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A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
41–50 of 144 posts
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish someone could explain this to me. My local observations are the same as parent. I have no unemployed, graduated friends, in fact, I have still-in-school but employed friends. They're all making great salaries and living in fun cities like San Fran, New York, and Boston. I practically have a job offer at a firm in New Tork and I'm a year from graduating and I've a decent shot at graduate programs too. I…
CS field in America is about as easy as it gets, in terms of finding a job. Demand is absurdly high. That's not the case for every field. That's not even true for CS, as soon as you get out of the country. The column is about someone in (apparently) Canada, who doesn't seem like he's in tech.
Even in CS in the US it varies a lot by specialty and region. I know some sysadmins in the Midwest who've been having trouble finding work lately. It seems that even if you can do other things, having an N-year CV of doing Unix sysadmin work (and an age >M, for some N,M) puts you into a ghetto which doesn't currently have a lot of jobs. Especially true if you don't have a degree. CS has a reputation of caring less about degrees than many other fields, but the combination of a sysadmin CV and no degree seems to raise the odds that you'll get typecast as "computer janitor".
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
"networking" is important. I'd have thought that "paying money to get into an event in order to network" was a sub-optimal version of networking. I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there. Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on bui…
> Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs. Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example: The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up. The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.
No, you must not lie.
You emphasise all the customer service style jobs you've had; or you say that you want to get customer service experience with a world leader company that takes service seriously.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#44He missed one step: MOVE. If you're where jobs aren't, don't be there.
The unemployment rate in North Dakota is 3%.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
"networking" is important. I'd have thought that "paying money to get into an event in order to network" was a sub-optimal version of networking. I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there. Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on bui…
> Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs. Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example: The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up. The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.
Not putting your college degree on your one page resume is not 'lying', it's eliminating irrelevant information in favor of freeing up space for past service industry jobs and relevant skills.
Tailoring the resume to the position is a best-practice in job applications.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really wish someone could explain this to me. My local observations are the same as parent. I have no unemployed, graduated friends, in fact, I have still-in-school but employed friends. They're all making great salaries and living in fun cities like San Fran, New York, and Boston. I practically have a job offer at a firm in New Tork and I'm a year from graduating and I've a decent shot at graduate programs too. I…
> I really wish someone could explain this to me. I'll try, although I don't have any special insights, I don't think it's mysterious. From goodside's comment: "I majored in CS." From yours: "CS and physics maajor". I probably don't have to tell you that there's tremendous demand for so-called STEM majors. I don't know about your friends' majors, but these are really both "isolated, non-representative examples". I th…
>I think there are plenty of people going through what this 29-yo is going through, and part of that might be because they have degrees in things like English, Art history, Philosophy
This. I have friends who majored in the humanities and are now working retail and restaurants. I feel bad for my friend with an English degree stuck working at Barnes and Noble but I also understand the flipside, which is if you're a Philosophy major right out of college with few or no internships, what precisely _are_ you qualified for?
I know I won the lottery with a CS degree in this economy (god how I hate that phrase) but of what real world use is a philosophy degree?
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#47I'm a bit confused. He says he got his undergrad degree around when Lehman collapsed, which was September of 2008. So if he's 29 now, why didn't he graduate until he was 25 or 26?
And if it took that long to graduate, I'd like to think he was doing something worthwhile in those extra years that would have easily turned into a job.
There is no secret sauce. Work begets work. I started working as a [very bad] programmer and [mediocre] sys admin when I was 13. That job got me the job I had throughout college. The job in college got me the job I have now. Six years later and things are good.
My anecdotal observations are that the longer people I know waited to get their first job, the longer they've remained unemployed or stuck in dead end jobs.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#48There are a shocking number of people here with no outward empathy, understanding nor willingness to see outside of their own limited experience. The world is not the tech industry. Not everybody has the same perspective as you. In fact, more people find themselves in this chap's shoes than in yours. You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur. How can you build a succ…
You're right, I don't have a lot of empathy for this guy. If I found myself in this situation -- a not-implausible outcome, given the state of my life at the moment -- I would most definitely not react by mailshotting ~100 law firms every week. Or maybe I would, once, and when it didn't work I'd move on to something different. He's stuck in a rut and he knows it, which is what's so frustrating about this letter. It's not working, dude!
So do something else.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#49If you were my little brother, and you told me that you had applied to 100 jobs you were strongly qualified for and got zero offers, I would put on my big brother pants and make some fairly pointed observations about your skills, beginning with lead qualification. I would then advise working on skills like lead qualification over sending out 100 more resumes into a process which, as your big brother who loves you has…
"networking" is important. I'd have thought that "paying money to get into an event in order to network" was a sub-optimal version of networking. I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there. Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on bui…
On the topic of paying for networking (I'm not disagreeing with you), I was thinking that you shouldn't be paying to get into networking events generally. I know I don't. When I was in Boston, there were 10+ good networking events every week, which were almost always free. If they weren't, a few well placed emails got me in the door free. Now I'm in Ohio, and even here I can find free networking events with good people at them.
Even events like SXSWi, which are definitely not free, can be made free. Its simple, just get on a panel or speak there. Before someone says that a 29 year old wouldn't be able to do that, I say look at who is really giving the panels there. About 50% of them are under 30. Every year I have a dozen ~25 year old friends speak there. There's expenses involved in getting there of course, but if you attend SXSWi as a speaker and don't get at least one job offer you've probably done it wrong.
Re: A 29-year-old on the difficulties of landing a first job
#50Boy does this hit close to home. I was almost exactly in the same place 2 years back. Dropped out of PhD, start looking around for a gig, then promptly rejected by almost every top IT/telco related Japanese companies.
My solution was similar to @patio11's advice: a) iterate and refine your process, b) hack something on something, anything, on the side, and c) go to the events where networking actually takes place.
All of these will give you both tangible and social proof to bring to table once you eventually get through to the interview round.