Helping the People Who Don’t Get Hired

At its peak, the copy of Living with Schizoaffective Disorder that I have on my own website - there are copies elsewhere - had 8,000 readers per month.

The State of California Mental Health Department placed it on a reading list that they distribute to their county clinics.

I was able to give some closure to a grieving mother whose son low-level formatted his hard drive then killed himself for no apparent reason.

They could just write down "overqualified" or "lacking social skills" or "doesn't get along with others" as reasons and not even mention a mental illness.

One more, from a dead website: https://web.archive.org/web/20120505130855/http://mobile.ore...

A person who does Interviews who Googles your name will uncover this sort of stuff. They will read it and not give you the benefit of the doubt. You won't get a chance to explain that you were talking about sloppy practices that lead to industrial accidents.

Instead they will read where you got ejected from hackathons for allegedly making bomb threats, and then move on to the next candidate.

I think this is a big factor in why you don't get jobs and contracts.

You also exposed the software consultant problem of not being paid on CNN during that Joe Stack event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhLV7jydPJ8

If an interviewer had watched that show, they could have a negative view of you and remember you had exposed the software consulting industry of being a hard life and not always being paid.

You have been a critic of the startup scene, you have been a critic of the software consultant career, you have been a critic of so many things that it gives you a negative reputation with recruiters and interviewers. All of this is revealed by a few Google searches of your name. On top of that you are very picky on what company you work for and what development tools and OS you will use. These things are seen as being negative, and recruiters and interviewers want to see positive things, people not complaining about the industry but instead solving problems and working with others as part of a team.

All of these things raise red flags and prevent you from being hired. The major factors are not your mental illness, but these other things that can be revealed by Google and other search engines. There is also a criminal and financial/credit background check that employers/contractors/clients do prior to hiring that also has to be done. They will see that the police ejected you from Hacker Dojo etc, and see the times when you were without money and owing back debt and back taxes. If they see you have bad credit, they might worry that you are more likely to steal from the company. This is true for federal background checks for government contracts.

Those things are what I uncovered with just a simple Google search, and I sure there is more that can be found.

Your essay on your mental health: http://www.warplife.com/mdc/books/schizoaffective-disorder/

It is the least of your worries.

You also point out that the software problem isn't about bugs, it is about human beings. Which is kind of controversial:

http://www.warplife.com/jonathan-swift/books/software-proble...

Some people adopt the philosophy of a stoic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism

They don't complain about things, they study problems and how to solve them with logic. When you discover a problem, you don't criticize the industry, you don't get negative, you work on a solution and stay positive and stay in a good mood instead of a bad mood. When you discover a problem, it is an opportunity for you to find a way to solve it. This is how many people have become a success, and how many startups get founded.

I think you are misunderstood, I think you have a great amount of knowledge, I think clients miss out when they reject you, but you have a negative image on the Internet and in real life that just drives people away from you.

I myself deal with negative thoughts, when I write something criticizing something or being negative here on hacker news I get downvoted. I have to remember that I should stay positive and find solutions to a problem if I discover a problem. It is positivism and creativity that I need to be focused on, and so should you.

Edit: typos and better analysis and advice.

Even so, it would be nice to have a job, and not to be faced with discrimination.

Consider that most today revere the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Junior as a saint. But during his lifetime, he was not permitted to stay in hotels during his travels, and so had to sleep in his car. He wrote once about how that really got him down.

http://www.warplife.com/

Edit: Suppose I did get a job. What problems would that solve? In the US, the mentally ill are legally permitted to wear their own clothes, as well as to manage their own financial affairs while we are in mental hospitals. Even so, the hospital staff either is unaware of these facts, or refused to abide by them.

This is the case even if one is on an involuntary hold.

If I got a job, would that enable some other mentally ill webmaster to pay for his domain renewal, so he doesn't lose his livelihood?