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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

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Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#31

Post by tptacek »

rfugger wrote: post #19
tptacek wrote: post #9

Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…

I don't understand either of your points. Care to spell them out?

1. Resume blasts are infamously ineffective. Not only that, but gap since last job is a screening criteria so basic that even HR can filter from it; if you're bad on that metric you're unlikely even to hit a hiring manager. So it may be less true that 6 months of unemployment is intractable than that 6 months of unemployment forecloses on the tactic of just blasting resumes.

2. Women routinely incur 6-12 month gaps of unemployment because they have kids. When Erin went back to the workforce, the resume gap was by far the biggest obstacle she faced; it was raised specifically in (I think? She'll comment and correct me.) every job interview she had. Point being: if you're disadvantaged as a cohort that early in the process, the impact to your career long term is likely to be far-reaching even after you find employment.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#32

Post by jiggy2011 »

tptacek wrote: post #9

Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…

It's probably easier to justify a 6 month gap with "I decided to have a kid" than "I was unemployed because nobody wanted me".

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#33

Post by tptacek »

tbrownaw wrote: post #21
michaelochurch wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, they do. They're not even just the largest employer bracket; they literally employ a majority of the employed in America.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#34

Post by netfire »

tptacek wrote: post #10
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.

Startuplandia myopia is myopic. Even for software developers, if you apply for a bunch of BigCo jobs, you're going to find that a long stretch without formal employment is an obstacle. The "I've been freelancing for the past year" trick probably does not work as well for med techs or paralegals.

Probably not. Something like "I've been volunteering down at the hospital" would be much better in those professions. Regardless of your profession, surely you can find something productive to do for 6 months, even if its part-time or without pay. Taking that sort of initiative will probably also get you the connections and referrals you need to get a job. Doing nothing but submitting applications for months on end is about the worst thing you can do. If you aren't getting hired, do something to make yourself more hirable.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#35

Post by rayiner »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #28

"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…

Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one of those irrational things.

It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody else wants him, why should I?" In reality, people can be long-term unemployed for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with them being a bad potential employee. Maybe they have really specialized skills or want a really specific kind of job--the nature of such situations is that there is going to be gaps in how long it takes to find the next employer looking for those very specific skills.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#36

Post by toomuchtodo »

tptacek wrote: post #3
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 share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.

My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time.

After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#37

Post by yasth »

tptacek wrote: post #9

Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…

It is easy in the tech world (and HN is mostly tech) to confidently say 6 months is a long time for unemployment. At the moment, I'm fairly certain I could have interviews in a single digit number of hours, but that isn't true for people who have to compete for "general skills" jobs (i.e. those that require a resume, but no particular special skills, such as receptionists, admin and the like). Also there are a lot of perfectly valid reasons to have a 6 mo gap (the biggest is maternity leave).

Resume blasts are often the only realistic option some people have for getting their candidacy out there. If they had a friend at a firm that was hiring they'd probably have used that before 6 months of unemployment. Unemployment generally means that hanging out with employed friends has to be cut back (because going out for drinks gets expensive). If you network fails you for a few months you might not have much of a network to lean on after that.

Discrimination against 6 Months+ of unemployment certainly has some objective basis. Discrimination isn't always a bad thing. Still there are undoubtedly people swept up into this bias who should not be.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#38

Post by tptacek »

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…

This is an artfully written comment, the way it peppers paragraphs of opinion with factoids that make it look authoritative but don't in fact back any of the points up. "From 1945 to 2008..." perks up "people believed in corporations" groan.

It's a hall of mirrors. You look closely and suddenly "the right wing" is "The Tea Party", and "The Tea Party" is "anti-corporate", or "In 1999, if you said the world was run by evil people [...] you'd be seen as a bitter loser". But worse than the occasional verifiably false premise is the fact that the whole comment is slippery, written deliberately to avoid being pinned down and interrogated.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#39

Post by tptacek »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #36
tptacek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is rising, not falling. I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.

My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well. We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part time. After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.

It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#40

Post by radley »

enraged_camel wrote: post #25
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 easie…

A better choice is to try to make something great... especially for HN followers.
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