A historical note: Forty years ago, I shared a house with a guy who had recently completed an MA, and hadn't found any work related to it. I always knew when

A historical note: Forty years ago, I shared a house with a guy who had recently completed an MA, and hadn't found any work related to it. I always knew when his family had been in town, because the Help Wanted ad section from the Sunday New York Times would be on the table. Memory may exaggerate, but I remember this section as fatter than today's Times is Monday through Saturday. The Washington Post had a similar Help Wanted section. In fact, I think that every job I have held since 1983 I applied for in response to a classified ad. Obviously it would be better to be recruited, to have somebody call up and say, Hey, Dave says you're a great hand at X, are you by any chance looking to move? But responding to a classified ad is how an awful lot of us found employment back then. I should say that there one would occasionally see ads for work requiring remarkable qualifications, but paying a bit better than McDonalds. It was only much later that I understood that these were placed to establish that one couldn't hire US citizens for the work and so should be allowed to hire someone on an H1-B.