The Secret Formula To Never Being Unemployed | Hacker News Reader

The Secret Formula To Never Being Unemployed

nickoneill.com

49 pointsbiznickman37 comments

I suspect that running an informative blog raises your visibility in some areas much more than others. Looking for a web-related job by making a blog about Basecamp is quite possibly the best case, since the proportion of people hiring for a 37signals-product-related job who also read and care about blogs is probably fairly high. But, writing a popular welding blog may not work as well to increase your employment prospects as a welder, if most of the people hiring welders don't read or care about blogs.

(Then again, maybe people hiring welders these days do care about blogs. But I'm not sure you can extrapolate from a Basecamp blog helping you to get a webdev job, to all sectors of the economy.)

Valid point, although if you interview other people in the industry, they're going to know about your blog. It's the same concept as interviewing potential employers. If you make them aware, they will be. It doesn't matter what the industry is.

It does matter; unlike the web development world where blogs are ubiquitous, in some industries writing a blog may be a complete waste of time. A better way to market yourself may be to go out and actually shake hands with people. There is only one problem: getting someone to agree to a face to face meeting carries a higher opportunity cost for them than spending a few minutes reading your blog, so you are less likely to get agreement there.

When you combine that fact with the large number of unemployed individuals in traditional industries who would love to get face time with an important person in their industry, it's just not a good idea for a manager, HR guy, or other decision-making individual at a company to agree to meet with each individual who requests a meeting.

The basic problem in some older industries is essentially that a person can only demonstrate their skills within the context of a (sometimes large) company. A web developer or a designer can create a website or a blog and show the world how good they are, but a welder or a wind tunnel technician doesn't have the same opportunity. And hiring someone (especially at a large company) can be very expensive with all the benefits, training, and time spent acclimating the new hire to the company and its culture. Most companies simply prefer to go with the less risky option and screen employees who have been out of work for a while, which is very unfortunate.

I think you're missing my point though: practically anybody will accept to be interviewed no matter the industry. Try it yourself and tell me that you don't get incredibly high results.

The first group of individuals who are always employed is skilled employees.

Uh really? This absurd absolute kind of lost me.

My guess is that given the recession, some portion of the employed want to create a psychologically appealing barrier between themselves and the unemployed. Making a claim that there's some certain path that will guarantee employment would seem to a fine way to do this, however crudely broad-brush the argument turns out to be.

It's almost a tautology - by definition, if you're employed, you're skilled (at whatever skill the employer was looking to get). If you were 'skilled' in something an employer no longer needs, then you become unemployed. Are you 'less skilled' in the absolute sense? Probably not, but from the previous employer's POV, you're not skilled (in what they need).

Company X anticipates getting a contract so they staff up for it. Joe gets the job. The company doesn't get the contract they lay Joe off. Where in that scenario is Joe skilled or unskilled at doing his job? The only thing I could say is Joe was skilled at getting through the job interview filter at company X and nothing else. Say Joe works for company X, and company X goes under. Is Joe less skilled than Sue who works for Company Y? There is to much noise surrounding why companies hire, fire and the process by which they do so to claim any sort of tautology around skilled = employed. Maybe if you limited it to up or out companies.

The complete tautology is that you are skilled at remaining employed. There are plenty of instances, eras, locations, and industries in which the pool of employable individuals is radically smaller than those who are qualified for a position. Most generally, those exclusions are based on social factors: skin color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age, social background, social connections, and others.

While Silicon Valley in particular is vastly more meritocratic than many cases, and you'll find a broad diversity especially among East Asian, Indian, Israeli, and eastern European backgrounds, there's still a marked under-representation of blacks and hispanic/latinos (the latter particularly notable given the huge hispanic population in the Bay Area). There is also a fair amount of grumbling about age-related biases, something to keep in mind as you progress through your tech career.

And regarding skills in an absolute sense: another point to keep in mind about tech is that skills can age very, very rapidly. Today's hot technology is tomorrow's old hat, legacy, or unneeded skill. Particularly in start-ups, the focus is on what's needed right now.

Please keep the PC rhetoric out of HN. The fact that some demographic X is under or over-represented in some field Y is not by itself evidence, let alone proof, of a conspiracy against or in favor of X.

You can replace that with "the first group of individuals who are always employed is skilled employees who has highly sought after skills" ... It may not be 100% but for the majority you'll find the statement to be true, no?

I never knew that if I had skills that were in high demand, and lived in a city that had a vibrant startup culture that I'd have an easy time finding a job. Thanks!

Shhhhh... it's a secret!

Move to where there are jobs.

Easy for a 22 year old recent college grad, harder for a 52 year old mom who worked for the same factory for 20 years before it downsized. It's not easy to pick up, leave your community and family, and start over somewhere else, especially when you have no degree and your skill set has aged no matter where you go.

These one-liners aren't as useful as you probably think they sound.

You didn't even mention the possibility that your 52-year-old mom's entire life savings is tied up in her house in her hometown. Where there are no jobs, and nobody is buying houses, so she can't cash out except at a big loss.

She already made a big loss. The only question is whether she goes on deluding herself that she is still in the black, or whether she acknowledges the loss, accepts it and moves on.

Similarly, there is a possibility she put all her money into GM stock. Should she refuse to sell it to avoid taking a big loss?

No, it's not easy. Neither is starving. If you can't live where/how you want, then you can't and the only viable option is MOVE. Yes it hurts. Yes a lot may be lost. Sentimentality does not pay the bills or put food on the table. Many have gone thru worse and come out better.

I made such a move at 38. Wasn't easy. Sure I wasn't 52, but it still hurt and had its own issues. It's your choice whether to let a bad situation grind you into nothing, or to suck it up and do something - anything - legal & moral to get thru/over/past it. Leaving the family home, friends, legacy, etc. hurts but starvation and bankruptcy hurt much more. No it's not easy - DO IT.

Those one-liners are more accurate than you probably want them to be.

That's why artificially encouraging/subsidizing home ownership is actually economically suboptimal.

Lowering relocation costs (financial and other) and increasing labor mobility (geographic and across industries) definitely helps the economy.

The military is one of the better organizations for this, since they have operational needs to relocate people on fairly low notice and without much flexibility. The relocation process is fairly well structured and some resources are the same everywhere, while other things are customized to the location.

Big companies are pretty good about this for their top execs, but maybe there would be value in startups making relocation easier for new hires, especially older ones who might have families or other obligations.

Of course, telecommuting and satellite offices solves a lot of this, too (especially if you have a job with 50% travel, it isn't that much worse to have 50% travel + 10% travel to main hq in order to remain somewhere else).

Thinking out in left field here:

Given that the relationship between housing liquidity and the labor market has been well established by economists, I wonder if there's a market for housing exchanges. The exchange would allow buyers to finance a home like a traditional mortgage, but when they wanted to move they could place their equity in the home on the exchange and trade it for the equity on another home, with the exchange facilitating the transfer of mortgage obligations.

No I guess it wouldn't be easy.

My parents did it, but then again they where only 43...

Seriously, who said it was easy?

The advocates of the "just do it" mentality always make it sound easy. "Just do it," and never any practical advice. If the it were so obvious that one could just do, they would have done it already.

The fact that the formula is a secret makes it more valuable. I better make a bookmark of this website.

Thanks for the chuckle.

This article seems to be written following a "How to gain impressions and establish yourself - here's list of things you should tell your readers!"

tl;dr: unemployed people should write blogs.

This is wrong for so many reasons...

Have kills that are in demand.

Of course, that means keeping up with changes in your industry, but you should be doing that anyhow.

If you were a 53 year old female inventory manager at a factory, where you worked your way up from unskilled labor to management over more than a decade, what changes should you have been keeping up with? Now you're tossed into a world where having no degree and no high demand skills, anyone that hires you (even into management) is going to start you at such a low wage you can't afford a one bedroom apartment in the community you've lived your entire life in, where all your relatives live.

These one-liners aren't as useful as you probably think they sound.

The mom and her family should have been investing in side income streams along the way.

My grandfather came over to America, worked in a box factory. At nights he took courses in accounting. When his kids were old enough he had them working part time jobs and they all pooled their money together. Eventually, they started investing in businesses where they could earn alternative forms of cash flow.

First it was bars/mechanic shops/restaurants, then it went into rental properties whenever real estate markets got very cheap (e.g.: he bought 10+ houses in Texas post-S&L crisis). This worked out pretty well.

Most of the successful immigrants I know did this. They came over, most were poor. They would sleep 4 to a 1 bedroom apartment. But eventually they found steady jobs, lived cheaply, and then invested the savings into a bunch of different things whenever the right opportunities came up. (The Patels in the motel biz are a good example of this).

The idea that your job/your one career should provide enough for you the rest of your life is just foolishly optimistic. You have to diversify to build in a margin of safety for when life throws a curve ball your way.

There are multiple wrongs with that situation, most of them not fixable by a quick fix

1) Education is a life-long process, not a 4-year-sprint. Agree that some skills (or degrees) are not as easy to pick up in spare time as others, but continuous development programs / community college evening classes / books from library do exist.

2) Savings rate of 0% is probably more integral to the reason one "can't afford a one bedroom apartment", than a low wage. Someone at 53 must have worked for over 30 years, saving even $100 a month would've yielded a financial cushion for situations like that.

Sure, so long as nothing came up over that 30 years.

Yeah, forgot that. US medical system is our best tool in fighting income disparity.

Ideologies among tech workers have been studied. Carrie Lane's _A Company of One: Insecurity, Independence, and the New World of White-Collar Unemployment_ points out that tech workers often blame themselves for unemployment. If we blame ourselves, how much sympathy will we have with the 53 year old female?

Jeff Schmidt's _Disciplined Minds_ is a very good explanation of ideologies among professionals. (http://disciplined-minds.com)

(Obviously, "unemployment" is a systematic problem of a peculiar economic system.)

Inventory management is a skill that is saleable. If your area has no work, it is stupid to stick around. Find a place that does have work, and go work there.

Easy? No. But whining about how it's hard and how bad it is ain't gonna get you a job either.

edit:

I've seen a pattern: people who move and keep learning keep winding up employed. People who don't move and stop learning wind up unemployed, and stay that way.

People need to be ready to start looking for work at all points in time, because at any given tomorrow, they may not have a job.

Here's a useless oneliner: The American Dream is now the American Nightmare :)

It's funny. I sympathise with laid off unskilled workers too, but they don't do any worse than most tech savvy startup entrepreneurs. Most of us, including me, are broke and in debt.

Just curious, can you say what your startup is (in the most general terms)?

I have a few. In social media and a service based startup. 'Nuff said. They all make money, but my living expenses, taxes, child support are more.

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