at graduate programs too.
I must be doing something fundamentally different, or there's some systemic bias in my favor. I am lower middle class, white, male, nerd, not particularly socially apt, average university, ~100k loans, American, CS and physics maajor, living in the northeast.
I'll try, although I don't have any special insights, I don't think it's mysterious. From goodside's comment: "I majored in CS." From yours: "CS and physics maajor". I probably don't have to tell you that there's tremendous demand for so-called STEM majors. I don't know about your friends' majors, but these are really both "isolated, non-representative examples".
I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy, etc, and have little or no concrete idea of how to apply this degree in the real world. Part of it is also because there is little support for developing skills outside your narrow major in many colleges and universities, and there's this drift between what many students expect from school (prepare to get a job) and what the schools deliver, which is more abstract. Plus many new grads don't know much more about how to go about finding a job than just pumping out resumes, because that's what they're told to do by (some) "career centers" and counselors on campus.
The column is about someone in (apparently) Canada, who doesn't seem like he's in tech.
I'd put money on your being a lot more socially apt (in the areas important for this stuff) than you think you are, as compared to the rest of the population.
"socially apt" is just another word for "common sense" or "not being a self-hindering idiot" in a lot of circumstances. It doesn't have to mean being a slick sunglasses-at-night bastard.
He has a hard time applying for jobs which he may or may not be qualified for and he's resigned himself to living alone in a 500 square foot apartment until he dies... Yikes. With an attitude like that I'm sure he interviews really well.
Bottom line is, if you're spending 100% of your time trying to find a new job, then your time is not well managed. Set aside some of that time to contribute something positive to the world.
A few suggestions:
Volunteer at a local nonprofit. They are constantly overwhelmed with work, and will love the help, even if it's only 20% of your time. It will be great for networking, and you'll have a good feeling about it, not to mention something to pad the resume with. Also, you'd be surprised how many places you think are official are nonprofits who could use the free help.
Go to meetup groups. Spending money on a conference for networking is not useful when you can get the same thing for free. If you're technical, there are LUGs, programming language groups, database stuff, etc. Consider book clubs of people with similar interests.
Start a blog and actively maintain it. Rather than brooding on why the system is keeping you down, study up on things and write articles to teach others. Once you get a flow going, people will start linking to your articles and you'll have some recognition.
Just a few starting points. You can easily spend 1 day a week (20% of your time) working on a cool project like that, and still have plenty of time to search for work. And the next interview you get, you'll be a lot more confident.
- It is written with a tone that lacks accountability and instead seeks to blame the situation on outside factors. To a certain degree this is true, but the bit about nepotism bothered me. There are plenty of people who are able to get jobs without being related to the CEO.
- Does it mention what industry or city/region the author is looking in (I admit I skimmed some of the article because it's really long and was making me depressed)? I know I'm somewhat insulated because I live in New York and I'm a developer, but I am trying to be unbiased. I went to a good (not top 10) state school, had a really bad GPA, and graduated right in the heart of the recession. I still had many good opportunities and a job within 3 months. The same goes for almost all of my friends, many of whom are not engineers or programmers. Maybe the author should consider looking in a different geographic region.
- The part about probably never being able to get married and have kids because of money seemed a bit melodramatic to me. People who aren't rich have been getting married and having kids for thousands of years.
- Is moving in with his parents an option while he looks for a suitable job? I got the impression that he has parents with at least some means because of the bit about sending him cash if they felt bad. This would seem like a good idea rather than spending everything you make on rent.
The moral of the story is that I understand the job market sucks, but if he is really as qualified and hard-working as he claims, it shouldn't be that hard to find something.
And if it took that long to graduate, I'd like to think he was doing something worthwhile in those extra years that would have easily turned into a job.
There is no secret sauce. Work begets work. I started working as a [very bad] programmer and [mediocre] sys admin when I was 13. That job got me the job I had throughout college. The job in college got me the job I have now. Six years later and things are good.
My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs.
I was in the Army before I went to college, so I didn't graduate until I was 27. I got a 3.8 GPA in electrical engineering, but I was still unemployed for over a year before I got hired as an engineer. It was a pretty disheartening year, and I doubted whether I was worth anything to anybody. I finally got a job through a friend. All the cold calls, resumes and interviews were for naught, I got hired through cronyism.
I have a friend who got a degree in sociology, at the age of 28, by working at a hotel and paying out of pocket for a class or two per semester for a decade. She still works at that hotel, two years later, making just above minimum wage. I thought I had it bad being unemployed for a year, but I had military experience and technical skills that were at least somewhat in demand. She's was looking in the social work field, but now she's just looking for any job with benefits and growth, paycheck or industry be damned.
You could argue that sociology is not a degree you should get if you actually want to work. But this woman was written off as "not college material" by teachers and family alike, mostly because she was socially awkward in high school. She worked her ass off for a decade to put herself through school and I'm proud of her. She's shown more grit and determination than I have, certainly. And yet she's unemployable. Hell, she probably couldn't get that hotel job if she started now, because she's got a degree.
"My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs."
Who is waiting?? We're talking about people who've been trying to get decent jobs for a long time, and have come up empty. So saying "They should have gotten jobs before" is begging the question. They've been trying all along.
However, this tells me it is not hard to find a job, just hard to find a nice job. This is different. Having a nice job is an incredible luxury nobody has an inherent right to...
This opinion is compounded by various complaints about immigrants "taking" jobs. The truth is everybody feels they are entitled to do something amazing - regardless of if they are good enough. Some of us have to suck it up and stack shelves or staff factories...
Aspiring to more is great and everyone should do that imo. But reality might mean working a lot of crap jobs in the meantime to survive.
Survival is shockingly easy in today's world. Not surviving requires a concerted effort in fact...
To sum up. I think this complaint is valid when worded properly - its just completely unimportant.
This sentence struck me as a little odd. Is the USA at a point where McDonald's expect a burger flipper to commit to a career with them?
Maybe I'm biased because all the non-skilled jobs I worked were before/during university, but I never got the feeling that anyone believed I'd retire from there.
Yes, we had the whole rigmarole at the interview "I want to work here because you do great customer service blah blah", but I was never asked about spending my entire career there.
I even know a guy who was begged by the McDonald's staff to work weekends there (after he left for a corporate job), because he was better than all the other staff.
As long as the guy has half a brain and is reasonably personable, I'd rather have someone like that for 3-6 months than the standard buffoon who will last just as long before getting fired/bored of working, and do some damage in the process.
Like buying almost anything, it's possible to pay a lot of money but still end up with something crap.
The real shame is that kids are not taught to think about education in the same way they they would consider the value of any other purchase.
Others have a CV reaching back 5+ years at that age.
Don't put that much time exclusively into uni unless you intend to stay in science or aim for a cushy cubicle job that hires on the premise of paper-planes.
It seems like the author has never thought of creating their own job. It's pretty humbling to walk around the neighborhood offering to cut lawns or paint fences and building up business that way but sometimes it needs to be done. The author must have _some_ skill worth selling after all those years of schooling. Even if they make less than minimum wage initially they can do something.
The fact that the author isn't running their own business isn't what concerns me, it's that it's something that doesn't seem to have even been considered. To me, this seems like a societal problem as well as one for the author.
In terms of advice, I can only offer my own experience: I quit my first job at 18 (worked full time through college) to work for less than minimum wage at an ISP because I valued experience.
I moved. Twice. First to London, then to the US. If you are in a town where you have seriously gone after all the jobs you can and still can't get anywhere, it's time to look at places that ARE hiring and move there.
I was willing to make atrociously bad amounts of money (I was living in a country with no minimum wage law) for five years in order to get the experience and proof of ability to execute that I needed to move and get a "real" job.
In my mind, the 29 year old author's only real hope is to create their own job - they have nothing to show an employer that they have any kind of tenacity or desire to work in a specific industry and so they will need to get their experience elsewhere.
This sucks for the author. I get that but I see no other feasible way for them to explain why they are 29 with no relevant work experience in their field. More generally, this sucks for society - we seem to have convinced a large amount of the population that the only way to make money is to sell ones labor to someone else and have that person tell you what to do and how to do it. In short: there is a dearth of autonomy in the world.
The unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3%.
Nearly all of them were crap. There was a constant and persistent inability to demonstrate what they had to offer my company. There was a massive focus on class projects and a complete "meh" in terms of work history.
Now, some of these people might have been excellent hires. But they could not demonstrate their aptitude. The people I did contact did have a differentiating factor: it was that they did something... almost anything... out of the ordinary in their life and put it on their resume.
People I contacted included a YC company intern, someone who liked Haskell, and someone who had gone from total programming novice to real-time operating system coder in 4 years.
Danger signs included gaps in employment (why does $applicant's resume stop in 2008?), inability to spell correctly, and lack of knowledge of the tech world.
It's not hard to apply Sturgeon's law and lift yourself out of the drek that I saw. If you want help resume building, feel free to email me. I can help you tune your resume to demonstrate your awesome (at least to another CS geek! :-) I can't say anything about what other fields look for ).
For the uninitiated why is this a danger sign?
Did they get fired? Did they get a pile of money and go roll around on a beach somewhere? Did they have to take care of family? There can be insanely great reasons... just as easily... insanely bad reasons.
It's an unknown, which adds pure risk. For someone to be out of work for years indicates some sort of ... something. I can't tell with just a gap if that is a problem or just someone living life in a non-career fashion for a while.
I don't personally really view time under a year as significant, as that can simply be time spent in finding a new job. This might particularly be true for someone who doesn't have a faddish skillset.
So in my view, if you took off for a few years, allude to why you did so, along with an explanation of how you kept your skill current.
Example: "I was an early google employee and cashed out after a while, then travelled the world for a few years. I've kept myself current by working on a compiler for my own language with the latest theoretical contributions... you can find it at github/blah/blah. I'd like to resume work at your fine institution". Or that could be restructured into a a line in the resume: "worked on cutting edge compiler as personal project: Last Few Years. See Github Address".
It's frustrating and wrong but it's not HR that put everyone in this mess. Edit: and it's definitely not HR that's going to get everyone out.
IMO, the easiest thing to do is actually volunteering some time (crazy right?) for a non-profit organization to:
1) Build up skill sets with real experience 2) Network with people of influence 3) Give back to the community
Paying it forward has always worked well for me and it makes a positive impact. Who doesn't love a win-win situation?
> "Those 14 steps assume everything goes well and roughly according to plan."
Yeah, definitely, if you plan to fail. Playing the numbers game with applications (sending off hundreds a month) is doing it wrong. He says he does research and tailors his applications to each one. With so many, they can't possibly be tailored enough. Those kinks will have been optimised out to save time.
Job hunting is a difficult and thankless task. But go about it the wrong way, with the wrong attitude, and it'll never get any better. Cutting the "woe is me" attitude and focussing more positively on what you can do to fix a shitty situation would be the first step.
I was in a position of thinking I'd never amount to anything, a couple of years ago. I spent 7 years in a supermarket, with only the faint tease of career prospects and progression (rapidly pulled away when I actually went for them). I thought I'd never get out, and I applied for all sorts of jobs (though not on the mass-production scale this fella has), slowly becoming bitter about them hiring other people over me.
Then I thought, "what can I do to get out of this rut?" I'd taught myself how to design and develop a website many years ago and for some bonkers reason didn't capitalise on that at the time (that's 7 years of good career progress I consciously chose not to take - no one's fault but mine). I got back into it and got a contact who gave me good work that I chose to do for free. It wasn't long before I was approached by an agency with the offer of a job. My first full-time position, at 23 years old. That was only 12 months ago.
It's been onwards and upwards ever since, even with recent redundancy.
Maybe if I'd done what this guy did, I would still be sending off 100 applications to any old job every month. The time spent doing that could easily have been spent making myself a more attractive prospect. After all, you're not being paid to 'troll' a jobsite 7 days a week, so you may as well do some unpaid work that puts you in a better position instead.
I've never gone to university and I was much worse off than that guy was success wise, but I managed to pull myself up and I make a living contract programming now.
Don't give up. Also, don't assume that the only correct path is through the front door.
He also seems to signal that he's far more into what a job gives him than what he can bring to a job in terms of skill. This is something that is easily sniffed out, even just through his writing. Oh, he gives the usual "hard work, sacrifice, and a bit of luck," bit, but then goes on to blame HR, the economy, etc instead of applying any rigor to his own skills and experience.
It's never been easy to break into a job. The idea that a college degree is a Golden Wonka ticket to riches and Everlasting Gobstoppers needs to die.
If you don't have the entrepreneurial spirit to create your own job/startup/career, then you're going to be a piece of phytoplankton, carried by the vagaries of the ocean's currents. There are jobs for people lacking this motivation, but they're not the ones with "I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect, and the power."
And I have to say that this isn't particularly credible from what I've witnessed:
"due to job-hunt and financial issues, my age group finds it extremely hard to go out and be in social settings, so the usual networking and schmoozing that previous generations indulged in isn't nearly as possible for us"
And finally, playing the blame game with the faceless and apparently evil minions of HR is just ridiculous. In my experience, HR tends to weed out people so as not to waste a hiring manager's time. And in 90% of the people I've seen hired, the manager took their resume to HR to have it vetted after already having received recommendations for the applicant. In other words, if you're trying to get to the hiring manager through HR, you're doing it wrong.
Email me (in my profile) if you want to talk and bounce some ideas around and make life better.
I don't have anything against non-STEM fields and believe everyone should be allowed to choose what they want to graduate in, just letting people graduate while piling up debt only to end up jobless seem tragic.
Networking isn't a one-off kind of thing, essentially you are trying to be something of a 'friend' to this person, benefiting both parties.
The silver lining is that if you're in the right industry it can be easier. Last week I sent out 10 resumes and got 4 interviews for web development positions. My chances are good at every company I interviewed with but only time will tell if I'm not being too optimistic. Your location has a lot to do with it too im sure. I live in Chicago so it was relatively easy to land those interviews but if you're not in a major metro area (New York, Chicago, LA, etc.) then surely it's a lot tougher to break in. The solution is probably to move. Half the people at the companies I interviewed at told me they moved from places like Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan to where the jobs were.
It's tough though no matter where you are and what you're trying to break into.
This is so true. Everyone wants to say we're not trying hard enough but we
really are the guys with the awesome grades, extra-curriculars, part
time jobs, and involved in sports plus finding time to be social.
No employer has ever asked me about part time jobs, clubs or sport. Frankly I don't think any of them cared about my grades either.
These things are noisy signals, proxying for hoop jumping. What's more important is proving that you have relevant skills.
It's tough though no matter where you are and what
you're trying to break into.