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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

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Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#21

Post by tbrownaw »

michaelochurch wrote: post #13
tempaccount9473 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby go…

I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Nor mine, not in the short term. Corporations != Corporate System. A corporation is a private-sector enterprise that performs some set of business processes to make a return on capital. Not all of those ar…

The Corporate System is the current economic totalitarianism in which it's pretty much impossible to stay afloat without corporate blessing.

This has never been the case. Large corporations do not employ the majority of people.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#22

Post by larrys »

theorique wrote: post #8
jiggy2011 wrote: post #7

Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? "Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.

Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a prospective employer? This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time look incredibly productive.

Probably a variation of "better to be thought a fool than to open up your mouth and remove all doubt". In this case you say something which is better than nothing.

In the case of a guy laid off from a factory job better to say you have been spending the time helping a friend doing handyman work then that you are at home watching TV, doing nothing, or just sending out resumes getting rejected. Even better if you imply that you liked the work and were making money. It's all in the story.

Even the BS shows at least you are attempting and know the downside of not having anything. You get a few points for that in my book.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#23

Post by at-fates-hands »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months. If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you c…

I can absolutely vouch for this.

After a 6 month contract gig, the employer told me they were going to bring me on full-time. I stopped interviewing thinking I had a full-time spot. They told me two weeks before the end of the contract they didn't have anything else for me and I was cut at the beginning of January after our project ended.

I did find a job with a small company, but after three days, realized they were looking for a Javascript developer, not a front-end developer. From then on, I was out of work for almost four months. Luckily, I picked up a freelance project which filled the gap during the time I wasn't technically "working".

On my resume, I put it was a private freelance project that lasted the time I was unemployed (four months). Since it was relevant to my work history, nobody asks about it, or just wants me to go over what we did and the technologies we used.

The interesting thing is when recruiters see "freelance" projects they instantly equate it with being unemployed. While the actual HR people at the companies I interviewed with never made the same connection. To them, work is work as long as its relevant to your career.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#24

Post by bluedino »

tbrownaw wrote: post #6

So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?

Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has been unemployed, the less competent they are.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#25

Post by enraged_camel »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months. If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you c…

>>The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

Ideally, yes. In reality, it's easier said than done.

1. Most unemployed people need a way to pay their bills. This is not possible if you're dicking around with open source projects or volunteer work. Starting a business requires a certain amount of capital. And "making stuff to sell on Etsy" works only for a tiny minority of people who have the creative skills to make cool stuff.

2. When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job. You should get up at 8am and look for jobs, make a list, take a lunch break, then spend the afternoon tailoring your resume for those jobs. Then you can get off at 5pm or whatever and do other things. What most people do however is that they do other things during the day, and then in the evenings they sit in front of their computers with Monster.com open and browse job openings, and maybe send out a few resumes. Which doesn't work of course.

Basically, the only people who can afford to work on something meaningful while unemployed are those who have a significant amount of money saved up. In today's economy, most people who are at risk of unemployment don't.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#27

Post by bluedino »

>> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed.

Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have already selected the best from?

>> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed.

What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job? Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for another year?

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#28

Post by DanielBMarkham »

"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed."

What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the problems in the world go away through direct action.

Prima facie, this argument seems to be that if employers don't like an attribute in a job applicant's resume, we should either make it illegal for them to discriminate based on that attribute or "fake out" that attribute in some other way.

It seems like anything I'm going to say is blindingly obvious, but I'l say it anyway: we cannot provide "recent experience" in X simply by hiring somebody and giving them a nametag that says "I do X!". It doesn't work that way. Employers want experience, not simply words on a resume. You can't create lots of experience for a job position in a market that simply might not have that many job positions of that type available. In addition, sometimes (not always by any means) companies let go the people who are deadweight first.

I could go on. There's a plethora of various speculations I can make about why this measured observation is true. More research, most likely by job seekers themselves, is required to fix this. Politics by correlation, just like management by correlation, is a terrible way of running a ship.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#29

Post by rayiner »

tempaccount9473 wrote: post #5
michaelochurch wrote: post #2

The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another 100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts into salable work. The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent creative work's value is goin…

> The Corporate System is actually collapsing. [Citation needed] I agree that there exists a hypothetical future where corporations collapse and all creative work is done by brilliant unpaid individuals who have their work broadly pirated. But that's not what I expect to happen. Large corporations have the majority of the wealth and capital, and are frighteningly efficient at weilding their economic power to lobby go…

I disagree with this assertion that corporations are a "terrible way of turning human labor into work product." In industries like software? Sure. In industries like coal mining? Explain to me how a decentralized structure would be a more efficient way of marshaling the capital resources and labor necessary to blow the top off a mountain and extract a bunch of rocks from the carcass.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#30

Post by macspoofing »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #12

I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for longer than 6 months. If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government program you c…

>If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire you. You have to be able to say that you've done something.

WHY??!?!? Seriously, WHY?!?!

So, I'm thinking that maybe there's some skew in these findings, and then you come in and say "Yea, I wouldn't hire you unless you show me you did more than just look for work".

Looking for work is time consuming. Furthermore, as the spouse who's currently jobless you may be pulling double duty taking care of the kids, or fixing up the house, or helping out the household in some other way (maybe working at McDonald's), things that you don't put on your resume. Little does such a person realize, that there are people like you, who look at his or her resume and dismiss them as lazy.

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