Is Any Job Better Than No Job?
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About a week ago, I found a job for a software tester that asked for experience with a number of programming languages, so I assumed it would at least be a technical position and it might be a nice change of pace.
They called me for an HR interview n Thursday, and that's when I discovered that they apparently no longer needed anyone in my area. They said they could need me in another city relatively nearby (4-5hr. drive from here, so I'd need to relocate), but the position was just black-box, no-code testing. They also asked me for my salary requirements, and when I hesitated (as I knew it would likely be below my expectations), she spoke up and told me the typical range for the position - about $10k less than I was making before.
I decided I needed the money, so I did their technical interview the next day. I think it went really well (there were at least two instances where I answered a question she was about to ask as part of the question preceding it) so I'm expecting an offer, but it still feels like a major blow to my ego to even be considering taking the job.
I figure I'll set a one-year limit on the job, training however I need to in order to get out of there by then, and I'll use my salary to help fund a project I want to build. Lemonade from lemons.
The point is, sometimes you just need to do what you need to in order to keep going. If an employer is offering insulting wages or seems abusing/untrustworthy, or if the job would be too big a burden (uprooting your family for relatively low financial gain), that's one thing, and I fully understand declining those jobs. If the job is reasonable, and you can't afford to be out of work any longer, then your ego needs to take a back seat to survival.
If they sensed that, it might hurt your chances of getting an offer. (I don't mean to be a downer, and I really hope you get it and it's better than you expect.)
Oddly enough sometimes an employee kicking ass during a technical interview and coming off as a "great deal" is a bad thing. They may realize you'll likely leave in 6 months and they'd rather invest in someone who will need to stick around longer.
Employment is like dating - you're more desirable if you've already got a job. The number of companies willing to speak with you dramatically increases - and why wouldn't you trade up if given the opportunity, especially if this current job is "below" your standards to begin with?
To that end, I decided that I wasn't even going to bother preparing for the interview, and I'd just wing it and see what happened (this was likely a defense mechanism - if I don't bother to even prepare, then it doesn't reflect on me if I do poorly / don't get the job). Feeling how I do about the interview, if I don't get the offer then it doesn't hurt my ego since I can be reasonably sure they passed on me for the exact reasons you described.
That said, I did try to do some preemptive damage control. I asked about opportunities for advancement in the company, expressed an interest in the certifications they mentioned, etc. In the HR interview, when asked whether I could be happy in a testing role, coming from development, I explained that I had enjoyed the bits of testing experience I had as part of my last job, that I wouldn't mind a break from development at the very least, and that any development itches I had could be scratched by my side project. Incidentally, this also opened the topic of intellectual property and all that, and she said that there were established procedures for that, and that it wouldn't be an issue.
So whatever happens, I'm ok with it.
The job is basically entry-level testing (0-2 years experience, the ad - which was otherwise inaccurate -said). The technical interviewer did mention that experience wasn't necessary and that they regularly interview people with literally no experience - they just look for people with the right mindset.
She seemed to indicate that my technical background was a plus, and I definitely showed that I understood what the job required.
Still, in the first interview, the HR woman noticeably hesitated before giving a salary range, indicating that she was probably aware that it would be a pay cut for me (also, if HR feels the need to give a number first, that's probably a bad sign in terms of expectations of overqualification). As I said above though, going into the technical interview I really didn't care if I got the job or not, and it wouldn't kill me if I didn't get it, especially since it would be very obvious that the reason wasn't underqualification.
In the mean time, you are stuck at a job where your skills are wasted and where you don't get much money.
Very inefficient market.
Obviously there are plenty of great programmers with no finance experience, and going through recruiters does not work for recruiting programmers.
If you are hiring an HR person, you get too many applications, and you need someone in the middle to weed out obviously unqualified people. But for programmers, there are not nearly enough candidates that reviewing each resume would be too onerous, and recruiters can't ask the right questions to separate excellent candidates from mediocre candidates. If I saw a resume that said "experience writing Haskell and QuickCheck tests", I would call the person that instant. When a recruiter sees that, though, the resume goes in the garbage because "it doesn't say TDD", or "we need 10 years of experience with Java", or something. While it's true that we aren't hiring for a Haskell position (though we do use Haskell), it's also true that someone who's good at Haskell will pick up Scala pretty quickly. (They might not want to switch languages, which I completely understand, but it's nice to give them the option.)
Anyway, industry still doesn't "get" programming, but we are getting closer. Some day. Some day.
(We also do some weird things, like find great candidates and then say, "oh yeah, we can only give you a four month contracting position with no benefits, and also, we can't pay for your relocation". I'm sad that we can't hire people, but happy that good programmers won't take such an obviously shitty deal.)
GDP in 2008 surely isn't below what it was in 1998.
What we're seeing here is yet another indication of the big increase in inequality in the US over recent years.
(If you borrow $10 and spend it, GDP has increased by $10. If you spend it on something other than services, income won't go up commensurately.)
Every payment is a transfer from one person to another. If you spend $10 on, say, golden rocks (gold), it doesn't get eaten and wiped from existence by the God of Golden Rocks, but rather goes into the pocket of the gold miners and owners of the gold mining capital. It doesn't make a difference that gold is a commodity, not a service.
Net product is equal to income. You learn this in Macroeconomics 101. Example financial statement: http://www.bea.gov/national/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTa...
My guess is that you wanted to throw out some vaguely gold-bug sort of thing out there, and protect yourself from downvoting by marking it "side note".
yummyfajitas comment about only expenses on services showing up in income was probably not very well worded. I guess he's not using the economist's definition of income. If you substitute wages for `income' in his statement, it makes some sense.
Also I do see that income and production have to be equal (modulo effects of moving wealth in and out of the system, perhaps). Different consumption patterns may lead to different distributions of income and wages, even if the sum stays the same.
(I don't know whether `the debt fuelled boom' that was mentioned, depresses the median income while boosting the rich.)
My side note was really just a side note. The central bank does create and destroy money. I am not a gold bug. If you want commodity based money, tie your currency to a basket of commodities. Even the BigMac index is better than useless gold.
So buying $10 worth of golden rocks will increase GDP by $10, and the balance sheet of Gold Inc by $10. This will only increase personal income if the owner of Gold Inc sells $10 worth of stock or receives $10 worth of dividends in the same year.
Now, we have $10 in debt-fueled spending, $10 in increased personal income, and the original poster is still wrong.
Aggregate personal income is typically roughly proportional to GDP. GDP has grown quite a bit over the last decade, which suggests that aggregate personal income has too. The population hasn't grown much over that time, which suggests that mean personal income has also grown quite a bit. (More quantitatively: US GDP growth has been something like 40% per decade recently, US population growth more like 10%, so mean income has grown by about 30% over that period.)
If median income goes down and mean income goes up, that typically indicates that richer people are gaining while poorer people lose. (It doesn't have to; imagine, e.g., that everyone below the median income jumps to $1/year below the median. Result: the median stays the same while the mean goes up. This is not at all what typically happens, though.)
If the growth in aggregate personal income has been slower than that in GDP, that indicates that businesses' profits are growing faster than what they pass on to their employees. That translates in the not-much-longer term to more money for the owners of the businesses. Who are, surprise surprise, on average substantially wealthier than median. So, again, more gains for the wealthy than for the not-so-wealthy; so, again, increasing inequality.
What any of this has to do with the bizarre notion that when you buy gold the money gets eaten by a golden rock god, I'm not sure. (I can kinda see how you might have got the impression that yummyfajitas thinks that, but immediately after making the golden-rock-god comment it seems like you start speculating on how I probably have no clue what I'm talking about. Highly mysterious, but I'm probably just being dim.)
GDP growth has been inflated by debt-fueled spending.
But the change in inequality stems largely from globalization applying downward pressure on wages.
Simply: 10, 20, or 30 years ago, more of the component cost of a product went into middle and lower class wages. Now, wages are down; more-so for industries where costs are easier to optimize globally.
Protectionism was the wrong conclusion, but labor had it exactly right when they posited that buying lower-cost goods (those with costs sourced internationally) would squeeze the income of the working class. There's no way it couldn't.
(What labor glossed over, is that stagnant wages don't necessarily mean stagnant quality of life. But they were organizations rewarded only for increasing wages, so they predictably had no interest in the larger objective view.)
Changes in inequality stem from political decisions about the allocation of income increases.
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs217.snc4/39207...
The distribution of salaries for the UK looks like this:
http://sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc4/hs224.snc4/38561...
and I expect that the US is even more extreme, although I don't have any data for US salaries.
Indians, Europeans (My guess mostly from western poor countries) go to Dubai because 30K $ a year is a huge salary jump, but for US citizens its not much different from they would get here.
Also depending on the gig often relocation expenses and other expat benefits are a factor (probably more so in the financial firms and big cos though).
But 30k$ per year salary to drive Tucks is surely not worth, The degradation of health due to poor living condition, is alone is a significant cost, considering any ailment that starts there would lead to significant future costs after the person comes back to USA.
American citizens re still liable for US (federal) income taxes on foreign income. There's an exemption of something like $90k and credit for taxes paid to wherever they are, but someone with a $300k salary would owe significant US taxes.
Note that many deductions are not available to non-residents.
I doubt the United Arab Emirates has this arrangement... just saying.
While serving to reduce the likelihood of a sharp crash, the extending of unemployment benefits is also slowing a recovery by reducing the incentive for people to do work or start a business, even if it doesn't pay well.
Edit: for clarity
Why not just eliminate unemployment benefits altogether? As a working American, why is it my responsibility to foot somebody else's bill while they search for a job they "like"?
Had that person not been employed last year (2009), and began working in 2010, and was subsequently laid off, that person would not be eligible for unemployment.
My experience with unemployment is that it pays 40% of what your average pay was over the last 6 months up to a certain maximum. That maximum is pretty low: last time I was unemployed, I think I got a total of about $12,000 in unemployment benefits over an 8-month period. Most people can't live on 40% of their income and for the select few who can, it's because 40% of their income would be far above the unemployment cap, so they wouldn't be able to do it either.
What makes you think people aren't taking jobs because they don't want unemployment to end?
However, this all depends on your current financial situation, if you need the money and you have more then yourself to support, its time to start looking at any job is better then no Job. Its better to have some money come in rather then no money even if it is only while you are looking for something better or even in your feild.
Apparently, either they aren't needed all that badly, or else they're finding some. Otherwise, he surely would have raised the wage offered.
Of course, it could be that his business is marginal enough that it wouldn't be profitable at a higher wage, in which case it's likely that the days of his business are numbered.
I am employed at a job now, but not just "any job" because I actually love what I am doing.