Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

motohagiography

The trouble with corporate jobs is that we tend not to cultivate a social support network and activities outside of it because many of these jobs are a kind of slavish race to the bottom where people compete to show their sacrifices in exchange for managerial favor. Some ways to hedge the (arguably, insane) social risks of your corporate job are, before you are unemployed:

- learn to fish, as the author mentions. Hunting is similar, and good for relationships, as is canoeing, camping, and general outdoorsmanship.

- buy a year+ membership at a cheap gym so you have somewhere to go a few days a week while you are off. The cheaper it is, the more social it will be. Think of it as social and mental health insurance.

- join volunteer, church, or fraternal organizations to develop cheap activity based relationships. if you are a committed atheist, join a secular volunteer organization, and barring those, a theatre or activist group.

- No matter what you hear about others, your severance will be a nasty insult and you will very likely have to spend to hire a lawyer to get what you are owed. Find one now and agree on a rate while you have a job.

- keep lines to recruiters open while you are still employed, even if they are obnoxious. Don't let them know your current/past salary ever, because they will just use your lack of job to pressure you down on the next one. For them to "have your number," literally means being at a disadvantage.

If you are unemployed or just about to be, it's very stressful, but it builds character, and for everyone I know who experiences it, living through it is always better than living in fear of it.

> - No matter what you hear about others, your severance will be a nasty insult and you will very likely have to spend to hire a lawyer to get what you are owed. Find one now and agree on a rate while you have a job.

While it's a nice sentiment for thought, severance pay isn't mandatory in the U.S. and there's no requirement for it in the Fair Labor Standards Act[0]. Severance seems more like a customary courtesy, like tipping.

[0]: https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/severancepay

I don’t think the GP was implying that everyone gets severance. Generally employers are often in legal grey areas when they are letting people go; particularly in cases where there is no legal or policy violation. In these cases they often try to bully you into giving up your rights. Severance is payment for agreeing to waive your right to sue for wrongful termination.

Fair point; severance pay can certainly act as a sort of "hush money". Not to mention how it can be used to keep ex-employees from exposing trade secrets with a competitor in the same industry.

Very wise; excellent advice. Any adult who has faced the prospect of unemployment can probably hear this fairly well, but is there any way to communicate this concept to younger people? I'd have loved to come out of college with a better perspective on what "employment" means for a life.

Thank you. I think the point of an undergrad degree is to produce credulity. My recent comment history has one about about how money is made, and that's the perspective I think young people should have. tl;dr: it's a scale of dependency, labour, time, skill, risk, capital, power.

STEM people are not typically taught negotiations, sales, political science, marketing, or business and we're often given this conceit that we're above all that, which I think keeps us stupid and cheap.

> STEM people are not typically taught negotiations, sales, political science, marketing, or business

Yup!

> we're often given this conceit that we're above all that, which I think keeps us stupid and cheap.

I was thinking along these lines some years back after finally realising that (i) I was underpaid; and (ii) I had no idea how to negotiate effectively; and (iii) that there are many opportunities in life to negotiate, and getting better at negotiation from "I don't even recognise that this situation is a negotiation" to "this situation can be negotiated, here's my very awkward and mediocre effort at doing that" would have a much higher return on investment than learning yet another technical or mathematical thing.

> point of an undergrad degree is to produce credulity

I went through a period of suspecting similar things: if there's a STEM education pipeline that products highly specialised technicians and engineers who aren't equipped with knowledge and skills to navigate and exploit a commercial environment or hierarchical political organisations, isn't the pipeline doing what employers might want? Producing very useful and focused and naive "resources" who don't understand their own value. Tools to be applied.

I'm not sure how much I genuinely agree with this. But perhaps some part of it is true, with the STEM pipeline being tuned to serve the interests of employers and universities and government, but not necessarily the people going through it.

If you're thinking along these lines, check out the book "disciplined minds". The author's argument is roughly that the major part of graduate education is political: demonstrating that you can serve the interests of your masters and perform creative and intelligent work on the problems you are assigned, within the constraints you are assigned.

It's a good read but probably far less actionable than cracking open a few books about how to get better at negotiation, or marketing, etc.

I know it pretty popular to bash George Mason University these days... But one positive thing is our applied information technology program has courses requiring business skills, ethics and understanding of the global economy and culture. If you paid attention, and listened to the guest speakers they had come out weekly for the senior capstone project lectures, you'd learn quite a lot about navigating the worlds of commerce and government.

it's good to hear that at least one university is making some effort to equip graduates with a more broader view of the world.

i ended up doing mostly pure-math in undergrad -- because i found it interesting, with no view on how it might contribute to a career -- so my naivety is arguably partly self-inflected!

> The author's argument is roughly that the major part of graduate education is political: demonstrating that you can serve the interests of your masters and perform creative and intelligent work on the problems you are assigned, within the constraints you are assigned.

This is usually said as criticism, but I worked wit few people who could not above. It was special kind of hell.

Working with someone who can't serve interests of team, can't work on assigned problems somehow switching to problems nobody needs or can't fit into constrains we have is not all that useful.

i can appreciate that: being able to understand and internalise the objectives of the team, org, etc is part of the job, when the job involves deciding what to do and tasks cannot be completely specified.

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