Homeless man lives off reward points from former life | Hacker News Reader

Homeless man lives off reward points from former life

ocregister.com

16 pointspetewarden20 comments

These stories are always so difficult to read and for me sometimes hard to imagine. It seems like everywhere I love people are having a hard time hiring people and the thought of laying off someone is absurd. It's so bad that I've seen companies keep people they are know are incompetent because they figure it's better than nothing. It seems like there is a huge disconnect between the experience of parts of the economy and the country in this recession.

It's hard for me to imagine not being able to earn an income or provide for my family but that's the reality for a lot of people right now. It's good to remember that and be thankful for where you're at and what you have.

Perhaps he should have saved something besides rewards points when he was making 6 figures?

It would however make an intriguing plot point in some dystopian movie where everyone's retirement savings plans have been replaced by reward points from various big companies. Be a good consumer all your life and retire happy!

He lost his job almost 2 years ago and lost his house just recently; he could have spent his savings trying to keep an expensive place while trying to find a job. If so, I agree that doing so was unwise, but homes are things that people can be unreasonable about.

He lives in Orange County, and was a former sales exec for Oracle. The only thing he saved was the extra cost on his mortgage when he took out a negative amortization loan on the million dollar mortgage for his home.

Ah, OK.

The vitriol around this guy on the O.C. Register's comments section is just too much. Dude's been out of work 19 months and his house just foreclosed on him, and some of the comments are like, "yeah, this jerk is fat and old and he has a giant wine collection and a lease on his car."

If anything, he seems pretty resourceful. That Oracle bit seems like a smart little bit of logic for someone in this guy's situation. And why should he have to give up every detail of his life because of his bankruptcy and foreclosure? He could have a job next week for all we know.

The people getting screwed by this economy are in this guy's demographic. I've seen way too many newspaper types (many friends) lose their jobs during the so-called "salad days," because it's cheaper to keep around the young guns.

Though I will say this much: How much did this guy save while working if he had to file for bankruptcy? And how quickly do you plow through all that savings?

I think the lack of tact and kindness is wrong, but the sentiment may be fairly on par. Things are different in other parts of the country. A lot of people can't dream of affording a lease on a car like that job or not. I'd love to be able to afford 25 dollars a day for rent but the reality is a lot of us who are actually working are being far, far more frugal than this guy is when he is out of a job. The realities of life just aren't the same in the rest of the country.

It says something interesting that he can so easily go from making 'six figures' to nothing.

If we exclude the 'blame the economy' explanation, then it seems to me that either:

a) he was never worth 6 figures in the first place; or

b) he has contacted only companies that could have no use for him; or

c) he has contacted companies not covered by b) and they have all made six-figure-scale mistakes by not offering him a job.

My cynicism inclines me to a).

My guess is that he tried to transition from finance into IT, but didn't pick up a ton of IT experience. Perhaps finance isn't hiring, and IT isn't going to pay 6 figures for somebody without serious chops.

There's another option. He was worth 6 figures if he was making sales of, say, twice his salary. If fewer companies are buying, there are fewer 6 figure salespeople that Oracle can keep. Doesn't mean he was never worth his former salary. Doesn't even mean only the good salespeople are left. Perhaps his particular area was hit harder.

> "If we exclude the 'blame the economy' explanation..."

...we can conveniently blame him entirely for his current predicament.

At 25 dollars a day for a hotel room, with food, a car lease and a storage unit to pay for and paying for bottled water he's spending even more than I am on living expenses and I HAVE a job.

Yes, some parts of the country are more expensive than others and by strict definition he's 'homeless', I don't think that term applies in the same way to somebody who has a storage unit full of vintage wine and flat screen TV's.

I don't take issue with people living however they see fit, but come on, I'd love to drive a BMW but I buy clunkers with cash because that is what is practical. Don't expect me to feel sorry for you because you chose to make car payments and buy bottled water instead of paying your mortgage.

Is this for real or did I just read an article from the Onion?

I'm struck by how much of the time in this article is spent driving relative to how much is spent building stuff. Maybe that is just the OC Register reporting selectively. I really hope so.

He's apparently a well-educated professional recently making six figures and yet he is spending time on the job boards, waiting by the phone, and Tweeting, for more than a year and a half now. What the heck. That's stupid when you're 22, but you're excused a little stupidity when you're 22 and still think that job seeking is a matter of sending out resumes. When you're forty-something that is practical criminal.

Not everyone is a machiavellian networking pro. Some people just show up, do the job, and go home.

While I suppose it is theoretically possible to be an employed professional for the last two decades and earn six figures without ever once having explicitly done networking, it seems like he probably has a lot of free time now and there is no time like the present to start calling up all the people whose lives he has touched in the last two decades and catch up on what their current needs are.

If he's been at the same job for two decades, and especially if his company doesn't explicitly do work for clients (most programmers work on in-house code, doubly true for those making six figures), most of the people whose lives he's touched are either still at that company or out on their asses as well. And the ones that have found new jobs are probably too new at them to be of much help getting his foot in the door.

Also, there are some severe hiring stigmas against older programmers. Now, early 40s is not what I'd consider "old" by any realistic metric, but I know expert coders in that age bracket that have serious trouble finding jobs because of the overqualification issue (i.e. that a programmer fresh from school can usually meet the company's needs, but the company can pay them half as much because they have no experience), as ~15 years in the biz tends to put one into the senior developer bracket.

Of course, one important question is whether this guy is even considering jobs that pay in the $40-$60k range; I find it hard to believe that there are no medium to low range programming jobs that he can find, at least if he's any good. It's very possible that he's looking in all the wrong places because he considers himself too valuable, having been spoiled by six figure salaries until his laying off...

Then again, it's also possible that his specialty was too niche for him to be highly employable outside his company, like if he was primarily maintaining some legacy system written in Cobol? (which would be a dealbreaker on a resume at plenty of places...) Some of the coders doing that type of stuff make tons of money when they work because nobody programs goddamn Cobol anymore, but they have a hell of a time finding new jobs when the old ones disappear.

Edit: nevermind, just saw a tweet of his: "Anyone looking for a Sr Financial Analyst/Corp Dev/Planning person in OC or Bay Area please let me know." This guy's not looking for programming work at all, so everything I said is mostly irrelevant...

His Twitter account: http://twitter.com/HomelessThomOC

When I was reading the article I thought "Now if it were me I'd try to avoid branding myself as homeless, as I don't really think that helps one land a high-paying job and eventually you're going to be Nr. Used-To-Be-Homeless, but maybe he'll be able to spin it in such a Purple Cow manner that it could actually help."

The Purple Cow angle seems to be a wee bit underutilized.

Arg, if anyone deserves to be homeless its the IT guy running the ocregister's mobile site.

Accessing this link from an Android it redirects to a broken gateway page, which in turn links to tbeir mobile front page, completely losing the original link.

Still boggles my mind that a site can be so fucked up. Ironic thing is if they just left it alone and didn't try to be all fancy with the user agent parsing, things would have been fine.

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