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Finding work should be your primary focus, yes. But employment counsellors will tell you that you cannot and should spend 8 hours a day doing it. That's just a recipe for burn out. After you've applied for a few thousand jobs and been rejected a few thousand times, applying for more jobs is an exercise in futility and a recipe for depression. You're obviously doing something wrong. Figure out what you're doing wrong, fix it, and then try again.

"When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job."

This assumes there's enough of a job market "out there" that after more than 6 months you can still burn 40 hours per week on it.

"This is not possible if you're dicking around with ... volunteer work."

This doesn't even make sense. Most volunteer work doesn't require much money. You may be confusing setting up a charity or donating to a charity with volunteer work at a charity. Even something "time consuming" like serving soup at the church soup kitchen can't burn more than a couple hours.

I did volunteer work at a soup kitchen and through the connections I made there I worked with someone who kicked my butt and fixed my resume. If that hadn't happened i wouldn't be making the salary I am now.

The ancient wisdom: give and it will be given you is mysteriously powerful. Humans want to help those who help others, it's in our genetics.

I guess this also proves the power of networking =)

I can not recommend this advice enough. Give and it will be given you.

It is the first step of forming an alliance and symbiotic relationship between adversarial systems.

When two humans want to acquire all the assets of the other and make the other one the slave, the first step in starting an alliance is doing a cost benefit analysis of how things would be easier for both if cooperation was done. Often times the one persuaded is reluctant until one human takes a leap of faith and gives, in expectation of receiving. It's all highly mathematical and I could create an algorithm to describe it. But you wouldn't recommend that either.

If you've been looking for work full time for 6 months and not a single employer has wanted to hire you, being unemployed for 6 months is the least of your problems.

Absolutely correct. The proposed scenario suggesting that the long term unemployed consists of competent, skilled and psychologically capable people who have spent 8 hrs a day working hard preparing and customizing resumes and going on interviews, but have not had a single offer after more than six months of doing this on a daily basis is complete fiction. Perhaps there is a single person who falls into this category, a minute fraction of a single percent of the long term unemployed. Even that assumption that out there is one single competent person who did all this and had no offers is highly questionable. Portraying something that ranges from non-existent to exceptionally rare as the normal condition is just promoting nonsense. The reality is that the long term unemployed population is not comprised of competent and skilled people diligently working 8 hrs each day seriously seeking a job by contacting companies, sending out resumes, and going on interviews.

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Usually, what happens is, they spend the time looking for jobs they are qualified for and want, and don't get. Then they spend some of their time looking for jobs they are overqualified for as well, and usually don't get.

That's 6 months.

I've done it. I was unemployed for about a year; during that time I went on about a dozen interviews, did volunteer work, took courses etc. so as to have something to explain what I did during this blank period on my resume.

I learned much better multi-tasking skills during this period, and how to organize dozens of contacts, because if job x calls you and you've applied to 28 jobs in the last 10 days, you have to know immediately who they are and what they do as well as what you said to them in your customized application.

Personally, I'd like to see better integration between linkedin and my smartphone to facilitate this. Anyone working on that?

Applying to jobs is hard, not getting them is hard, and there's about 10% unemployment in the US for a reason. It's not just because 10% of people are lazy or incompetent and 90% are hardworking and good.

Perhaps part of the problem is poor math, logic and research skills.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

> Nonfarm payroll employment edged up in March, and the unemployment rate was little changed at 7.6 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

> In March, the number of long-term unemployed (those jobless for 27 weeks or more) was little changed at 4.6 million. These individuals accounted for 39.6 percent of the unemployed.

One must wonder if 39.6 percent of 7.6 percent is 10 percent, or is it 3 percent.

A three percent incompetence rate is lower than ten percent. It's also almost identical to the 3.1% of the population who are under correctional supervision: either in prison or on parole. (http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/aainjail.htm)

With a full 3% of the population actually in the correctional system, it is not hard to imagine that there is also 3% of the population incapable of contributing meaningfully to a job. Half of Detroit residents are functionally illiterate. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/07/detroit-illiteracy-...) 36% of Washington DC residents are functionally illiterate. (http://voices.yahoo.com/more-than-one-third-washington-dc-re...) Nationally, 21% of adults are functionally illiterate. To think that the vast numbers of illiterate adults who are also unemployed are ready and capable of holding down a job in a meaningful sense is a complete fantasy.

Yeah, you're focused on unemployment numbers after the redefinition of unemployment. That's not as accurate. Technically there were a lot of unemployed left out of the earlier evaluations as well, but this problem is worse now. It's to the point where the data isn't nearly as useful, or perhaps is useful in different ways. Either way it's a very poor tool for measuring long-term unemployed.

Your illiteracy studies? Not particularly rigorous science behind them. Not usually a good sign when what you cite sources no peer-reviewed studies at all. It's interesting that you chose those two places along with the correctional system to focus on, though.

But go ahead, blame my math, logic, and research skills.

The National Institute for Literacy is a federal agency that was established by the National Literacy Act in 1991 and reauthorized in 1998 by the Workforce Investment Act. There's nothing wrong with their methodology. Their measurements are consistent with other studies, but theirs are the most recent and are done nationally so are likely the most reliable. Feel free to cite other studies if you prefer, I notice that your post contained no references, just smug dismissals of data with citations.

Now you've moved from saying I'm bad at math to calling me smug, and saying that I'm dismissing your data. I'm not dismissing your data; you have cited NO DATA.

Your first link referenced what amounts to a policy paper by the Detroit Regional Literacy Fund. Which is actually interesting because it implies the link goes to a study by the National Institute for Literacy.

As an aside, I'm not doubting the reputation of the National Institute for Literacy. I just don't trust any study I can't see the data from. This is a personal thing, but it comes from working and being friends with people that routinely manipulate data for Federal Policy Think-Tanks.

So first you have the Huffington Post with two sources, one that doesn't have any references in it and makes statements without visible justification and another that is The Wall Street Journal. Second, you've got a Yahoo Voices article: Your second link listed these sources: www.proliteracy.org, The Washington Post, Wikipedia, BBC News and the Associated Press. So you've got publications sourcing other publications.

The reason I don't immediately trust everything on the Huffinton Post and periodicals that don't actually source any studies AT ALL, is because they often draw inaccurate conclusions from bad data, or use sources that have no scientific grounding.

This happens a lot with medical studies.

The other problem is you seem to be assuming that the unemployed population is the same as the illiterate population. I don't know why you assume this, as your sources don't have any causative inferences.

Detroit has high illiteracy. Detroit also has high unemployment. Without a study, though, there is no implied causation.

If all you want is a citation from a periodical, I can do that: how about this that says 53% of recent college graduates are un- or underemployed?

http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/one-in-two-new... , or

http://www.wjla.com/articles/2012/04/overqualified-college-g...

A better choice is to try to make something great... especially for HN followers.

But doesn't your point #2 conflict with #1?

This is obviously industry-specific but assuming you have the skills, doing contract programming requires only trivial up-front cost (a domain name and server, but most who work with the web would have that already) and it's certainly not a $15/hr job.

As one of my siblings comments says, it's your responsibility to have a safety net of your own (6 months of all your expenses is a pretty standard number). Not doing so is simply irresponsible unless you're struggling to keep food on the table as it is.

Yes, it is industry-specific. Not only do software engineers have the necessary skills to do contract programming or start something up by default, they also make enough money such that building up a nice amount of savings is a trivial issue.

Outside software however, things are quite bleak. Many people are stuck in that awful income range where they make too much to qualify for government aid, but too little actually save any meaningful amount of money[1]. And, unlike with a lot of software companies, their jobs don't really allow them to work remotely. So when they become long-term unemployed, they get hit hard.

[1]You know, software is kind of a unique field, in the sense that you have both ends of the income spectrum. On the one hand, you have homeless wanna-be founders who eat nothing but ramen all day. On the other hand, you have people who get paid six figure salaries in comfortable office environments. What you don't have however is people who are in the 20k-40k range. As a result, most software engineers cannot sympathize with those people.

"who are in the 20k-40k range" - Sounds like badly paying startup.

Well, you not saving money is nobody's fault but your own. And if you can't pay your bills, you can either take advantage of any of the many safety nets provided by the government, or you can use any of the natural safety nets that are available to everybody but the most antisocial people; friends and family. Jobs are not a right, they are a privilege.

There's an interesting amount of money you can make as a person living in the United States where you're not making enough money to both survive and save on your own; and, you're making too much money for the government to go out of its way to help you. I've had friends in those situations over the course of my life. I believe I've even heard of situations where people would turn down raises or even turn down jobs because making money at the new level earned them less money than the government help they were getting, and the government would stop giving them any help if they passed a certain threshold.

Maybe in your situations you've been lucky; but I've seen people on really hard times that cannot readily save. I'm grateful to know they're living stably now (as far as I know, little-to-know savings).

Yeah, we talk about "means testing" social security payments in this country, but little talk of "means testing" welfare recipients.

I worked with people 20 years ago (at a burger king) who would turn down shifts because that extra $15 for a 5 hour shift would put them over a limit and they'd lose all their food stamp money. We're very keen on progressive taxation, but apparently progressive welfare is too far out of our realm of possibilities.

Would like to point out that many years ago with respect to collecting unemployment that it was clear to me (after speaking to the former employees) that the ss office in the state that we were in was purposely coaching employees on how to stay on unemployment as a way of regulating the labor supply which could only absorb so many people otherwise wages would be depressed. My point is simply that there could be multiple masters being served here by these policies. Not saying that is why it is happening in your example but on the surface some things that don't make sense sometimes fulfill another purpose.

Another example might be looking the other way while employees cheat on expense reports. They get the money and everyone avoids additional payroll taxes.

Oh, I really do believe you're correct - there's too much of a system in place which needs to justify itself and the people who put it in to place. I think you're very right with the 'many masters', I just wish we didn't have to be so cynical to be able to spot these sorts of things.

It seems like we should just give everyone food stamps. Then this artificial benefit cliff doesn't occur.

How on earth then are so many illegal immigrants making enough money to both survive and also send money back to their families in their native countries?

Also, anecdotally, and since you brought it up, I was in a situation where I lived for many years at or below the poverty line, but I made due by living in inexpensive apartments I split with other people in the same situation. I think most young adults who aren't given a trust fund or financial help from their parents go through a period like this in their lives, usually while developing more marketable skills or working their way up a company's hierarchy.

The point is, you learn to make do, and you learn to survive, just like everyone else on this planet does. And if you want to increase your standard of living beyond sharing a dingy apartment with other people then you make yourself more valuable to employers somehow or accept your lot in life.

> How on earth then are so many illegal immigrants making enough money to both survive and also send money back to their families in their native countries?

no taxes? no health care? no social security?

People with salaries close to the poverty line don't really pay much in taxes.