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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
81–90 of 349 posts
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#82It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this:
-Good people are hard to find
-If I find a good person, I snap them up right away
-Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same
-If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews
-In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire
-Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring
Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
The market doesn't punish the companies for irrational behavior when everyone engages in the same irrational behavior.
Why don't you engage in rational behavior and get rich?
Trust sparsity ("bozo bit") is an irrational behavior that doesn't make anyone rich. In general, it makes everyone poor.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#84This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof.
Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than those that don't.
How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and easy filter.
There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership.
10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both.
We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#85I'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…
Definitely agree on the "do something in the gap" aspect. In a lot of technical fields, 6 non-practicing months can be very close to "no experience".
My job responsibilities tend to come in waves of 3 different functions, where I'll focus almost exclusively on one aspect for 4 months, then move to another for 8 months, then hop again. Each time I switch it can take a lot of time to "shake off the cobwebs" - either the software changes, there is new functionality, or just rediscovering some best practices.
I can completely understand reluctance to hire someone in that situation.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in the UK so maybe things are somewhat different here with regards maternity but all women I have worked with who have taken time off for this have been given their job straight back once they are ready to return and are usually paid some % of their salary while they were off (I think the law mandates this).
I think that's a positive attribute of the UK system. But consider this: childbirth is a reason many women everywhere temporarily leave the workforce --- not for maternity leave, but literally surrendering their job, perhaps for a couple years. The research we're talking about today shows that after leaving the workforce for a couple years, they face an obstacle that makes it harder to find a new job, and thus more l…
That's certainly true, it took my mother ~5 years to get back into her industry after having kids and even then it was lower in the org chart than she left at.
I would still posit that reasonable people would be more sympathetic to a mother spending 2 years looking after children than a single guy playing a 2 year xbox marathon though.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#87This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…
"While it has benefits for creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as people won't move to where the jobs are."
Over the last few years it's more like they can't move to where the jobs are, at least not without taking a huge loss on a house or declaring bankruptcy.
But yeah, you're right - we've got a rather immobile labor market, for a variety of reasons, and there don't seem to be any quick fixes. telecommuting you'd think would help, but it's not applicable to every single job, and even places that do allow for it don't necessarily orient their culture to take full advantage of it.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>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…
But doesn't your point #2 conflict with #1? This is obviously industry-specific but assuming you have the skills, doing contract programming requires only trivial up-front cost (a domain name and server, but most who work with the web would have that already) and it's certainly not a $15/hr job. As one of my siblings comments says, it's your responsibility to have a safety net of your own (6 months of all your expens…
Yes, it is industry-specific. Not only do software engineers have the necessary skills to do contract programming or start something up by default, they also make enough money such that building up a nice amount of savings is a trivial issue.
Outside software however, things are quite bleak. Many people are stuck in that awful income range where they make too much to qualify for government aid, but too little actually save any meaningful amount of money[1]. And, unlike with a lot of software companies, their jobs don't really allow them to work remotely. So when they become long-term unemployed, they get hit hard.
[1]You know, software is kind of a unique field, in the sense that you have both ends of the income spectrum. On the one hand, you have homeless wanna-be founders who eat nothing but ramen all day. On the other hand, you have people who get paid six figure salaries in comfortable office environments. What you don't have however is people who are in the 20k-40k range. As a result, most software engineers cannot sympathize with those people.
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The government doesn't need to turn a p…
Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market (no childish fantasy required). The market does punish shitty corporations, but it happens over years to decades, and most people can't wait that long. How much comfort is it to someone who's unemployed if Microsoft breaks off and falls into the ocean in 2025? These people want jobs now and, as far as I can tell, don't really care what the…
Sounds like there is a market opportunity for job coaches. Reasonable-reason-for-extended-absence-from-the-job-market as a service, anyone?
Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment
#90Earlier 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…
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…
Ah yes, and here we have the "tptacek shitting on a comment using big words and smart-sounding phrases" comment. ;)