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Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

nytimes.com

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Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#61

Post by sdenton4 »

themodder666 wrote: post #37

One of these days, I want to take a year off to see how hard it is to find an actual job de novo, with no experience. I see so many trade schools and apprenticeship programs that its hard for me not to think that people just arent looking hard enough or in the right places.

trade school != job...

A common trap in the current era is to go back for more education when the job market isn't working out, missing a year or more of wages and taking on further debt... And then finding things aren't much better on the other side of the degree.

This happened to one of my parents: got one awful job at a tiny company for about a year after getting the master's, then was fired for trying to be ethical (refusing to lie about the results of security audit for the benefit of a large customer), and now can't find anything else... woohoo.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#62

Post by nradov »

8bitsrule wrote: post #35

"the stunningly low official unemployment rate of 3.5 percent, the lowest in a half-century. Working even one hour during the week when the Labor Department does its employment survey keeps you out of the jobless category." Aha. Re-define what 'job' means, problem solved.

The definition has always been the same since the Labor Department started publishing official unemployment statistics. Nothing has been redefined.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#63

Post by dang »

psv1 wrote: post #3

[flagged]

If there's a workaround, it's ok. Users usually post workarounds in the thread.

This is in the FAQ at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html and there's more explanation here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#65

Post by not2personal »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #28
lotsofpulp wrote: post #9

>say they cannot find jobs that provide a middle-class income and don’t come with an expiration date. Unemployment numbers don't measure quality. We have tons of available jobs, but low quality. And/or the people looking for jobs don't have the skills required for high quality jobs. Edit: Here's an income quintile graph from 2016 that shows quality of jobs (scroll down): https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55413

Right! Engineers driving busses; office managers flipping burgers. And the administration dares to call it 'full employment'. Its part of the very wealthy keeping all the money - if nobody has a skilled job, we don't get (much) income, and wealth inequality zooms onward. A better measure of employment would be, how much total payroll is across the country. Per capita if you like. That would tell us how we're doing. N…

A few years of college does not an engineer or office manager make. The good ones are employed in those roles, the rest haven't proven to be useful enough to be afforded them.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#66

Post by csomar »

melvinroest wrote: post #24

I'm honestly experiencing this as a CS grad in the Dutch job market. I find it weird and frustrating. I've noticed why: 1. Companies don't dare to value creativity [1]. University is so liberal and the job market is so the opposite. 2. Most companies can't value a CS degree. The exception is when enough people in the company did a CS degree and that's a lot more rare than I thought. 3. University didn't teach me to f…

I think 1. companies are burned out with CS grads who simply can't code 2. companies are burned out from new employees just learning the job and then jump somewhere else and 3. companies are looking to on-board you as fast as possible.

A few problems you should be working on:

> nobody cares that I fast-tracked

> in terms of crystalized intelligence

> But my portfolio is rather terrible

> compared to what I'm capable of [*hint: Unless you did something that you can't show publicly, what you are capable of is nothing if what you did in terms of production is nothing]

I think you are over-confident when it comes to your skills.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#67

Post by sys_64738 »

Just remember that it gets harder to get a job as you get older. You probably don’t want to be the oldest in your place of employment. Sure you might be the lucky one.

Your best bet if you’re younger than 40 is to get rid of all your debt and have a viable exit strategy from the workforce.

If you’re younger and reading this just remember your replacement will be along shortly.

Age discrimination is real and unstoppable and coming for your job.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#68

Post by 77pt77 »

commandlinefan wrote: post #43
melvinroest wrote: post #24

I'm honestly experiencing this as a CS grad in the Dutch job market. I find it weird and frustrating. I've noticed why: 1. Companies don't dare to value creativity [1]. University is so liberal and the job market is so the opposite. 2. Most companies can't value a CS degree. The exception is when enough people in the company did a CS degree and that's a lot more rare than I thought. 3. University didn't teach me to f…

> nobody cares that I fast-tracked In fact, if fast-tracking cost you even 1/10 of a GPA point, it is actively hurting you - if they’re comparing somebody with a 3.9 GPA to somebody with a 4.0 GPA, whether the second candidate got that extra 0.1 because he was only taking one class per semester doesn’t come into consideration.

High GPAs count against you.

That has been my experience.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#69

Post by lowercased »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #49
lowercased wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always understood there to be a difference between "laid off" and "fired". "Fired" tends to be because of you, "laid off" is more on the company's side. I was "fired" once (well, twice, in the 90s) because I wasn't pulling my weight. I was 'laid off' once (in the 2000s) because the company was running out of money, and had to lay off around half the company. That wasn't really anything to do with my performance…

The reason it has a stigma, though, is that when layoffs happen, companies tend not to layoff their star performers, or they do at least some amount of stack ranking. Of course that is not always the case (sometimes entire departments are closed if a company exits a line of business, or the entire company itself folds), but if the company had a ~5-30% across-the-board layoff, it's generally assumed some level of pers…

In my case, there were around 25 people, and 12 were let go. This was financial, and they primarily lost the higher paid people (me) and kept the jrs. Also, LIFO was a factor, and I was one of the last in.

You're not wrong. Certainly people think "well, there must have been a reason you were let go..." and yeah, sometimes it may mean you were stackranked out. With smaller companies that's probably harder to do, or... there are bigger factors at play (more immediate cashflow in our situation).

And yes, always be looking.

Re: Lots of Job Hunting, but No Job, Despite Low Unemployment

#70

Post by melvinroest »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #56
melvinroest wrote: post #24

I'm honestly experiencing this as a CS grad in the Dutch job market. I find it weird and frustrating. I've noticed why: 1. Companies don't dare to value creativity [1]. University is so liberal and the job market is so the opposite. 2. Most companies can't value a CS degree. The exception is when enough people in the company did a CS degree and that's a lot more rare than I thought. 3. University didn't teach me to f…

For the CRUD type jobs I've worked on, database design and understanding of SQL and ORM frameworks probably helped get me in. Are you strong or lacking there? Try programming a blog from scratch.

I've taught how to program a blog from scratch. I the code on my machine and could post it on Github. I never knew people cared. Thanks for pointing it out so clearly.

Some nuance: I'm a CS grad, so this perspective is relative to that.

Weak: SQL optimization, I have no clue.

Mediocre: SQL itself, I understand everything at sqlteaching.com and I never had an issue at work doing SQL.

Strong-ish: ORMs, read the API documentation and then it's just programming. I've experienced SQLAlchemy (Python) on a side project, Hibernate (Java) at work and Sequelize (NodeJS) when I taught at a bootcamp.

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