10 ms·

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

108 points by mvs 15y ago

rboyd 15y 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.
- forensic 15y 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 15y 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.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      This Robert Heinlein quote is perhaps overplayed, but I'm gonna paste it in here anyway in case someone hasn't heard it or just needs a reminder: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.""
      - arethuza 15y ago
        Care to list some societies that have failed for those reasons and in that way? [Edit: Heinlein died in '88 so he can't have been talking about the Soviet Union and its empire, which anyway I don't think falls into that category].
        aselene 15y ago
        Spain forced all jews to convert or to be exiled in 15th century, although they were the most succesfull bankers and merchants (perhaps because of that). When all the gold from America arrive to Spain in the next century there were no one to use it wisely, so the Spanish Empire turn into an economic disaster.
  - potatolicious 15y 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.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      The real question, I think, is when did news.ycombinator turn into reddit/r/politics?
      - forensic 15y ago
        When software entrepreneurs put 10% of the population out of work and then used social darwinism to justify the lack of a social safety net.
    - scrod 15y ago
      What is possibly the only coherent comment in this entire discussion is already being down-voted. Sorry Hacker News, but your "cultivated community" demonstrably fails to perpetuate very little more than a disinterested, self-serving, center-right frame of reference with a strong undercurrent of elitism.
      - 15y ago
  - hugh3 15y 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.
    - forensic 15y ago
      >I don't know why people seem to think they should be immune from it. So when social leaders sell us in childhood on the idea that the future will be a disease free high-tech utopia, they really mean it will be that for an elite 20% and the rest of us can go die. Social Darwinism is delightful.
    - danssig 15y ago
      Wow, the "survival of the fittest" argument, and on hacker news of all places. The entire point of civilization is to escape "survival of the fittest". Do you know what we call people who still live by those rules? Uncivilized.
  - tomjen3 15y 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.
    - forensic 15y ago
      The chairs in this analogy represent access to food, healthcare, education, shelter, clothing. The necessities of life. The game technically has more chairs than people. The problem is that an elite 1% are occupying 50% of the chairs.
ntkachov 15y ago
While reading this, This particular simpsons clip came to mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE especially when i was reading about the PH.D from Purdue working as a janitor.
geekam 15y ago
I actually can feel this. I am looking for one myself in NYC/Nj area.
- alnayyir 15y ago
  Are you a programmer? If not, what do you do?
  - mattdeboard 15y ago
    I can't imagine a world where a programmer in NYC can't find a job.
    - alnayyir 15y ago
      That's why I'm asking, finding a job in NYC and the Bay Area have both been the most pleasant and amusing job searches of my life so far.
      - itiztv 15y ago
        why so?
    - blackguardx 15y ago
      It depends on your specialty.
      - geekam 15y ago
        True. I am ready to work as a junior developer too. I have computer science background and have willingness to learn as well but that just does not cut it, in this market. I am however working on my own apps and learning and trying to build a portfolio that way.
        alnayyir 15y ago
        What open source work have you done?
hugh3 15y 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.
- kstenerud 15y 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 15y 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.
    - kstenerud 15y ago
      It's not really a question of blame. It's terrible for all of these people to be trapped in a lie, but the fact remains that the only way out of it is to realize the truth of the matter and change course. Life never feels sorry for you, no matter how much you've been wronged.
waterside81 15y 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 15y 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.
  - kubrickslair 15y 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.
- kubrickslair 15y 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.
danielpal 15y 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.
- hugh3 15y ago
  A PhD in education. What is one supposed to do with a PhD in education anyway? Surely not become a teacher?
  - arethuza 15y ago
    Become an academic in that field - that is pretty much what a PhD is - credentialing for academic research.
    - hugh3 15y ago
      So a PhD in education educates me about to educate others about education?
      - turbodog 15y ago
        Don't be obtuse. A PhD means you've done research towards improving the ability to educate others.
      - count 15y ago
        A PhD in Education certifies you to do research in education to potentially teach others about in the future. The intent is to generate new ideas and try new things, and the PhD is a qualification that you can approach that in (hopefully) a scientific manner, and that your results will be useful and relevant to your field. tl;dr: No, to research about education.
      - kragen 15y ago
        No. It educates you to do ground-breaking research in education and advance the state of the educational art.
ChristianMarks 15y 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.
- chrismealy 15y 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-economics-profession/ http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/blogging-and-the-e...
  - chrismealy 15y 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.
MrKurtHaeusler 15y 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 15y ago
  I knew I could count on HN comments to give me a whiny out-of-touch yuppie.
- prostoalex 15y ago
  Yep, nothing wrong with being jobless. It's being money-less that's annoying.
- jinushaun 15y 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.
  - MrKurtHaeusler 15y 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.)
gexla 15y 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 15y 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 $200 per month? Do you have access to decent food, in relative safety, and have a good reliable internet connection?
  - gexla 15y ago
    I'm living in the Philippines. I feel very safe here. It's Asia, so the market for food here isn't as wide as the market for food in the U.S. For example, there are Germans here who have setup their own shops for food which I have never seen and has little demand from the locals. You will never see that sort of food in the grocery stores. The Philippines isn't known for it's food like Thailand is. Certainly food is a big part of happiness in life, but I'm happy here for the most part. There are some things I miss but there are American resto's which do a pretty good job of bridging the gap. In the largest cities here, you can find pretty much anything. My internet connection is reliable enough. I do have plans in place for problems which occasionally pop up, but my area is stable enough that it hosts a lot of BPO's (call centers.) Housing is relatively cheap here. The standards are also lower, but if you have lived in Asia for a while then you get used to the differences. I could get a nicer house for a lot more money but I'm content where I'm at and the price is right.
eazolan 15y ago
I sympathize with the people in the article. I graduated right when the dot-bomb hit. Making 8$ an hour cleaning out inkjet printers made me feel like I had wasted years of my life getting a degree. I still feel that way now, but at least I make enough to live on. If I got the chance to do it again, I would have dropped out of High School and just learned to code. Then, write Facebook before Zukerberg.
holdenc 15y 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.
- scrod 15y 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/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - yummyfajitas 15y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
pnathan 15y 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.
- count 15y 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?
- kragen 15y 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.
FiddlerClamp 15y 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....
- count 15y 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!
  - FiddlerClamp 15y 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 15y 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.
- hugh3 15y 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.
- kragen 15y 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.)
  - blackguardx 15y 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.
temphn 15y 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 15y 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.
  - temphn 15y ago
    Yes. But what do they do afterwards for food/rent?
    - ido 15y ago
      If you live in the developed world you won't actually starve - that's what welfare is for.
      - blackguardx 15y ago
        It is actually pretty hard to get welfare and unemployment benefits in the US. I got laid off from a job in California a few years ago and it took weeks for the unemployment office to finally agree that I qualified for benefits. They make it extremely hard to collect benefits so that they can save money. There were times when I spent days calling only to have an automated voice tell me to try calling again later. I wasn't even allowed to be put on hold in a phone queue. It was very frustrating.
        rick888 15y ago
        I've never had this problem. They've made it so easy that you only ever have to talk to someone once. The rest of the time it's all online and is automatically deposited into your bank account. It may have been a problem because your ex-employer disputed it.
Tichy 15y 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.
deleted 15y ago
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mannicken 15y 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 15y ago
These quotes sound quite a bit like my dating life. Especially since I spend so much time working...

108 points by mvs 15y ago

rboyd 15y 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.

forensic 15y 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 15y 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.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    This Robert Heinlein quote is perhaps overplayed, but I'm gonna paste it in here anyway in case someone hasn't heard it or just needs a reminder: "Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck.""
    - arethuza 15y ago
      Care to list some societies that have failed for those reasons and in that way? [Edit: Heinlein died in '88 so he can't have been talking about the Soviet Union and its empire, which anyway I don't think falls into that category].
      - aselene 15y ago
        Spain forced all jews to convert or to be exiled in 15th century, although they were the most succesfull bankers and merchants (perhaps because of that). When all the gold from America arrive to Spain in the next century there were no one to use it wisely, so the Spanish Empire turn into an economic disaster.
- potatolicious 15y 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.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    The real question, I think, is when did news.ycombinator turn into reddit/r/politics?
    - forensic 15y ago
      When software entrepreneurs put 10% of the population out of work and then used social darwinism to justify the lack of a social safety net.
  - scrod 15y ago
    What is possibly the only coherent comment in this entire discussion is already being down-voted. Sorry Hacker News, but your "cultivated community" demonstrably fails to perpetuate very little more than a disinterested, self-serving, center-right frame of reference with a strong undercurrent of elitism.
    - 15y ago
- hugh3 15y 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.
  - forensic 15y ago
    >I don't know why people seem to think they should be immune from it. So when social leaders sell us in childhood on the idea that the future will be a disease free high-tech utopia, they really mean it will be that for an elite 20% and the rest of us can go die. Social Darwinism is delightful.
  - danssig 15y ago
    Wow, the "survival of the fittest" argument, and on hacker news of all places. The entire point of civilization is to escape "survival of the fittest". Do you know what we call people who still live by those rules? Uncivilized.
- tomjen3 15y 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.
  - forensic 15y ago
    The chairs in this analogy represent access to food, healthcare, education, shelter, clothing. The necessities of life. The game technically has more chairs than people. The problem is that an elite 1% are occupying 50% of the chairs.

ntkachov 15y ago

While reading this, This particular simpsons clip came to mind. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMrENoTe3cE especially when i was reading about the PH.D from Purdue working as a janitor.

geekam 15y ago

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

alnayyir 15y ago
Are you a programmer? If not, what do you do?
- mattdeboard 15y ago
  I can't imagine a world where a programmer in NYC can't find a job.
  - alnayyir 15y ago
    That's why I'm asking, finding a job in NYC and the Bay Area have both been the most pleasant and amusing job searches of my life so far.
    - itiztv 15y ago
      why so?
  - blackguardx 15y ago
    It depends on your specialty.
    - geekam 15y ago
      True. I am ready to work as a junior developer too. I have computer science background and have willingness to learn as well but that just does not cut it, in this market. I am however working on my own apps and learning and trying to build a portfolio that way.
      - alnayyir 15y ago
        What open source work have you done?

hugh3 15y 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.

kstenerud 15y 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 15y 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.
  - kstenerud 15y ago
    It's not really a question of blame. It's terrible for all of these people to be trapped in a lie, but the fact remains that the only way out of it is to realize the truth of the matter and change course. Life never feels sorry for you, no matter how much you've been wronged.

waterside81 15y 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 15y 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.
- kubrickslair 15y 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.
kubrickslair 15y 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.

danielpal 15y 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.

hugh3 15y ago
A PhD in education. What is one supposed to do with a PhD in education anyway? Surely not become a teacher?
- arethuza 15y ago
  Become an academic in that field - that is pretty much what a PhD is - credentialing for academic research.
  - hugh3 15y ago
    So a PhD in education educates me about to educate others about education?
    - turbodog 15y ago
      Don't be obtuse. A PhD means you've done research towards improving the ability to educate others.
    - count 15y ago
      A PhD in Education certifies you to do research in education to potentially teach others about in the future. The intent is to generate new ideas and try new things, and the PhD is a qualification that you can approach that in (hopefully) a scientific manner, and that your results will be useful and relevant to your field. tl;dr: No, to research about education.
    - kragen 15y ago
      No. It educates you to do ground-breaking research in education and advance the state of the educational art.

ChristianMarks 15y 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.

chrismealy 15y 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-economics-profession/ http://rortybomb.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/blogging-and-the-e...
- chrismealy 15y 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.

MrKurtHaeusler 15y 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 15y ago
I knew I could count on HN comments to give me a whiny out-of-touch yuppie.
prostoalex 15y ago
Yep, nothing wrong with being jobless. It's being money-less that's annoying.
jinushaun 15y 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.
- MrKurtHaeusler 15y 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.)

gexla 15y 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 15y 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?
- gexla 15y 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.

eazolan 15y ago

I sympathize with the people in the article. I graduated right when the dot-bomb hit. Making 8$ an hour cleaning out inkjet printers made me feel like I had wasted years of my life getting a degree. I still feel that way now, but at least I make enough to live on. If I got the chance to do it again, I would have dropped out of High School and just learned to code. Then, write Facebook before Zukerberg.

holdenc 15y 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.

scrod 15y 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/ http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 15y 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]

pnathan 15y 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.

count 15y 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?
kragen 15y 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.

FiddlerClamp 15y 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....

count 15y 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!
- FiddlerClamp 15y 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 15y 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.

hugh3 15y 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.
kragen 15y 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.)
- blackguardx 15y 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.

temphn 15y 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 15y 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.
- temphn 15y ago
  Yes. But what do they do afterwards for food/rent?
  - ido 15y ago
    If you live in the developed world you won't actually starve - that's what welfare is for.
    - blackguardx 15y ago
      It is actually pretty hard to get welfare and unemployment benefits in the US. I got laid off from a job in California a few years ago and it took weeks for the unemployment office to finally agree that I qualified for benefits. They make it extremely hard to collect benefits so that they can save money. There were times when I spent days calling only to have an automated voice tell me to try calling again later. I wasn't even allowed to be put on hold in a phone queue. It was very frustrating.
      - rick888 15y ago
        I've never had this problem. They've made it so easy that you only ever have to talk to someone once. The rest of the time it's all online and is automatically deposited into your bank account. It may have been a problem because your ex-employer disputed it.

Tichy 15y 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.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

mannicken 15y 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 15y ago

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