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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

If you were my little brother, and you told me that you had applied to 100 jobs you were strongly qualified for and got zero offers, I would put on my big brother pants and make some fairly pointed observations about your skills, beginning with lead qualification. I would then advise working on skills like lead qualification over sending out 100 more resumes into a process which, as your big brother who loves you has to point out, you must have designed to fail. It should not be difficult to get radically better at it, because a) you've got nothing but free time and b) the place where you're starting from is not terribly advanced.

Also coming from the place of big-brotherly-introvert love: if you are aware that networking is important and networking takes place at events that you don't go to, this suggests a fairly obvious strategy that actually works.

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"At the age of 29, I've likely forever lost the following opportunities due to cost and probable inability to make up for lost wages and career potential:

- Getting married. - Having children. - Studying any more, whether that means grad school, law school, or even just night classes at a random community college."

So let's go through this step by step:

1) Getting married doesn't require money if you find the right wife, the kind you REALLY want. My wife and I were married by a justice of the peace in a living room with nobody watching. Why? Because we didn't have money, and post 2008, our families didn't either. We "eloped" so that we could be the bad guys, and eliminate the guilt from our families about not being able to pay for a wedding. It worked great. Her parents and mine felt zero guilt, although there was temporary anger towards us. Having zero guests made sure there was no envy between relatives, and all is well now.

2) Having children: Interesting how white, middle class people think having kids is the most expensive thing ever. It's not. My wife was considered to be so infertile that the Dr. wouldn't even prescribe her birth control. She wasn't even having periods. She got pregnant through some crazy and awesome quirk, and we became parents when we hadn't planned on it at all. At first we freaked, but then when I met neighborhood kids (El Salvadoran) in the barrio (very safe by the way) we were living in, and realized how well they were doing in school, life, and health, I realized you don't have to be rich to have kids. You just have to be smart enough to realize that kids need love, patience, shelter, and food. They DON'T need $800 strollers, $400 cribs, a nursery, NEW clothes. NEW anything. You can get all of it at the thrift shop. I make decent money now, but I didn't then. LEARN from immigrants. You live in fucking Canada, and like the U.S. your nation is filled with people who know how to stretch a buck and be happy. Your parents didn't know how to do either thing nearly as well, IMHO. (I'm speaking generically about the baby boomer generation, who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents. I exclude my Dad from this, because he taught me to live on the cheap my whole life.)

3)Studying any more: If you think that law school, or grad school are what it takes to get ahead from your situation, you are a fucking fool. Both are rip offs even IF you HAVE the money and time. You are much better served by going to night classes at community college (provided you have access to one that works with the private sector business community to train in valuable, marketable skills). Or you can go online and educate yourself in the arcane technological arts which are guaranteed to get "your foot in the door" of a business. I got into my field as a lowly programmer. Now I do IT strategy, data governance, business analysis, as well as the fun techy stuff that I choose to focus on. Point is this: if i wanted to, I could just be the business guy that most people want to be. But I got my foot in the door on a weird skill that universities suck at teaching in a time and cost efficient manner. Where did I learn said skills? Online classes that cost me $300 a pop. A total of 4 over the course of a year. I attended a major university. I loved it, but compared to the new generation of online education, it was a fucking rip off.

Stop whining, and start learning from others who have made a life for themselves. We are not the baby boomers. The house in the suburbs doesn't really make sense. Kids don't need their own yard if they can go to a park that's the size of a 100 yards and filled with 100 kids for them to play with, instead of 1 yard where they play by themselves.

"who I think as a whole were shitty savers and rather shitty parents."

I agree, also except for mine, who was for all intents an purposes an immigrant.

This was a really great post. Look to the people who grew up with nothing to learn that it really isn't that bad to have "nothing". (I wish I could make those quotes even more sarcastic).

> 2) Having children: Interesting how white, middle class people think having kids is the most expensive thing ever. It's not. ...

Exactly.

Our child's clothing, toys and books come from:

1. Yard sales 2. Helping hands 3. Friends and neighbors 4. Craigslist and Freecycle

Guess what? We give 100% of those things away in time. We've taught our son the concept of not holding onto physical things. All of his things came from someone else, and he gives all of his things to someone else.

He's completely good with that; at 9 years of age, he'll bring a bag of toys and books to the car and say that he'd like to give these away.

Our biggest child related expense is where we're living. We wanted an excellent public school, so we're living in Mountain View, where it's CRAZY expensive, instead of somewhere else that's cheaper.

We are fortunate that we have very solid and affordable health care through my company, though he has needed very little of it.

Thanks, JPKab, for pointing this out.

How "white"? How odd. I didn't know attitudes and ideas had colors.

You got me there. I wish I could think of a word to describe the group of people who have been brainwashed into thinking that if they don't spend shitloads of money on stuff, and buy a big house in the burbs, that they are bad parents......

But you are right, saying it's a "white" thing is racist of me. There are people of all colors who get trapped into this bullshit, as well as people of all colors who are not fooled by it.

Bourgeois. Closest English term I can think of which conveys a similar notion is WASP.

I believe they might have been called "city-folk" at some point... maybe the equivalent of suburbanites or gated-community-dwellers today. Maybe saying, "that's a gated-community mentality!" would convey a similar meaning in a succinct and relatively PC way.

What do you think the "W" stands for in WASP?

I am fully aware of what it represents, hence the need to come up with a less divisive term. I was just observing that it's often used in that context.

Diederich, it's interesting how you pointed out living in an expensive school district is your biggest child related expense. My wife and I did the same thing. We chose to live in a 1 bedroom high-rise, so obviously we sacrificed on space and "the yard." Instead we get a short (walkable or train) commute, nice parks, and have a adapted our apartment to imitate those of the Japanese (and other space efficient cultures) so that the 1 bedroom aspect isn't a problem. I love what you were saying about teaching your son to donate toys and other possessions. My son is 5, but we still need to work on that with him. Thanks for mentioning that, because it reminded me of how important it is that we follow your lead on that.

I admire what you're doing, but I just wanted to point out that there's a HUGE difference between denying yourself something because you can and denying yourself something because you can't afford it.

The $3 beer incident was poignant.

I found the book 'Nickel and Dimed' eye-opening.

Good job with your kid!

I think you've made some good observations around the expense of material goods, but as the parent of two kids, I already do this. It helps, but it doesn't address the really expensive things about life with kids.

For me, the big whoppers have been day care and the loss of income on scaling back on work. Full time day care is about 24K a year in San Francisco.

http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/child/facstaff/

This is the faculty/staff daycare that has a long, long waiting list at UC Berkeley - it is considered a very desirable program, so it's possible that you could get something much cheaper.

Another huge expense is housing. I fit a family of 4 in a fairly small (1200 sql ft) house with a garage and backyard (sweet!) in an unfashionable part of SF. Mortgage runs me about $3400 a month - sadly, if I'd waited to buy, I could probably have had this for $2600. Rent would probably be somewhere around that range.

Buying a stroller used is a great idea (I bought all cribs and beds used, and it saved me some money, but I'm really optimizing around something that takes at most 10% of the budget, if that).

I want to be sure to say I'm not complaining, I consider myself pretty lucky to have these things. 1200 sq ft with a garage and a yard is pretty excellent. Nice day care is a luxury. And I get to live in SF, which is where I grew up, and I really like it here.

I wouldn't say you "can't have kids" if you can't afford these things, so I agree with you there, but I just don't think you've identified the real heavy hitters where it comes to the expense of raising a family.

But I really don't think the problem with middle class people is that they are spending too much on strollers. It does take some serious $$$ to stay middle class in San Francisco.

Great comment! I gotta agree with you. Just live below your means and you will do fine. And you absolutely right about getting your foot in the door. I did it with some linux skills that I picked up and just kept learning on the job. I am still amazed at a friend of mine who does well with just data integration, stuff that I showed him, but he made a business out of. And yeah kids don't need designer clothes to be happy. My wife says she is going to get our kid 1 toy and he better be happy with it. We'll see.

"networking" is important. I'd have thought that "paying money to get into an event in order to network" was a sub-optimal version of networking.

I agree that zero responses to 100 letters and resumés mean that something is wrong with the letters or resumés. But the author claims to be researching and tailoring, so I'm not sure what's going wrong there.

Certainly that amount of research and work could be spent on building 'on spec' relationships with relevant companies.

EDIT:

> At this point, you're probably wondering why I'm not looking at retail, restaurant, or coffee shop jobs. The truth is that I am, but due to my resume, experience, and other such things, these places assume I'll leave as soon as something "corporate" pops up.

Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.

> Well, you really need to tailor your application to be suitable for the jobs.

Be clear: You mean "you need to lie". When applying to a coffee shop, for example:

The person with a 4 year degree will not get the job. They will leave as soon as something better comes up.

The person with a 4 year gap on their CV will also not be getting the job, as it will be assumed that they're hiding something.

No, you must not lie.

You emphasise all the customer service style jobs you've had; or you say that you want to get customer service experience with a world leader company that takes service seriously.

This does not work in the current market for the kind of role we're discussing. The hiring manager is looking for criteria to turn the big pile of CVs into a small pile of interviews.

Being overqualified, or unexplained gaps fit the bill perfectly. It really does not matter how well tailored the experience, or how impressive the covering letter.

If you are applying to a company that has a "hiring manager" and are not a perfect match, you are making the first mistake.

The manager at Starbucks is not a "hiring manager". He doesn't care what's on your resume. He cares about three things: 1) Can I work with this guy? 2) Is he reliable/competent? 3) Is he going to steal from me/screw the other staff/piss off the customers/otherwise make my job more difficult?

Not putting your college degree on your one page resume is not 'lying', it's eliminating irrelevant information in favor of freeing up space for past service industry jobs and relevant skills.

Tailoring the resume to the position is a best-practice in job applications.

What are you talking about? 11 Years ago I moved from Toronto to Vancouver. I was a web programmer in Toronto and would eventually be looking for a position of similar capacity in Vancouver.

The moment I hit the ground though, I didn't expect my dream job to land in my lap, but I still needed to pay rent. So, I walked into the local internet cafe with the help wanted sign.

Here's how it went:

Me: "Hey, I see you're looking for someone, and I could use a job right now, would you be interested in looking at my resume?"

Him: Dude, I can't pay you more than minimum wage plus a buck or two, you know that right?

Me: Yes, I understand. I just moved here though and it'll probably take me a couple of months to find a job I'm qualified for.

Him: So you're going to be looking for something better right away?

Me: Yeah, but you need a person to help you out, and some of these machines, to be honest could use a bit of a rebuild. Can any of your staff do that?

Him: No, and you're right I could use a person right now.

Me: Well, I could really use the money, and I think we'd both benefit here. I'll give you 3-4 weeks notice and help interview a replacement if you want.

Him: (after a good deal of humming and hahing and a conversation with his wife) Okay, let's do it.

Just like that.

It can and does happen. The retail industry isn't looking for a 3-5 year commitment. Hell, they hire people for the month of December only. Like anything, you need to speak to their needs and address them. In my case, most of the staff he had barely understood computers, and none of them could rebuild and clean out his inventory. I could. He gets that extra service for free in place of understanding that I'm not a long term employee.

i had that happen in SF, sent an email, got a phone call about 7 mins later, they said they were downtown, i said i was at Van Ness, 10 mins later i found their subletted unlabeled space. we chatted a bit, then they said "hey a RedHat upgrade messed our custom perl install, wanna try fixing it? so about an hour of deciding i wanted a job i was getting paid doing something i'm decent at.

On the topic of paying for networking (I'm not disagreeing with you), I was thinking that you shouldn't be paying to get into networking events generally. I know I don't. When I was in Boston, there were 10+ good networking events every week, which were almost always free. If they weren't, a few well placed emails got me in the door free. Now I'm in Ohio, and even here I can find free networking events with good people at them.

Even events like SXSWi, which are definitely not free, can be made free. Its simple, just get on a panel or speak there. Before someone says that a 29 year old wouldn't be able to do that, I say look at who is really giving the panels there. About 50% of them are under 30. Every year I have a dozen ~25 year old friends speak there. There's expenses involved in getting there of course, but if you attend SXSWi as a speaker and don't get at least one job offer you've probably done it wrong.

For me, 'networking' only really helps me when I've worked with the people. Nobody you just met at a cocktail hour with name cards is going to call you up if they have a job opening.

If you worked with someone for a few years, they will remember you when a job opens up and call you. Or at least help you when you call them.

Ideally you will have a job/internship with these people, but it works pretty well in a partnership or customer/client relationship. It even works within an open source project (though that is fairly CS specific).

Studies have shown that you're correct. Doing shared activities is the best way to network, not at a pre-talk mixer.

I feel exactly as the author. In my country (Portugal) never was such an educated generation and never was such a problematic generation. There is more than 40% of young unemployment. Does that mean that 40% of young people don't worth a dime or are making it wrong?

> Does that mean that 40% of young people don't worth a dime or are making it wrong?

Does Portugal have a minimum wage enforced by the government? Lots of people would hire workers for, let's say $8/hour, but if the law says you have to pay them $12/hr, then maybe there won't be any hiring going on.

Minimum wage is (in theory) 485€ month (around 20€/day) for a full time job.. but there is a work around where you get a job as an external employee and there is no minimal wage.

I also believe in Milton Friedman but not in a globalised world, unless we lower wages till meet India market to be able to compete. I can tell you where are US jobs nowadays. My girlfriend, in Poland works for HP for less then 8K dollars year. Master degree job, not as a cleaning lady..

I was thinking the same thing. If you send out 100 resumes a week, how great a quality can any of them be? If only because of how exhausted and frustrated you get after sending out 100 resumes. Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to write an excellent cover letter and a tailored resume.

I'm so totally with you on this part:

Take your time, research some companies where you'd be a good fit and REALLY do your best to

and then it needs to get followed with "convince the person with hiring authority in the company to hire you." The resume is designed to be rejected.

In my experience, the resume is so thoroughly designed to be rejected that you basically can't rely on it. I don't know how ordinary people would actually get jobs in this market by simply submitting a resume for an open requisition; there will always be someone out there whose resume has less HR red flags on it (probably because they falsified it) so you never even get an email back from hiring.

100% of my job opportunities have been from networking (or nepotism) and most of the people I know have the same experience.

My parents (and I'm sure many others) pushed for resume blasts until the last couple of years. It makes sense from the perspective of the world they grew up in. You sent as many as you could and got a lot of job opportunities to choose from.

I sent out 15 highly targeted applications and got a 100% response rate. All of them were polite, mostly manually written rejections. I got one interview that went nowhere. That's when I decided I'd be better off starting my own business.

What do you mean by "lead qualification"? Searching Google wasn't helpful...

Evaluating whether the position, company, culture, and long-term prospects are mutually relevant to both parties.

Operationally, answering the question: "Are you selling what they are looking to buy?"

The more sense it makes for both parties, the higher the probability for the deal to get into more advanced stages.

Your resume is like a sales lead. As someone who made a living selling these to mortgage brokers, they'd routinely ditch the low credit leads before making contact - they knew it'd be too hard to "close" that lead.

So I think Patrick is arguing that more qualification is necessary - it sounds like employers are seeing this resume as a low quality lead. Meet some people who can help you, do something that tells an employer "this person might make me more money!", etc.

I suppose from the employer's POV a resume is a lead, but from the job seeker's POV, the notion that there exists a possible target for a resume/cover letter is a lead. There is a time and focus cost to sending out a resume/cover letter (or doing stuff that actually works, like trying to get a coffee date with a decisionmaker there). You should not spend your limited time on opportunities which are unlikely to convert into mutually rewarding relationships. Getting your resume circular-filed is the least mutually rewarding relationship I can think of in the employment space.

It is a term from sales. For a particular seller of something (say, talent) there are a pool of potential buyers. They're called leads. You learn about them or they come to you. Some of them are better fits than others. Lead qualification is the process of sorting out leads who are worth your effort in selling from those who are not, who you either a) don't attempt to sell or b) use less time-intensive ways of selling.

For example, I consult, and while in principle I could attempt to sell anyone with authority to write a check on consulting engagements, I don't. If I meet someone at a party and he says "I don't have a website but..." there is no possible end to that sentence whatsoever under which he is a good prospect for business in the near term. If you want a Rails programmer? Nope, sorry, I'm probably not your guy. If you're a software company with $10k in the bank, you can't afford a formal engagement with me. Strongly qualified leads for me tend to, e.g., have over 10 employees, profitable software businesses with revenue in the millions to tens of millions, multiple opportunities for things I can do for them, a business model which suggests ample opportunity for positive ROI at the rates I charge, and some reason to have personal trust for me.

To the extent that I do active sales work (e.g. flying out to a city to meet with your CEO, creating proposals, etc), I focus my active sales work on qualified leads, rather than "any business I could possibly think of."

Applying this to a job search: he's sending resumes to places which are not hiring. That isn't a strongly qualified lead. That's like me soliciting five figure checks off every passerby in Ogaki Station. Total waste of time.

Good advice. My question: is he strongly qualified for the positions he applies to? He doesn't mention having any particular skill.

He says he could get a job worth $36,000. But he thinks he's worth more. Maybe, but it's not clear why, from the article. I think our current system creates a mismatch between skills and expectations for new liberal arts grads.

I read the $36,000 job as the one he was now aiming for, but hasn't found yet. I.e. that, failing in his attempt to find an entry-level position in a finance or business type setting (the sort of high-stress, high-pay, 70 hr/wk "ambitious" route), he's now turning his sights towards a "lifestyle job", a 40 hr/wk, $36k job at a ski resort or that kind of place.

You're right, I misread that section.

Here's another columnists retort that you may enjoy - http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/05/17/matt-gurney-o...

Thanks! A few nice points he makes:

"(survey) on young Canadians’ expectations of what they would be earning 10 years after graduation, and what they were actually earning 10 years after graduation. The expectations: Totally in line with Carrick’s letter-writer — about $90,000 a year, with, one would assume, the tailored suits, fancy cars, power and prestige to match.

The reality: $31,648. Considerably less than the self-pitying letter-writer’s $36,000."

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