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Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

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Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#41

Post by JabavuAdams »

gizmo wrote: post #10
Estragon wrote: post #3

Can you actually live in the area on $12/hour? Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.

Actually, I'm willing to bet the opposite. She's going to get significantly more than $12 an hour. Why? Because by saying she's willing to accept $12/hr and fetch lattes to get where she wants to be... she (deliberately) puts herself in a position with no negotiating power. You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. It's like saying to somebody who's about to punch you..…

> You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it.

Don't assume that other people are like you, especially when negotiating.

This is awful advice.

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#42

Post by _delirium »

lhuang wrote: post #18
tessro wrote: post #5

>> continuously trolling the depressing opportunities on Monster/NYU Careernet/Craigslist. Is this system broken? Is there an opportunity for improvement in the way people find jobs, or is the best way to find good work going to increasingly be by performing memorable stunts to get eyeballs from prospective employers? I'm curious, especially in light of the relative lack of successful startups in the area.

A joke an econ professor once told me: "Look under your foot, do you see a twenty? No? Well, thats because someone already took it." The point was a generalization of the fact that in a free market, arb opportunities don't exist because market inefficiencies are corrected in real-time. Thats not always true, but the general point is. The problem with finding good jobs on Monster, CL, etc. is that, more or less, there…

That joke actually reminds me of a more common counter-joke: when an economics professor sees money on the street, he doesn't pick it up, because it can't really be there

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#44

Post by nandemo »

Estragon wrote: post #3

Can you actually live in the area on $12/hour? Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.

First, I do agree that she's selling herself short. Actually she shouldn't even mention salary to start with.

But I keep hearing that X is too low for living in the Valley, for varying values of X.

Out of curiosity, I checked the minimum wage in California and it's $8/hour. In SF it's $9.8. So how do blue collar workers survive? Do they all (mostly?) commute from outside the Valley? If they have to live in the Valley, are their living conditions terrible?

Serious question.

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#46

Post by jonny_noog »

cmelbye wrote: post #36
nopassrecover wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

through SEO? Let's not pick on the terminology, clearly she is talking about your ranking for common keywords and PageRank.

I just think it's odd that she's using the completely incorrect term in a professional setting where she's trying to convince a future employer that she can do the job.

Bearing in mind that there's a good chance that her prospective future employer probably couldn't describe the task even that well, I'd be willing to give her a pass on that one.

If I was the prospective employer, it would actually serve a great purpose for me, it tells me that she has some amount of experience with the technicalities of the Internet, but not a great depth in this kind of area. She seems to be going for writing jobs ideally, not a dev or server admin position or something, so this would not necessarily be a detractor to her overall pitch. And you can tell she's pitching to non-technical people:

"I can even make that div float so that the text doesn’t get all messy. Don’t know what that means? See, you really should hire me."

I quite liked that passage.

She also refers to "software packages like Microsoft Office and Adobe Suite" where I would in any similar situation at least refer to it as "the Adobe Suite" and most likely I'd be a little more specific than that, going into further detail about which apps in the suite I actually have experience with. But again, I give her a pass because the way she's written things up I suspect works for the audience she's targeting.

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#47

Post by paraschopra »

Not particularly related to this but I am amazed how people here and on the blog are surprised that she is willing to work for $12/hr while at the same time web app startups are afraid to charge even $10/month from their users. What an irony!

PS: I know scale v/s no-scale argument, but still one should charge for your web app (no matter how trivial is it)?

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#48

Post by jfarmer »

nandemo wrote: post #44
Estragon wrote: post #3

Can you actually live in the area on $12/hour? Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.

First, I do agree that she's selling herself short. Actually she shouldn't even mention salary to start with. But I keep hearing that X is too low for living in the Valley, for varying values of X. Out of curiosity, I checked the minimum wage in California and it's $8/hour. In SF it's $9.8. So how do blue collar workers survive? Do they all (mostly?) commute from outside the Valley? If they have to live in the Valley…

Blue collar workers have a hard time surviving and there is a massive problem of low/low-middle class flight in SF. This predominantly affects minorities, who have to live in less safe neighborhoods like the Tenderloin or Bayview/Hunter's Point, or move to cheaper places like Oakland.

SF prides itself on its diversity, but every year it gets whiter and whiter.

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#49

Post by ytinas »

gizmo wrote: post #10
Estragon wrote: post #3

Can you actually live in the area on $12/hour? Also, someone should teach her about salary negotiation. Stupid to box yourself in like that. She'll probably end up working for $10/hour.

Actually, I'm willing to bet the opposite. She's going to get significantly more than $12 an hour. Why? Because by saying she's willing to accept $12/hr and fetch lattes to get where she wants to be... she (deliberately) puts herself in a position with no negotiating power. You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. It's like saying to somebody who's about to punch you..…

Ok, so if she comes to work for you she's in good shape. In the real world, however, when a jackal sees a gazelle it doesn't care if it has "pouty eyes" or not. Meat is meat, the easier to catch the better.

Re: Jessica Roy: Dear San Francisco Employers: Please Hire Me

#50

Post by gizmo »

JabavuAdams wrote: post #41
gizmo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, I'm willing to bet the opposite. She's going to get significantly more than $12 an hour. Why? Because by saying she's willing to accept $12/hr and fetch lattes to get where she wants to be... she (deliberately) puts herself in a position with no negotiating power. You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. It's like saying to somebody who's about to punch you..…

> You can't play hardball against somebody like that without feeling like a dick about it. Don't assume that other people are like you, especially when negotiating. This is awful advice.

I'm not advocating the tactic at all. I'm simply predicting that she'll get a significantly better deal than $12/hr because only one employer has to step up and make a reasonable offer. You don't have to get the best offer on average, you simply have to get one good offer from one employer.

Some people assume that because she states she's willing to work for $12/hr that's automatically the best rate she's going to get offered. I think it will affect her average salary offer, but I don't think it will affect her best and worst offers much if at all.

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