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Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me
- xal 17y agoWell i'd hire her if I was in SF :-) This is how you get a job.
- jaxn 17y agoI agree. I forwarded it on to someone I know in SF who blogs for a TV station there.
- Estragon 17y agoCan you actually live in the area on $12/hour? Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.
- gizmo 17y agoActually, I'm willing to bet the opposite. She's going to get significantly more than $12 an hour. Why? Because by saying she's willing to accept $12/hr and fetch lattes to get where she wants to be... she (deliberately) puts herself in a position with no negotiating power. You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. It's like saying to somebody who's about to punch you.. "Ok, you can punch me if that's what you want, if that makes you feel better", and if you say it right you make it almost impossible for that person to punch you. You don't want to get into a fist fight with somebody who's unwilling to raise his arms, and you don't want to negotiate with somebody who surrenders all leverage. I'm confident she'll get an offer that the employer genuinely believes is fair.
- protomyth 17y agouhm... about the whole punching thing... you give too much credit to the better angels of our nature
- gizmo 17y agoNature? I doubt that. It's probably a cultural thing, because I find that it's almost impossible to get into a fistfight if you don't want to.
- qeorge 17y agoHaving seen several of these postings, I agree with you - the $12/hr rate helps her stand out in a positive light. I'm not as sure about the leverage stuff, but it definitely communicates that she's someone who's looking to break in anywhere she can, as opposed to a bratty kid who thinks their "reverse job posting" is just too clever.
- JabavuAdams 17y ago> You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. Don't assume that other people are like you, especially when negotiating. This is awful advice.
- gizmo 17y agoI'm not advocating the tactic at all. I'm simply predicting that she'll get a significantly better deal than $12/hr because only one employer has to step up and make a reasonable offer. You don't have to get the best offer on average, you simply have to get one good offer from one employer. Some people assume that because she states she's willing to work for $12/hr that's automatically the best rate she's going to get offered. I think it will affect her average salary offer, but I don't think it will affect her best and worst offers much if at all.
- ytinas 17y agoOk, so if she comes to work for you she's in good shape. In the real world, however, when a jackal sees a gazelle it doesn't care if it has "pouty eyes" or not. Meat is meat, the easier to catch the better.
- gizmo 17y agoMany smaller companies make all salary information publicly available, and otherwise it leaks out anyway. The moment she figures out she's earning half the money her peers do she's going to feel taken advantage of and hurt her employer out of spite when given the opportunity to do so. Or she'll get a raise and then still resent her employer. If morale is bad already and turnover is high, then sure, take the jackal approach. Otherwise you're better off with happier and more productive employees.
- ytinas 17y agoI would agree and I wish the world was like that. All I can say is: don't ever go near a "right to work" state.
- houseabsolute 17y agoWhy not you? But, I would say it's not stupid, just inexperienced.
- lanstein 17y agoI did.
- nandemo 17y agoFirst, I do agree that she's selling herself short. Actually she shouldn't even mention salary to start with. But I keep hearing that X is too low for living in the Valley, for varying values of X. Out of curiosity, I checked the minimum wage in California and it's $8/hour. In SF it's $9.8. So how do blue collar workers survive? Do they all (mostly?) commute from outside the Valley? If they have to live in the Valley, are their living conditions terrible? Serious question.
- jfarmer 17y agoBlue collar workers have a hard time surviving and there is a massive problem of low/low-middle class flight in SF. This predominantly affects minorities, who have to live in less safe neighborhoods like the Tenderloin or Bayview/Hunter's Point, or move to cheaper places like Oakland. SF prides itself on its diversity, but every year it gets whiter and whiter.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y agoThere should be a site that highlights truly fucking awesome people looking for jobs and has an actual insight into them (plus what they've built). I'd hire those people.
- 9oliYQjP 17y agoHere's the problem. Truly awesome people can jump from job to job with ease. They're always in demand. They're always having offers thrown at them, even when they aren't looking. Where there's a need for a website is for inexperienced, but otherwise awesome folks. Those people that haven't been discovered yet because they are fresh out of school, perhaps like this person. The big problem with this idea is that there's no guarantee that somebody who is an awesome student will make an awesome employee.
- prosa 17y ago>> continuously trolling the depressing opportunities on Monster/NYU Careernet/Craigslist. Is this system broken? Is there an opportunity for improvement in the way people find jobs, or is the best way to find good work going to increasingly be by performing memorable stunts to get eyeballs from prospective employers? I'm curious, especially in light of the relative lack of successful startups in the area.
- smokinn 17y agoGiles has a video he wants to sell you: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to-do-if-you-get-fired.html http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2010/03/programmers-what-to...
- MrFoof 17y agoYes. Isn't this what Spolsky and Atwood are trying to improve for computer professionals? Granted it's a specific niche of the market. Matching these sorts of unique demands with a wildly varying supply is a devilishly hard problem. It's not much different than dating sites. I'd put both dating sites and job boards in the "better than nothing" category. However I've always maintained that if you could find a very high-quality partner (or employer, or employee) as easily as it is to Google for most things, you will be the richest person on earth.
- ismarc 17y agoHere's the problem with the current "employment opportunity discovery" mechanism. You need a large number of qualified applicants to review job postings and to reply to those, generating a "success" for a particular site for a particular company. You need a large number of accurate, quality job postings to attract applicants. I've thought about this space for quite a while, fragmenting job sites all charge money to the company just to post an ad. From that, you expect a user response. I think the ideal method would be to have an indexed, structured database of potential applicants, people who are interested in potential job offers. Company's then input their requirements and a list of potential applicants is spit out, no identifying information, just the raw skills/experience (10 years with C++, 15 with C, 2 with C#, etc.). The company then pays $x to solicit that potential applicant into applying for the job. This preserve's the anonyminity the current system has (no personal identifiable information revealed until application takes place) and allows companies to spend significantly less time attempting to discover potential applicants. It's not without it's massive drawbacks (you need the index of applicants, get companies to use it, get applicants to keep their information up to date, gives the applicant a feeling of not trying to find a job, HR does the hiring so they may not pay for the grey area applicants when normally they'd at least make it to the hiring manager) but you can overcome some of these by providing the traditional service as well, company's pay a "nominal" fee to list a position and applicants search/apply. From what I've discovered, the best jobs are the ones you can't find. They're posted on the companies job listings and sit there, or the current job search systems have crappy indexes and include more cruft than quality (try a search for 'c linux' on one for a good example). Hmm...maybe there's room in this sector if one could tap into a large number of people who are interested in anonymously being considered for other potential job opportunities.
- cmelbye 17y agoHow does one raise their "Google Index"? I can help raise your Google Index through SEO.
- nopassrecover 17y agothrough SEO? Let's not pick on the terminology, clearly she is talking about your ranking for common keywords and PageRank.
- cmelbye 17y agoI just think it's odd that she's using the completely incorrect term in a professional setting where she's trying to convince a future employer that she can do the job.
- jonny_noog 17y agoBearing in mind that there's a good chance that her prospective future employer probably couldn't describe the task even that well, I'd be willing to give her a pass on that one. If I was the prospective employer, it would actually serve a great purpose for me, it tells me that she has some amount of experience with the technicalities of the Internet, but not a great depth in this kind of area. She seems to be going for writing jobs ideally, not a dev or server admin position or something, so this would not necessarily be a detractor to her overall pitch. And you can tell she's pitching to non-technical people: "I can even make that div float so that the text doesn’t get all messy. Don’t know what that means? See, you really should hire me." I quite liked that passage. She also refers to "software packages like Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite" where I would in any similar situation at least refer to it as "the Adobe Suite" and most likely I'd be a little more specific than that, going into further detail about which apps in the suite I actually have experience with. But again, I give her a pass because the way she's written things up I suspect works for the audience she's targeting.
- clistctrl 17y ago"I was reared during the internet age, most consciously during the dot com bust. I am also only 22, meaning that I am the definition of cheap labor. No, seriously, I think that getting paid anything more than $12/hour is “living large,” and getting paid $12/hour is “extremely manageable.”" I'm also 22, Currently making 70k... i would find $12/hour anything but living large.
- encoderer 17y agoAnd this woman graduated from NYU, Junior year in Paris, she's been published, and she's absolutely charming. She's optimized for distance, not speed. No reason to be a douche.
- jrockway 17y agoThis is the kind of person you pay $100k starting to though, to keep them around for a while. I was like this, and I kept changing jobs every 6 months because someone would come along and offer me twice what I was making before. Sure, I'll come work for you! (Oh, and I'm 24.) My bet is that two years from now, she will easily be making $50 an hour, even if she starts on $12 today. But if you're that person paying her $12 today, I estimate that will last maybe 3 or 4 months. Then someone else will have her talent, and you'll be saying to yourself, "yeah, paying someone like that $12 an hour was fucking dumb of us".
- starkfist 17y agoThis is the kind of person you pay $100k starting to though, to keep them around for a while. Why??? She's exactly like every other 20-something woman in Manhattan, only they all have better looking tumblr sites!
- jrockway 17y agoPublished author? I am not really in this industry, so I have no idea. I was a published author at 22 and make about that much.
- faramarz 17y agoIf I was a startup in the Valley, I'd hire her as copywriter.
- xelipe 17y agoI could use a copywriter for $8/hour.
- forgotAgain 17y agoHey Shane, Why use profanity? Your friend is putting herself out there looking for a job and you lessen her efforts by using profanity in your comments. Way to be a friend.
- starkfist 17y agoShe could get a writing job at a place like RWW easily. Unfortunately it's one of the only places she could get a job. It's also a boiler room. I don't know what the right phrase for a blogging boiler room is. I hope she truly loves SF because career wise there are more and better opportunities for people like her in NYC.
- cj 17y agoPerfect: Presents some degree of intelligence mixed in with an emotional appeal.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoI'm a little disturbed that this is how the most talented people in my generation behave. It seems like most people her age are simply lazy, but a small minority are talented, hardworking, and desperate to undersell themselves. If you've gone to a good school, gotten a good GPA, and been published, don't you dare compete on price! Figure out what the average entry-level college grad would make in a given position, and ask for 25% more. Tell them why it's a good deal. If she says $12, she sounds like damaged goods. If she says "I'm a better deal at $60K than the last applicant was at $40K," she has another sentence or two to make her case--which she can do.
- dtap 17y agoHow do you pay off NYU on $12/hour?
- paraschopra 17y agoNot particularly related to this but I am amazed how people here and on the blog are surprised that she is willing to work for $12/hr while at the same time web app startups are afraid to charge even $10/month from their users. What an irony! PS: I know scale v/s no-scale argument, but still one should charge for your web app (no matter how trivial is it)?