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

Well, HN never fails to to disappoint with the libertarian "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" and "just learn how to code" rhetoric.

A slew of survivorship bias comments that seem to focus on the 1 sentence of the article, where the author is saying they do not consider a manual labor job to be practical, and neatly ignoring everything else.

Here are some things most commenters have willingly ignored from the comfort of their privileged ignorance of economics:

1. Depending on your health, working a manual labor job at 47 may be a net negative value. Your body does not heal or recover that well from prolonged repetitive tasks, so working long days for a $12/hr wage may actually be a worse deal from not working at all. If this country had federal health care, then it might have made sense, but since we have the for-profit approach, it doesn't.

This can be true even if he's in perfect health right now.

2. Ageism is more real than you think. Especially ageism when it comes to the resume and job history. Since he's not an engineer, the thought process of a potential employer goes like this: this guy is 47 and he hasn't held a management job once in his life, nor progressed beyond basic tech support and customer service. He also has a family, so he likely won't be willing to work extra hours for free and be as willing to be exploited as someone who is 23.

3. Applying for shitty jobs is more costly than applying for higher paying jobs. The application process for a job is taking a certain amount of time regardless of the job itself, but the since the payoff for a better job is much higher, it makes sense to apply only for jobs that pay above a certain threshold. This is especially true when you consider he is providing some benefit at home as a stay at home dad (presumably). If he's providing $10,000 in value by staying at home, It will be 6x as costly to apply for a $15,000 job than for a $40,000 job.

4. The social stigma and not being able to network: Networking works great when you're a professional that is able to get job offers without networking. It helps you get better jobs or more interesting jobs, but it doesn't suddenly elevate you from a non-professional status (tech support + customer service) to the status of a professional with the corresponding salary and benefits. The only case where this work is very entrenched nepotism, where someone unqualified could get a job for which they are not suited with compensation higher than their "real" market rate.

Networking is mostly useless if you don't have the skills to back it up, like this guy.

5. The twitter sentence. I'm honestly shocked at some of the vitriol from the HN community here. Do none of you ever procrastinate? If I'm not mistaken, it's working hours right now, but most of you are finding the time to comment here, on HN. If you had ever spent job hunting for a significant amount of time, you'd know it's at least as mentally draining as any job, so getting distracted or having some down time isn't unwarranted.

I could go on and on, but the gist of it is: show some goddamn compassion and maybe step outside of your bubble for once.

The fact that this person is one of 9 MILLION should maybe at least tell you that it's a systematic problem, and not just a problem of "not being willing to work any job for fear of embarrassment" For every one unwilling to do manual labor like this guy, there's another one who is (aka the other 4.5 million).

I agree. I used to browse the front page of Reddit endlessly, especially on days off despite only caring about a few subreddits. Now that I consume them through my Feedly, I'm on Reddit much less. I have trouble trying to consume the Internet when I'm bored, which is good because that makes more time for reading books that help my career.

> Asking these people to serve as a cashier is a waste of literary talent.

How is it a waste of literary talent? To be crass, if they're currently producing something society doesn't value/want to pay for, how is being a cashier a waste?

> Ageism is more real than you think.

Citation needed. Most of my coworkers are easily over 40. The best programmers I've met at most of my jobs are late forties/fifties. What studies are you using, rather than your hypothetical "though process" of the hypothetical employer?

> If he's providing $10,000 in value by staying at home, It will be 6x as costly to apply for a $15,000 job than for a $40,000 job.

It will be 6x more costly to accept the 15k job than to accept the 40k job. The application costs are still the same. Also, by applying for the 15k job in your example, you are able to a) spend 10k to offset the value you bring at home or keep the 10k and let some chores remain undone and b) Keep 5k regardless.

> but most of you are finding the time to comment here, on HN.

We are not the ones who have to stretch 30 dollars a week to cover expenses for a family of four. If you have a steady job that doesn't frown too heavily on some procrastination, go ahead.

> If you had ever spent job hunting for a significant amount of time, you'd know it's at least as mentally draining as any job, so getting distracted or having some down time isn't unwarranted.

We're talking about degrees here. I'm procrastinating right now, but if I procrastinate too long I will end up unemployed, just like this guy. There's a difference between getting distracted and down time, and taking weeks off between interviews.

> show some goddamn compassion and maybe step outside of your bubble for once

From all accounts, this man who wrote the article is the one in the bubble. It's all about how he feels, how his friends will hurt his feelings if they figure out he's unemployed. He's the one that needs to step outside himself.

I think this is especially true in the Bay Area as lots of companies are looking for unicorns in a herd of cattle. There's nothing wrong with cattle, but places will spend 6 figures trying to recruit that 10x unicorn instead of training people.

Speaking as someone who's hired in the past, most of the CodeAcademy/bootcamp grads we turned away were turned away because they didn't have anything to show us except things they did in the program. Doing CA/completing a bootcamp tells us they know stuff, but the portfolio was an important piece because it told us they could apply what they learned. Just wanted to pass that on to anyone who is doing/considering one of these things. (Bonus points for creating unique apps that interviewers can talk to you about -- I can't even tell you how many Twitter clones I've seen.)