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Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

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Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#61

Post by sudont »

georgieporgie wrote: post #47
burgerbrain wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are able bodied and hard working, you can almost always find jobs in construction or demo (one or the other is almost certain to be doing well in any particular economic situation). These are not good jobs, but they are jobs . At the very least it is generally quite easy to get under the table work with these sorts of gigs. If you are able bodied, hard working, and reasonably bright, then contact local apprent…

Regarding apprenticeship-type programs, my father works for the Corps of Engineers, and my uncle is a life-long electrician. Both are work with training programs these days. Each of them has said that it's extremely hard to find someone who is both reasonably intelligent (or able to put down his/her smartphone long enough to appear so) and able to stick with a program through completion.

One of the reasons I could never do manual labor for the rest of my life (after working on farms and road crews) was the sheer intellectual loneliness of it. No matter how strong I was, or how fast I worked (I'm still pretty good with a pick-axe), I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.

The fact is, computers and large-scale engineering projects are really fucking interesting and siphoning off talent from other areas. The dreaded brain drain. Meanwhile, our grid is crumbling and we're playing it conservatively--minor fixes, if anything. If there was some serious thought and excitement put back into it, to not just modernize, but futurize our utilities--we'd see a lot more people start to join.

NIMBY is a problem: no micro-wind farms, no upgraded rail projects, no weird bio-tech projects, nothing new or innovative. If anyone's intellectually curious, why the hell would they want to join something as boring as a public works project?

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#62

Post by reduxredacted »

seagaia wrote: post #5
ig1 wrote: post #2

A quick look at his linkedin profile shows a 17 year gap in his work history and a very vague sense of what skills he has, I imagine that's what giving him problems.

That's possible. I wonder what the reason is, or if this Youtube thing isn't telling the whole story.

There is a bit of an obsession with telling the whole story in this thread and it's exactly what I'd expect out of HN readers (we're always skeptical, or maybe that's just me). The reality is that it's impossible to tell the whole story in 7 minutes 25 seconds.

I'm guessing the question really is: is what we're listening to and reading an honest portrayal of events. That's anybody's guess.

It's not the whole story, for sure. It's a story with details and facts chosen based on the biases of the folks covering it (I believe the business of news, particularly news magazines, is closer aligned with the entertainment industry ... having a story go viral increases pageviews, advertising dollars and subscriptions [I'm not implying malice, here, just trying to analyze perspectives]).

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#63

Post by fractalcat »

To everyone who's saying his university entry at sixteen is implausible: actually, it's fairly common. I started uni at sixteen (B of Technology, RMIT). So did my best friend (BCS, UTS). My partner started at fourteen (BCS, U of Canterbury). Anecdotal yes, but it's not exactly unheard of.

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#64

Post by darklajid »

yuvadam wrote: post #17
yuvadam wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Geez. I know America is nowhere close to being a socialist country, but one cannot be so oblivious to the fact that something here is rotten from the foundation. Have we lost all solidarity? Hell, even basic decency? Yes, maybe this specific person is not a good example. Maybe he has suffered mental health issues or substance abuse (though I find the accusation appalling). Maybe he does suffer a severe lack of skills…

I feel a strong urge to say one more thing. I live in Israel, and right now the majority of the Israeli people are uprising [1] (democratically and peacefully) against the absurd cost of living that we have been suffering for the past 20 years. Thankfully, our macro economy numbers are good, and people have jobs - but raising a child or buying a house is nothing short of impossible nowadays. Over the past month the e…

I'm mostly standing on the side walk here, a new resident and not a citizen. But yeah, these topics basically dominate all smalltalk recently.

Co-workers tell me what they pay for kinder garden and it's unbelievable. I can judge the general prices for housing and basic needs myself and again it's weird. I moved here from one of the most expensive cities in Germany (I think it ranked on place 2-3, depending on the report), this is 1.5 times more expensive in general, ignoring obviously crappy (from my point of view) fees for kinder garden, university etc..

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#66

Post by glimcat »

fractalcat wrote: post #63

To everyone who's saying his university entry at sixteen is implausible: actually, it's fairly common. I started uni at sixteen (B of Technology, RMIT). So did my best friend (BCS, UTS). My partner started at fourteen (BCS, U of Canterbury). Anecdotal yes, but it's not exactly unheard of.

It is fairly common, but it was much less common.

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#67

Post by picklestime »

reduxredacted wrote: post #51
dwc wrote: post #24

Three degrees. That could mean he's industrious, curious and driven. Or it could mean he had money enough to delay entry into doing something meaningful in life, and too little drive to do anything but. I know both kinds. Would anyone hazard a guess about which group has a better employment outlook? I don't mean to belittle the very real problems in both the job market and our education system. I do mean to quibble w…

Having managed (paid) interns and full time employees picked right out of graduation (I'm in a somewhat experimental role and that means the only staff I'm going to get is junior level), I can't possibly restate the importance of not delaying entry into doing something meaningful in life , if I take your meaningful to mean advancing your experience in your desired field. The best employee I've ever had wasn't a Compu…

Very intelligent, had all sorts of ideas, could talk about anything related to his field (networking) and would challenge you to think about things differently. Unfortunately, he could talk all around theory, but he couldn't execute. It was a strange sort of inability to choose between several equally good approaches to solving a problem. Every project he worked on got about 3/4 to completion and then fell flat into failure.

Almost textbook description of ADHD. ref: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2877100

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#69

Post by seagaia »

lisper wrote: post #60
Anechoic wrote: post #25

He has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Acoustics from Purdue University (a very good acoustics school) and he can't find a job in the Boston area (home of a dozen or so acoustical consulting companies, another dozen or so loudspeaker manufacturing companies including Bose, Boston Acoustics & Loud Technologies), several active audio & acoustical engineering associations (including Bosotn chapters of the ASA, A…

I made a feature-length documentary about four homeless people including one with a master's degree in psychology. http://graceofgodmovie.com/ In his case there definitely turned out to be more to the story.

What was the "more" to the story? I'm interested.

Re: Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

#70

Post by michaelchisari »

justin_vanw wrote: post #57
michaelchisari wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe he has suffered mental health issues or substance abuse Given the severe lack of social services in the US for mental health or addiction, I wouldn't fault him for either of those.

I think my post was taken the wrong way. I took the article to say "look at this person, he can't find a job for 14 years, despite all these amazing qualifications". I have a suspicion that there is more to the story, because I find it implausible that a hardworking competent person would could go that long without finding any work. Add to that the description of him as 'homeless and living at a shelter'. So he can't…

So he can't even find work that he is overqualified for?

I hear this a lot, but it's not that simple. McDonalds hiring day got an order of magnitude more job applicants than it's available positions. Whenever unskilled or semi-skilled positions are open, they get flooded with applications, and someone with three degrees is simply not going to be hired, for plenty of reasons.

From the article, though, he's only been out of work since November. Any number of economic factors could have led to his becoming homeless since then.

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