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Comment by beering | Hacker News Reader

These people still remember when you could graduate high school, go to work for GM for a few decades, and have the company pension to depend on in retirement. A suburban house with a white picket fence is somewhere in there too.

Nowadays we're much more used to the at-will relationship. The employment only lasts until either the employee or the employer decides that things would be better off if the relationship ended. I don't think either is "weird" - just mindsets from different places/times.

Actually, that kind of sounds like dating too.......

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Yeah, that's true -- perhaps weird isn't the right word for it; more like foreign (to me). I find the idea of being so dependent on a corporation terrifying, so it's fascinating that some people have just thrown themselves into the arms of the the social contract without any qualms or backup plans.

edit: OK, that sounds harsh. I have no idea what this dude had for qualms or backup plans; I'm just generalizing based on what I read about him. If you're out there, Todd, don't take my comments personally.

At 52, he had no such notion at all, I can virtually guarantee it. That employment model, predicated on strong unions in most cases, was well on its way to oblivion in the mid 80s, and by the time he was actively working, say in the late 80s/early 90s it was on life support. By that time there were vanishingly few people who though they were going to GM or US Steel for a lifetime job with a pension. This millennial vs. the 50-year-old thing is crazily ahistorical.

What am I supposed to do, live in fear every day of my life that my job might disappear tomorrow?

I think it's important to cultivate a skillset that makes you valuable in the market, not just to rely on the security of your current position.

Yeah, it would probably bother me less if it were possible to find a job in a reasonable amount of time. Everyone I know who lost a job recently couldn't find work for months. Any reliable trade I can think of takes years to learn if you're apprenticed full-time, so how could I pick that up on the side?

It doesn't help that, even though I went to a pretty nice college, the "career center" encourages resume-spamming as a good way to find a job. And they have completely ass-backwards advice for what to put on a resume - they're very buzzword-focused. I'd like to think I have marketable skills but I never learned how to market them effectively. I've been working on it but how do I know it will work until I really need a new job? And what if the economy gets worse before then? For that matter, how do I know what skills are in demand right now?

Well, you could just get a degree in CS :)

In all seriousness, I don't really have any advice about it, except to say, skills pay the bills. Marketing yourself is great but IMO you are better off taking the time gathering expertise in your field. There's a book on this topic called "So Good they Can't Ignore You" that I highly recommend.

I have a degree in CS. I also had 3 years experience as a professional programmer when I was laid off. Let me be clear: resume spamming does not work. I was on unemployment which requires documentation, so I know that for 9 months, I applied to a minimum of one job per week. In that time I got only 3 calls back and one interview. Fortunately I interview very well :)

No, but it might be a good idea to be prepared for that eventuality. Being prepared means also you won't have to be afraid ;)

Should companies be forced to employ people indefinitely?

No, people can just starve on the streets, that's fine.

Edit: this is a flippant response to a thoughtless question. The short answer is "no" and the long answer is: I'm really interested to hear what ideas you come up with when you think about it for more than 5 seconds.

I'm a grown adult who is perfectly capable of maintaining a savings account and investing in a network of peers who I could ask for help with acquiring another job. Why should that be my employer's responsibility?

Lots of "perfectly capable of adults" maintain a savings account and cultivate a network they think can fall back on in hard times. Far fewer than you think are able to save enough or have that network come through. In fact, assuming one's savings account is large enough, or one's network is strong enough, is an assumption born of privilege few, even in America, ever know.

That is demonstrably insufficient. From the article: "I was a volunteer firefighter, I coached football and baseball, I was saving my money, doing everything you're supposed to do". This guy had tons of contacts and a savings account, and he ended up homeless.

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