Comment by Anechoic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Anechoic | Hacker News Reader

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He has a Masters in Electrical Engineering and Acoustics from Purdue University (a very good acoustics school) and he can't find a job in the Boston area (home of a dozen or so acoustical consulting companies, another dozen or so loudspeaker manufacturing companies including Bose, Boston Acoustics & Loud Technologies), several active audio & acoustical engineering associations (including Bosotn chapters of the ASA, AES, SMPTE and IEEE), and several schools with strong audio, acoustical and/or media programs (MIT Media Lab, BU, Northeastern, Berklee)?

Something does not compute. I highly doubt it's racism (I'm black and very active in the acoustics community in Boston and have witnessed basically no intentional racism). Everyone I know out that way is very busy and a lot of firms have hired recently so it's not a matter of employers not willing to hire.

There's either more to the story here or people are missing out on a potentially fantastic hire.

edit: I've put out some feelers to see if any knows or might be interested in speaking with this guy.

I also suspect there is more to the story, and I would like to point out that he was unemployed from 1993 to 2007, which is a period that included an immense economic boom. I don't see how the current tottering state of the economy explains his inability to find any employment at all from 1993 to 1999, which was as good a time for an engineer to be hired as I can imagine. I was there in that job market, and there was a constant problem of recruiters cold-calling people by randomly dialing company numbers and trying to tempt them with higher salaries. There were all sorts of company policies to stop that from happening, including assigning phone numbers out of a really large space and making incoming calls go through the receptionist. For a physicist and acoustical engineer with computer programming experience to not be employed at all in the late 1990s - sorry, blame it on anything you want, but don't blame it on the American economy.

EDIT: also, that same LinkedIn profile claims he started his masters degree in Plasma Physics in 1972, when he would have been around 16. Come on people, engage some critical thinking here. You're not hearing the whole story, and you're not hearing it from a reliable source.

He spent ten years liquidating all of his assets and caring for his aging parents until they passed on. I don't know that it explains the entire employment gap but it seems reasonable that he would be a tough sell for many companies: older, and despite the good education and prior employment history, his skills are bound to be rusty. He was deliberately not working during that period.

He was only 33 years old in 1990. According to his story, he already had 8 years of experience as a senior engineer at Lockheed, plus two masters degrees in Physics and EE, and more than a decade of computer programming experience, and connections all over the aerospace industry. If he made a choice to not work for the next 18 years, while becoming indigent and sliding into homelessness, that's not something to be solved by the American economy. And he is not the first man with ailing parents, you know.

>I also suspect there is more to the story, and I would like to point out that he was unemployed from 1993 to 2007

This is an excellent point. I was working for a Boston-area acoustical consulting firm in the late 1990's and we had a hell of a time recruiting people. After an unwillingness to so so, the firm had to start giving out signing bonuses to attract candidates and still lost applicants to competing firms.

Fundamentally, I think it's bad to make sweeping judgements or generalizations from one example, especially one which is incomplete. The main issue that I see is that we can't just rule out statistics here. If there's a one in a million chance that, of any given person in the United States, they will be eminently qualified for a job and still unable to find one (probably due to a series of unlikely random incidents), we should actually statistically expect about 200 people in the United States to be in this situation. This doesn't actually say whether or not the system is broken -- this statistic could be both true and, say, Pareto optimal for society.

Basically, analyzing large, complex systems (especially economic and social systems) is hard and we should try to do it with an element of formality.

Maybe. The thing is, it's very unusual these days to find someone who has actual training in acoustics. Usually firms find folks with formal training in related disciplines (mechanical engineering, electrical engineer, physics, etc) and then teach them acoustics on the job.

Whenever someone comes along with actual acoustics training and/or experience, companies are usually falling over themselves to hire the applicant since the hire can be effective from day one.

Perhaps Mr. Johnson doesn't want to do acoustics and hasn't applied for an acoustic position. Or it could be transportation problems or something logistical. But I have a hard time believing that he applied in the field and no one in the Boston area would hire him.

I made a feature-length documentary about four homeless people including one with a master's degree in psychology.

http://graceofgodmovie.com/

In his case there definitely turned out to be more to the story.

What was the "more" to the story? I'm interested.

You'll have to see the film :-) Should be available soon on iTunes and shortly thereafter on DVD. Or, if you really can't wait, drop me a line and I'll send you a copy. Sign up for the mailing list to get updates.

There's either more to the story here or people are missing out on a potentially fantastic hire.

I've taken a class on homelessness. The short version is that it is usually rooted in intractable personal problems: Chronic health issues, abusive childhoods, mental illness and so on.

That is not intended to blame the victim. That's just reality: Employers pay you for value added to the business, not as a charitable act. If you have very big personal issues, you may not be very employable. I have a chronic illness myself and was very fortunate to be able to be a homemaker and military wife for a very long time. The good medical coverage from my husband's career was a godsend and it was helpful to be able to claim "homemaker" instead of "unemployed bum for 20 years" after I was finally diagnosed and well enough to work. I still had a hard time getting a job at all and I am still "underemployed" if you go by my education/skills. But until very recently, the job I currently have was all I had energy for. Anything more demanding would have gotten me fired.

I will also add that my understanding is that there is a general rise in homelessness, which points to systemic problems. That should concern everyone, not just folks like me.

Definitely more to the story... but still a fascinating look at how degrees don't mean everything (obviously)

Well. He's 55 yrs old and has been out of work for sometime. At that age no one expects to train you so you have to have had a great track record, be practically a guru and be bringing something to the company to get hired over a recent graduate. His race might play a part in potential employers being doubtful that he has those skills (probably a bit understandable given the number of black acoustical engineers) or not being able empathize with his situation.

* Well. He's 55 yrs old *

He's 55 years old now. He was 33 in 1990, when he stopped working (according to him). The idea that an electrical engineer and physicist with tons of programming experience to boot, and with references from Lockheed as a Senior Research Engineer, could not get a job from 1990 to 2007, is just not plausible, even if he took a lot of time off to care for his parents. The story is not reasonable, and there are parts of it we're not hearing and parts that have been distorted (I doubt he really got to Dartmouth at age 16).

People pass this along as two things: a) a sad personal story, and b) a commentary on the sad state of the country. The fact is that it fails as both. As a personal story, it is implausible and clearly incomplete. I feel like I am being pulled around by the nose. I feel like I am hearing only one source, and that source is less than totally truthful. The real story is probably still sad, but it's probably different and less pithy. Right now, I just feel like I am being manipulated.

And it clearly has nothing to do with the state of America in 2011, since this man's problems existed decades before, and in an excellent economy.

I don't really understand this comment. Why would it be understandable that some employers would not believe that he is a capable black acoustical engineer?

And even if they did, wouldn't it take maybe 5 minutes worth of correspondence to figure out if he was or was not? Unless you are saying there is rampant racism in the acoustical engineering industry to the point that he would not even advance to a correspondence level with a hiring manager based soley on the fact that he is black.. Which I would doubt.

Unfortunately, I've seen it, with myself in computer programming and systems administration. Not the only field where this crops up; fortunately, we're beginning to have good counterexamples of what black Americans are supposed to be:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPf03T8YN-4

Many times you need to get your foot in the door to even get those 5 minutes to prove yourself. Not arguing that racism is a factor here just playing the devil's advocate and pointing out that it is possible even if implausible.

>Well. He's 55 yrs old

I doubt that would be much of an issue, especially since a lot of the acousticians in the Boston area are around that age and I can think of at least a half-dozen Boston-area hires in that age group.

>and has been out of work for sometime

If I had to guess, I'd say this is the big issue.

>His race might play a part in potential employers being doubtful that he has those skills

Maybe, but again I've seen no evidence of this around Boston-area acousticians. I've certainly can't remember ever being on the receiving end of it.

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