When the Jobless Become the Unemployable | Hacker News Reader

When the Jobless Become the Unemployable

nytimes.com

25 pointsrayvega38 comments

I heard an anecdote about the last recession. It's just an anecdote, but should be interesting. It's about an "unemployment counselor" - she had 18 unemployed executives who would come to weekly meetings and complain about how tough it is to get jobs.

Deciding that it was unproductive, she suggested that everyone make at least 5 calls on jobs during the next week, and the main focus of next week's meeting is talking about how well it went.

Only 2 out of 18 showed up. 16 of them didn't make the calls at all.

I'm not finding the statistic right now, but I also remember hearing that the average number of job applications per week for long term unemployed people is 2.

This doesn't invalidate the article, but it's an important consideration. If you're not looking very hard and flexibly for work that might be suitable to you, does that really indicate that there's no opportunity available?

I was unemployed for a full year and a week (post college). During that time I sent out over 300 résumés, and applied to around 100 online systems. This ranged from front-end jobs (what I’m at currently) and design jobs, all the way down to groundskeeper and Wal-Mart stocker.

I had exactly five phone interviews and three in-person interviews out of the entire year. (One of which was a scam.) Not even Wal-Mart would give me the time of day.

...Until I got a referral from a friend to a recruiter. She got me an interview with a nice company, which landed me an offer in 14 hours.

I’m sorry, but your anecdote is a straw man.

> I’m sorry, but your anecdote is a straw man.

Your anecdote proves another anecdote is a strawman?

Kidding aside, I've been self employed most of my life and I've never written a resume up, so I don't know. Just sharing one story I heard.

Your experience is interesting. What do you think it was that helped? Was the recruiter good, or your friend a strong vouch? Would be curious to hear more about your experience, it's pretty shocking that you get barely any response with your credentials in 400 applications, but then a warm introduction lands you a job in a day. Well, I believe in the power of warm introductions, but you'd expect some interest if your credentials/skills stacked up, no? Would be curious to hear more.

"Your anecdote proves another anecdote is a strawman?"

A first-hand anecdote beats your vague, un-sourced, second-hand-at-best anecdote. Especially since the first-hand anecdote matches many other peoples' experience, mine included, and because you don't seem to have the personal experience required to have a working bullshit detector on the issue.

" Well, I believe in the power of warm introductions, but you'd expect some interest if your credentials/skills stacked up, no?"

After about 9 months, your credentials and skills don't really matter. It's like you have "I molest goats" on your resume in 96-point type. If you actually get a call you can hear the loss of interest once you explain that "yes, my resume is up to date".

> A first-hand anecdote beats your vague, un-sourced, second-hand-at-best anecdote. Especially since the first-hand anecdote matches many other peoples' experience, mine included,

My point was, both can be true in the same world. To layer more anecdotes onto the subject, the people I know that massively hustle don't ever stay out of work long, except by choice.

> and because you don't seem to have the personal experience required to have a working bullshit detector on the issue.

Eh, "Some people are complaining without getting off their asses" - not everyone but some people - is a hypothesis that absolutely jives with my bullshit detector. In fact, it matches tremendously a lot of experience.

> After about 9 months, your credentials and skills don't really matter. It's like you have "I molest goats" on your resume in 96-point type. If you actually get a call you can hear the loss of interest once you explain that "yes, my resume is up to date".

Ah, this is fascinating. See, that's just what I was looking for - great insight there, thanks.

Extrapolating from that, would it make sense to take a class or do some volunteer/charity work, or travel, or contribute to some open source project, or something to fill the blank in your resume?

I really don't know, this is all new stuff to me. I've looked at a few hundred resumes and proposals in my life for hires and outsourcers, but I haven't submitted one since I did an internship when I was 18 (did I even submit one there? not sure). I'm trying to think back to my own experiences choosing people, but back then I interviewed everyone with half-decent credentials because I didn't trust my resume-reading skills, and figured it couldn't hurt. Then I hired people who I jived with personally who seemed to have the skills and motivation. For outsourcers, it was all about portfolio and speed of their replies to my further questions, always. (This is a fascinating insight to me writing this, actually, I never realized that before - speed and portfolio were really the only two determining factors... written language less important, I contracted some people in India with spelling/grammar errors who obviously had the technical chops and speed one time, and then did a lot of work with them)

Okay, good discussion here Jon. Interesting stuff.

Definitely. What would you like to know?

I would say the recruiter is the only reason I have a job currently. She has a very strong relationship with my employer’s parent corporation, and that got me past the tide of people who spam inboxes.

Good insights. Thanks for sharing the latter part too, that gives me some perspective. Congrats on the new position. Feel free to drop me an email sometime if I can be of service in whatever, and thanks for sharing.

Thank you, and good luck on your travels!

Ok, just doing my job:

"Kidding aside, I've been self employed most of my life and I've never written a resume up, so I don't know." ________________

"Was the recruiter good, or your friend a strong vouch?" ___________________________ "Would be curious to hear more about your experience" ____________________________________-

"credentials in 400 applications" _________________________

"Well, I believe in the power of warm introductions." ____________________________________

"Would be curious to hear more." _______________________

Man, you're all dead inside, aren't you?

I was unemployed for about six weeks last fall, and in that time I sent out (on average) about 5 resumes per day, every day. I got three phone interviews out of it - one turned into part-time contract work, and one became a full-time job.

There's definitely a relationship between the amount of work you put into a job search and the results, but it's dependent on so many factors (age, location, industry, experience, etc). I'm not sure how long I could have kept up that pace before I transitioned from motivated panic to resigned despair.

If there's work to be found, there's a relationship.

After a break for school I tried to find work in the Boston area just as Route 128 was dying. There were precious few openings available that I could commute to ... as I recall, I managed to land only one interview (with Polaroid). Eventually I was recruited by a friend into a company he'd licensed software to try to save it, but the recession killed it before we got far enough.

I then moved to the D.C. area (mid-'91) and had no trouble finding jobs until the dot.com/telecom crash (telecom was pretty big in that area, I was in fact working for Lucent when it started its descent from 106,000 employees to 35,000...). The less said about that period, the better.

A straw man is when someone doesn't argue against a given claim, but argues against a different claim that's easier to defeat.

An anecdote cannot be a straw man, and the OP was obviously replying to the claim made by the article.

Learned Helplessness seems relevant. I always try to remember the poor dogs in the shuttlebox experiment before giving up.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Learned_helpl...

>recession

>unproductive

>invalidate

>important consideration

>does that really indicate that there's no opportunity available?

Well ain't you a special snowflake?

Unfortunately I cannot find anything other then a pitch for his book, but, John Boyd of Jcurve sales (20 or so years of B2B experience) transitioned into Job Search consulting.

At a talk I attended (sales related, which dived somewhat into his job search methodology, he challenged all of his attendees:

-Make ten cold calls a day (noone cold-calls anymore) to companies you wish to be employed

-Call the right people - decision makers, hiring managers, etc. (find via LinkedIn, Jigsaw)

-Those who actually did the above, had a position in 30 days.

Thats 50 calls a day (and cold calling can be difficult), for ~20 days..how much do you want a job?

My own experience, I would sometimes feel like I "did something" that day by firing out 50 online / electronic applications. That is PASSIVE marketing of yourself. Get active in your own marketing (which is a job search), and results will improved.

People also don't go out and network..attend the hundreds of little gatherings which you can find via LinkedIn groups. Just tell people what you are looking for, and ask how you can help them. Offer your services for free, the word will get out.

Get honest, Brutal and constructive feedback on your search. Your resume, phone-skills, elevator pitch, in-person interviewing (practice all of this).

"In particularly dynamic industries, like software engineering, unemployed workers might also miss out on new developments and fail to develop the skills required."

Can't buy that argument for software engineering. If you're unemployed you've got plenty of time to learn new technologies whilst looking for work.

I'd also argue that certain type of software skills don't become obsolete, and that a sufficiently experienced developer shouldn't have too much trouble picking up the 'latest and greatest' technologies. It's not like it actually changes fundamentally every few years!

Unfortunately, most HR departments don't understand that. To many HR recruiters, IT recruitment is a task of ticking off the checkboxes for knowledge, as opposed to screening for skills, character traits and personality.

But if your competitors have the same amount of experience but have picked up and used the 'latest and greatest' tools in real production environment, guess which one will get the job?

Do keep in mind that if you're 40 years old, it's less likely you'll get a job by picking up the 'latest and greatest' tools. Cause most companies that use these tools often employ workers a wee bit half over your age.

The problem is most employers only care about actual on-the-job experience. You might be a strong Python hacker, but if you haven't used Python in a professional setting recently it doesn't count.

Having something to show is the obvious solution to that. Even the simplest app hosted somewhere cheap demonstrates a myriad of skills that speak volumes about your capabilities. You still have to dodge the person ticking the bullet points in HR but that is a problem that everybody has regardless of the level of expertise.

I am not discouraging this kind of initiative, as it is the kind of thing that good managers are looking for. It has just been my experience that the majority of employers will not care, even if you have something to show.

The article doesn't talk about it, but I wonder about companies that do credit checks as a pre-req for employment. Being unemployed can lead to problems paying bills, especially over the long term. (For younger individuals, this might be problems paying back student loans, which aren't dischargeable in bankruptcy.)

Bad credit means not getting a job which means further problems paying bills... well, you get the idea.

Given the young age demographic of HN, I'm looking forward to hearing people's perspectives on the prospects facing people in their fifties who are trying to get back to work.

If you had two programmers competing for a job, equally qualified, but one who was 25 and the other 55, how would you choose?

> If you had two programmers competing for a job, equally qualified, but one who was 25 and the other 55, how would you choose?

What's equally qualified mean? I don't see how someone with less than 10 years of experience could possibly be equally qualified as someone with 30+ years of experience.

Either the veteran guy has a greater depth of skills and experience, or he's on a fast downward slope and not picking up new skills. If a 55 year old is bringing the same to the table as a 25 year old, the 25 year old is amazingly talented, or the 55 year old has abandoned learning new stuff.

Or the 55 year old started their programming career at age 45. I've seen it happen...

Edit: or whatever age would result in equivalent industry experience

The 55 year old still has 30 extra years of life. You can't dismiss all of that as useless to the job. That's 30 years of learning about communication, teamwork and productivity through just experiencing life.

I don't know how you make the argument that the candidates are otherwise equal unless one has a resume item reading: 1970-2000: Coma, Mayo Clinic

Web related jobs are often filled with recent college grads, 20-something hipsters, and all kinds of dogmatists who are just uncomfortable with anybody who doesn't fit in. It wasn't like this during the dot-com 90's where I worked with fun motley crews of developers.

A 55 year old who can't clearly bring more to the table than someone half their age is a concern. If the 25 year old was actually equally qualified, it would make sense to hire that person because they are young enough to move up the management track and into the succession track.

So if I'm looking at succession, I'm probably going young. If I'm looking for someone with enough sense to avoid re-inventing the wheel, I'm probably going mature.

[all of which is somewhat irrelevant to the effects of unemployment].

You know this is illegal[1], right?

1. In the US...

Plus, the younger employee will probably be cheaper to insure, and may not have kids (although at 55 someone may not either, and if so would be less likely to gain them). All of which is highly illegal and lame, but may be a factor at some jobs.

IANAL -

But AFAIK, hiring the older worker on the basis of age would never be illegal. Discriminating against an older candidate is illegal in certain circumstances, but not always.

http://www.eeoc.gov/facts/age.html

In practice, such discrimination appears to be commonplace and virtually unpunished given the burden on the candidate to prove that discrimination actually occurred.

Considering that there were 22,000 Federal age discrimination claims in 2009 [http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/charges.cfm] and that 61% of all claims were considered to have no reasonable cause and 17% were closed administratively [http://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/statistics/enforcement/all.cfm] one could napkin estimate that about 5000 people had some success in claiming age discrimination. I'd be willing to bet that most of those successes were against an employer and not related to the hiring process.

Not that any of that makes it right.

> it would make sense to hire that person because they are young enough to move up the management track and into the succession track.

So when you find someone good at code, you want to make sure to move them out of coding when possible and into something that skill and understanding of programming has no bearing on: management. [edit: removed pointlessly antagonistic remark]

1. In 15 years you always have the option to hire the CTO from outside, but hopefully you have groomed internal candidates and created a culture where high caliber talent will stick.

2. Without opportunity for advancement, your best young talent will apply to YC.

3. Having managers which understand the technical aspects of the projects they manage, doesn't hurt.

Your question is very prescient. Every developer has to have a game plan for what they are going to do when they are 50. Like it or not, it's a young mans game, and if you're pushing high age numbers, you've got to either be the go-to guru or the seasoned and sensible manager. If you're going straight up against 25 year olds in skillsets, it's going to be hard to win interviews.

Of course, creating your own companies is the other way to get around this.

Or more like 35-40 from what I've head, seen and experienced.

In my case, I was able to unintentionally run a bit of an experiment: starting around 35 or so I found it harder and harder to get work ... until I scrubbed my resume of all evidence of my age, which worked since I don't look my age and generally remembered to not talk about programming PDP-11s in interviews ^_^.

I did this in the middle of a job hunt and the change in responses was remarkable.

If my current employer were to suddenly let everyone go, I honestly wonder if half of them wouldn't fall into the "unemployable" category.

I did some contract work with a team in a large company. Within about a week I realised this team was a dumping ground for poor performers from other parts of the IT dept. They looked after all sorts of little odds and ends systems, and didn't really write any new stuff (that's what I was there for - they didn't trust them to create new software).

I have heard from contacts within the company that successive downsizing rounds has removed all of them, and as far as I am aware, none are working in the IT industry in any capacity anymore. They were nice guys but were just contended to sit back and collect paychecks and not learn anything new.

If you get into a age+skills death spiral it can be very hard to get out.

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