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9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

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Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#91

Post by vivekd »

tomschlick wrote: post #69
vivekd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is education is tailored towards particular jobs. For example if you have a degree in biology, sure you can get a job in a factory paying almost minimum wage. . . but it wouldn't pay enough for you to cover your student loans and still be able to move out. There seems to be a serious lack of jobs that let people actually have a life. . . and I'm not talking about picket fence in the suburbs dream home kin…

Then they should stop getting degrees in industries that don't exist / have very few job openings. Get a degree in business, accounting, finance, engineering, or tech and your chances of finding a good paying job increase ten fold.

But the guy in the article was in tech.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#92

Post by sctb »

sickbeard wrote: post #18

Bet he voted to "make America Great again". I feel for him but i believe the signs were there about the field he was working in, it's like a car sputtering and running out of gas. The solution would be reeducation, rather than trying to do the same dying job over and over gain.

We've asked you several times not to post like this here, so we've banned the account.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#93

Post by quickben »

matwood wrote: post #90
quickben wrote: post #54

There is nothing embarrassing about manual work. When I was 17, at one point, I sold toilet paper, on the street, in a third world country, to get some cash for my PC. Various jobs netted me half the cash for my PC over 6 months. My parents could scrape for the rest. 486dx-120mhz. Right now I'm in a comfortable seniority, renting a townhouse ( Toronto is too expensive to buy) and having a family. The c++ projects kee…

>I don't have to work with anything other than my fingers. Life is good. >Would I, if anything happens, go back to selling toilet paper or digging cannals to survive and strive? Without a doubt. One thing manual work taught me is how to really work. It also taught me that I don't want to do manual work for my entire life, so it ended up being great motivation.

You. I like you.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#94

Post by jimlawruk »

I am sympathetic to the author. I know a few people who are very strong in the Humanities, are well-read, and have a mastery of the English language, but can't find a Humanities related job due to market saturation. My wife falls into this category. She would be hopeless at learning a "marketable" skill like HTML and JavaScript. Asking these people to serve as a cashier is a waste of literary talent. I don't have any great ideas on what to tell them. There needs to be a better solution than go work as a cashier or go learn JavaScript.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#95

Post by CM30 »

M4v3R wrote: post #30
DashRattlesnake wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I feel sympathy for the author, but at the same time one thing that I miss from the article is whether he tried to raise his qualifications in any way. Did he try other market segments? Picked up any courses? Broadened his education in any way in the time he was unemployed? Raising qualifications usually costs money. He's tried when he had work. When he didn't it sounds like money was so tight and stress to high th…

> Every day involves endlessly scrolling through a list of jobs on Indeed.com and applying here and there with full knowledge that 99 percent of the time, I’ll never hear back. That means he is literally wasting time, which he could use in other, more productive ways. Sorry, but if I would be 99 percent sure that something I do will bring me 0 benefits, I would stop and do something else. If you don't have money to r…

Perhaps he's wasting time in some sense, but then in another, that's how quite a lot of people end up getting a job. They apply for hundreds of them, and that get lucky with one or two offers afterwards. Yeah, it's unlikely they'll get any particular one (because hey, competition is high), but jobs, interviews, auditions, etc usually kind of work on the expectation that 99% of attempts will be fruitless.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#96

Post by Beltiras »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #63
MatekCopatek wrote: post #35

To anyone recommending different approaches that could help this guy get a job - look at it from the other side. There are 9 million unemployed men such as this one (according to the article). This doesn't mean that there are 9 million job openings out there, just waiting for someone with the right resume to show up. Sure, there are probably some, but mostly, this simply means there are 9 million more workers than jo…

This guy openly admits he could find work, but doesn't due to his pride. There are lots of jobs out there that Americans (like this guy) "just won't do". He's in the bay area, I know that Handy and Uber are hiring. It won't be hard for him to find domestic labor for $12/hour. After das trumpenfuhrer builds his wall and deports the illegals, there will be about 10M job openings. Lets be realistic and acknowledge that…

Das trumpenfuhrer and realistic are not congruent.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#97

Post by matwood »

kevinml wrote: post #57
tjic wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point early in my software career I was between jobs for a few months. I have construction skills, so I worked doing demolition and then framing an addition for a friend at $10/hr. To quote Pulp Fiction "The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps." Over a couple of weeks I made a few thousand dollars, paid the mortgage, and g…

I'm about 4 years into my career as a software dev, but you know what I did before that? Worked a shitty manual labor job at a warehouse with shitty 13-hour days and not a lot of pay. I rarely got to see my friends who were more successful starting their own careers. But what I did have is money to pay my rent and free time to continue learning and honing my skills. Yeah it really sucked working in that warehouse and…

>I used that as motivation.

This. I worked overnight stocking shelves in a grocery store for awhile. It sucked, but I did a good job while I looked for different work. Then I waited tables for awhile after that. All the jobs I have had have taught me various things, but the main one was motivation to not have to do those jobs.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#98

Post by barry-cotter »

tjic wrote: post #23
arcanus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a highly overconstrained search Yes and no. It can speak to structural inefficiencies in the economy. For instance, I am a Computational Scientist with a decade of experience in scientific research, publications, etc. It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field, for instance. Underemployment is a very real thing, and it hurts the entire economy. We as a society have a vest…

> It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field This is an example of what I'm talking about. What's more of a waste of your training? To be work in a career field only 60% overlapping with your training, or to be unemployed (with 0% overlap) ?

Depends. If you never get a job in your field again because of downshifting into unskilled labour it's more of a waste than losing a year to unemployment and job search.

If you want to read more on this look up "search costs"

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1976....

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#99

Post by CM30 »

Brakenshire wrote: post #46
arcanus wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is a highly overconstrained search Yes and no. It can speak to structural inefficiencies in the economy. For instance, I am a Computational Scientist with a decade of experience in scientific research, publications, etc. It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field, for instance. Underemployment is a very real thing, and it hurts the entire economy. We as a society have a vest…

That is true, but it can also mean that the education system is not teaching to the real economy. There's definitely a significant place for an education which has no reference to the economy, but that is a failure if what you're supposed to be getting is a technical education, or if your aim is to increase productivity. Just because people have spent a lot of time learning something, it doesn't mean that skill or kn…

On the other hand, a lot of poorly paid careers are actually somewhat important, they're just (unfortunately) treated terribly as far as pay and conditions go. For example, journalism, teaching and caring for the elderly are all career paths/areas which are low paid and (perhaps) over supplied, but I don't think I'd want people to start leaving these jobs en masse to say, work in marketing or finance.

And on the academic side, I'm not a fan of the idea that everything should be focused on the career side. A world without the humanities might get university graduates earning more money, but it'd feel poorer in some sense at the same time.

Re: 9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them

#100

Post by sharemywin »

cabinguy wrote: post #65
sharemywin wrote: post #3

I think this focus in corporate america and startups on "winner take all" and only hire elite is hurting the economy. Because we've allowed monopolies for so long and they've multiplied, it's great for companies and investors, horrible for the economy at large.

I agree. Capitalism is by far the best system, but its glory days (in the U.S.) have passed us by. I drove through the downtown area of my hometown this past weekend and tried to convince my wife that it was once a vibrant business district. When I was a kid in the 80's, every storefront was filled with local businesses bearing family names. Today there is only a collection of small-town dive bars, a tattoo shop and…

Scary part is single point of failure. the more centralized a system is the bigger the catastrophic failure is.
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