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Comment by M4v3R | Hacker News Reader

He's not an engineer though, at least from what I read in the article. He wrote:

> I was still able to get customer support position quickly, learning skills on the job

> My background in IT and customer support, both considered the bottom rung at most tech companies, meant that I was expendable

So it seems he didn't really have higher qualifications, working in customer support, which is nowadays often outsourced and probably underpaid.

I feel sympathy for the author, but at the same time one thing that I miss from the article is whether he tried to raise his qualifications in any way. Did he try other market segments? Picked up any courses? Broadened his education in any way in the time he was unemployed? The market is saturated with unqualified workers so it's really not so shocking that people are having hard time finding work.

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> I feel sympathy for the author, but at the same time one thing that I miss from the article is whether he tried to raise his qualifications in any way. Did he try other market segments? Picked up any courses? Broadened his education in any way in the time he was unemployed?

Raising qualifications usually costs money. He's tried when he had work. When he didn't it sounds like money was so tight and stress to high that he couldn't afford it and was focused on the immediate need to get another job. Strategic thinking and action is actually a bit of a luxury.

He wrote:

> Often, the jobs I could get were so disposable that I was never given responsibilities that could help me grow into a promotion, no matter how hard I pushed.

> Even though my wife works a steady job, money has been tight — we’ve gone through periods where we’ve had only $30 to support a family of four for a whole week. Slipping into neurotic budgeting mode has become a well-rehearsed drill at this point. We cancel [all of the things]...

> [W]e’re still living paycheck to paycheck. We’ve cashed out most of our savings accounts, including retirement, and haven’t been able to replenish them.

> Every day involves endlessly scrolling through a list of jobs on Indeed.com and applying here and there with full knowledge that 99 percent of the time, I’ll never hear back.

Raising qualifications usually costs money

Browsing twitter from 9AM to 1:15PM (an activity he mentions he does) costs the same amount of money as working through codeacademy.com or learn python the hard way.

This is very easy to say from the privileged position of being a developer. My fiancée is a teacher. She did CodeAcademy. Finding a job just from Code Academy training is not as easy as it seems. The problem is cyclical: you need experience to get a programming job, but you need a programming job to gain experience.

I'm not defending the OP; I'm just clarifying that programming jobs aren't as easy to obtain as people might think.

I know a number of people who have gotten programming jobs just by learning on the internet (or General Assembly in one case) and then building cool projects in lieu of experience. I'd hire such a person tomorrow (if you are in Delhi or Pune, hit me up) if they showed up.

The steps are codeacademy/whatever -> cool project -> hired. You can't skip step 2.

I think this is especially true in the Bay Area as lots of companies are looking for unicorns in a herd of cattle. There's nothing wrong with cattle, but places will spend 6 figures trying to recruit that 10x unicorn instead of training people.

Speaking as someone who's hired in the past, most of the CodeAcademy/bootcamp grads we turned away were turned away because they didn't have anything to show us except things they did in the program. Doing CA/completing a bootcamp tells us they know stuff, but the portfolio was an important piece because it told us they could apply what they learned. Just wanted to pass that on to anyone who is doing/considering one of these things. (Bonus points for creating unique apps that interviewers can talk to you about -- I can't even tell you how many Twitter clones I've seen.)

> Every day involves endlessly scrolling through a list of jobs on Indeed.com and applying here and there with full knowledge that 99 percent of the time, I’ll never hear back.

That means he is literally wasting time, which he could use in other, more productive ways. Sorry, but if I would be 99 percent sure that something I do will bring me 0 benefits, I would stop and do something else.

If you don't have money to raise your qualifications you can still apply for unpaid practice in many places. It will not help with finances immediately, but will make looking for job easier afterwards.

Perhaps he's wasting time in some sense, but then in another, that's how quite a lot of people end up getting a job. They apply for hundreds of them, and that get lucky with one or two offers afterwards. Yeah, it's unlikely they'll get any particular one (because hey, competition is high), but jobs, interviews, auditions, etc usually kind of work on the expectation that 99% of attempts will be fruitless.

> That means he is literally wasting time, which he could use in other, more productive ways.

It's easy to judge someone from a distance.

He says exactly how this sounds. Seems this guy is not doing everything in his power to change his situation and he never really took step back and re-thinked his strategy.

>Raising qualifications usually cost money. He's tried when he had work. When he didn't it sounds like money was so tight and stress to high that he couldn't afford it and was focused on the immediate need to get another job. Strategic thinking and action is actually a bit of a luxury.

Codecademy is for free and can teach you to code and earn some money within 1-2 months time if you can commit yourself. And that is just one example of rising qualifications for free. You do not need a degree when you are a freelancer.

And he's still too embarrassed to take a job at the gas station?

The problem with customer support is that people can stay doing it until they get automated out of existence, during which time the writing on the wall is clear. Do they apply for other vacancies in the company or do things such as improve the documentation that the customers need? In my experience there are plenty that do not, they roll on to thr next temp/customer service job to get stuck in that groove.

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