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Former Dot-Com Workers Crowd Homeless Shelters
An anonymous submitter sent in this AP article - Former Dot-Com Workers Crowd Homeless Shelters. This article has inspired huge threads on two mailing lists I subscribe to, people coming out of the woodwork saying that they too were laid off/fired/quit many months ago and haven't been able to find jobs. Is the job market really that bad?
Here in Seattle, my view on the situation is that if you have hard skills - solid C++ and/or Java programming skills or even good network admin skills with experience - then you can get a decent job. Unfortunately, for all those who were working at dot-coms doing customer service, order fullfillment, copyediting, etc. you are out of luck and have to look at customer service jobs at old industry firms - which come with low salaries and no-fun workplaces.
I think people assume that dot-commers were techies - most weren't. I think a lot don't have well-defined skills and are generalists - which is hard to sell to employers these days.
As the veteran hacker (12 years) at my company, I've been tossed too many of these techno-wannabees to train. They are clueless. They ask me why I don't rewrite the Perl form processor in Java. When I ask them why I should do that, they say "Because Java is better." That's it. No qualification beyond that. Geez.
I call these people "buzzword employees". All they do is spew buzzwords to try and look 31337 and all they do is fuck everything up. It's like high tech Boomhauer CB lingo. "Yeah man, we gotta ODBC the IIS enterprise with the Sequel (SQL) Server and ramp up the TPS count and interface it all to the Excel Template for report generation for the CIO, I tell you whut."
Yeah sure, you go whip up some powerpoint slides, while I ignore you and keep the system up running normally, just as it has been. I will not upgrade my system just to make it buzzword compliant.
Well, not the shakeout is in full swing and these cookbook guys are the first to get the boot. Good riddance, I say. They were never really useful to begin with. Hope they got a Starbucks on skid row.
After reading many of the comments here, I've come to the obvious conclusion that many people here are talking out of their posteriors. I'm here to set the record straight and in doing so, punch a hole in a couple of the ridiculous dot-com myths that seem to thrive here and elsewhere.
"Good people don't get layed off" This is one of the most absurd generalisations floating around. People need to get a clue about how layoffs work. The people making the decisions about layoffs don't know shit about how good people are. All they see are numbers next to names and a burn-rate they have to go below. These guys can't pronounce half the stuff on the resumes of their technical staff, much less judge their competence.
"I saw the dot-com bust coming long before anyone else and the dotcommers are getting what they deserve" This is classic I-told-you-so-syndrome that pops up in all facets of life, whether you're talking about the dot-com bust or telling someone how you alone predicted the Rams would win the 1999 Superbowl before anyone else. The fact is that most dot-com worker saw a chance to do something they loved, in an atmosphere they enjoyed with an opportunity to make tons of money. Some jealous-folk wipe a bit of sweat from the brow in reassurance when these young people did not end up as successful as the hype of a few years ago was leading the public to believe. Using other people's misfortune for self-justification only shows how pathetic YOU are.
"Layed off workers living in San Jose should work at McDonald's to make ends meet" Trust me, if you're working at McDonald's in Silicon Valley, you'd still be in a homeless shelter, believe that. Your time is much better spent looking for a decent job either in Silicon Valley or somewhere else.
This post isn't meant to crap on ALL the comments here. Many of the comments are obviously spoken by those who've gone through layoffs or at least have true familiarity with them. Yes, there are people out there who turn down decent jobs just because they aren't paying their overpriced salaries of a year ago. And yes, people who only know HTML are in trouble while the market for C++/Java programmers is still pretty solid. But unfortunately the legitimate commentary is in the extreme minority.
Those of you doing this chortling obviously haven't actually been looking for work.
Things changed, changed badly, in the past three or four months. The job market right now is TERRIBLE, at least for Internet-related jobs. I'm a Solaris admin with 6 years experience in Solaris and >10 years total in various flavors of UNIX, and I can't find a position. (A highly skilled sysadmin, mind you, with great professional references. I'm no experience-poor hobbyist calling himself a sysadmin or a clueless tech-wannabe with a padded resume.) I stopped looking for something specific to my skill set weeks ago, and am now looking for ANYthing, even a LAN job. And still nothing. The recruiters don't call you back. Resumes are thrown in the circular bin. That flood of calls that always used to follow posting your resume on any job board has been conspicuously absent.
Hiring freezes are everywhere. Companies that aren't in hiring freezes seem to be looking for Supermen-- sysadmins and programmers that can fill the shoes of five people, simultaneously. Some of the job descriptions I've seen are INSANE. Positions for senior-level sysadmins that are also senior-level network engineers while also being Oracle DBAs with certification! I have to assume this has something with the downturn... knowledge-poor management assuming they can combine positions and Save Bundles Of Cash[TM].
It's bad, people. Pay attention. This could be you next.
The lesson I learned from this? I still don't have a job, but I know that as SOON as I can, I'm going to acquire expertise in a UNIX other than Solaris or Linux, and in a context other than the Internet. I just hope I get a chance to do so. (That's not intended as a slam against either... it's just that there seem to be a lot more jobs for the other flavors than those two.)
And I'm getting OUT of this goddess-forsaken, PHB-ridden industry as soon as I can.
It's sad to see dot-com workers lining up for spots in homeless shelters, since such spots are scarce enough as it is. There must be a better answer, and I think I've found it:
It's time to resurrect the modern leper colony.
Today, Molokai island stands as a pristine isle off the coast of Hawaii's main island. Well into the 20th century, people who had contracted Hansen's disease (leprosy) were corralled and left to fend for themselves apart from the rest of civilization. Though the leper colony became obsolete with the advent of modern antibiotics, it remains a powerful idea with a powerful purpose.
Geeks are little different from lepers, when you look at it. Both suffer from an incurable disease (at least in classic times), both are shunned by mainstream society, and both are wont to have random body parts die and fall off. A leper colony for geeks would be the natural and proper solution.
But how to get them there? Unlike in ancient times, we can't just throw them on a boat and leave them off on the shores. We need strong incentives. Part of the job is already done for us: Hawaii's pristine beauty and untrampled (except by zillions of tourists) lands are unparalleled in popularity and acclaim. Advertised as an island getaway, the leper colony could attract a large number of geeks on that fact alone. The rest of the mopping up could be done with promises of excesses of bandwidth and numerous sexually available local fauna.
Once isolated, the geeklepers would live out their natural lives. Since we all know geeks don't have sex, we needn't fear the propagation of their species. After one or two decades, the last remains of an unwashed mass of pimpled sociopaths could be collected and used as compost.
Above all, homeless shelters would again be free to admit truly down-and-out members of society who didn't go to expensive colleges and didn't recently live in the lap of luxury. That is a world worth fighting for.
Jamaica hasn't seen unemployment that low as far as I can remember. Right now we are floating somewhere around 35% and have never been in single digits. At least not in the last 40 years.
Worse yet they have a screwed up way of measuring unemployment. If you work even 1 hour out of every 3 months you are called employed. Nobody wants to count the way I suggest. I.e. If you earn minimum wage or above you are considered employed.
They are afraid to reveal that more than 1/2 the population is unemployed or at least not earning a living. At my company we have gotten applications from people who graduated university in 1998 and have never had a job.
So next time a valley worker gets laid off just stop whining jump in the car you don't actually own anymore. Draw out all the cash in your account. Dump your most expensive toys in the trunk and start driving. Stop and look for work at every town you come to. Ask about rent and other expenses too. If you find a place where you can hold $1000 per month after paying the basic expenses (Light, Rent, DSL) just settle down.
New York is paying $50,000 per year for veteran schoolteachers. Find out if you can get the government to foot the bill on a teaching degree so you can go get the $35,000 or thereabouts for an entry level classroom victim.
Money isn't everything but when the glamor goes a little of it is all you need. Better yet servicing printing equipment for a small town newspaper or going door to door for a utility company will leave you enough time to write a book, talk to people, perhaps even have sex.
OK. That last one may be wishful thinking.
I guess what I am trying to say is that for an educated man to suffer he must be forced to stay in a place with limited upertunities (like Jamaica with can get only so many visas availeble to our citezens) or he must give up and surender to his circomstances.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Is it that bad? Yes and no. And I'll give you examples of both:
A young relative of mine graduated from a respectable state university three months ago with a BS in Chem and a minor in CS. She moved into my Seattle basement and started sending out resumes for "web designer" jobs. I tactfully cautioned her that the market for such jobs was becoming *very* tough and that she might be better off looking to a chem-related company and work towards her development goals over the next few years.
Over the next few weeks, I became a bit more worried, because of several factors. Foremost, she lacks any experience in the real job market, and thus lacks the basic understanding of how to interview, and how to position herself as a desirable candidate. She's shooting for technical/dev design jobs when she needs to be looking at entry positions. Secondly, like many of her age-mates, she vastly overestimated the depth & value of her technical skills. Since I've done quite a bit of technical interviewing, I gave her my 10-question interview for an entry-level web-app developer. Basic stuff like "What kind of development do you want to do?" and technical zingers (not) like "What does SSL do?" If it has been a real interview, I would have ended it at question 5 in order to save her further humiliation. Finally, her salary expectations are completely unrealistic in the current environment. She's watched her friends with similar skillsets graduate over the past 2 years and walk into $40-70k jobs, so she feels like $40k is a reasonable minimum. This combination frightened me (I want the best for her, but I don't want her living in my basement forever), and I tried to give her some sense of reality. I pointed out that many of her friends in those $40-70k jobs are now unemployed. It didn't take. She continued searching for jobs that don't exist anymore.
Then I got laid off.
My company of 300 people had a major financial fuck-up (we grossly overestimated the target market for a new bet-the-company service and instantly saturated it in 4Q2000), and it finally hit hard with a layoff in April. I doubt the company will survive to see 1Q2002; the CFO has the brainpower of a barnacle and the money should run out sometime around September.
Now my situation is a little different. I have a mixed background (2/3 Tech/Sys+Net + 1/3 Security/InfoMgmt), with 10yrs experience. I don't have an MCSE, CCNA, or any of that crap, but I have experience that I can demonstrate, excellent references, and a heap of work samples. I know my shit, I know how to use it, and I play nice with others.
But I was blindsided by the layoff. That was stupid; it should not have been a surprise that a large number of the senior staff (read: expensive) would be let go. But I learn from my mistakes, and am relatively self-aware. I went home with my two cardboard boxes of personal belongings and worked on the yard for a few days. When the anger had left, I set about looking for a job in a careful and targeted manner. Yeah, most of the wads of cash are gone, but it took me 5 weeks to find a job with a *better* pay+bene package than the dot-bomb that gave me the heave-ho. It could have been worse, I know, but then again I'm not so proud that I wouldn't have taken work as an electrician or similar if nothing turned up.
Three months on, my relative is still looking for a job. She can get a job tomorrow at $25+k working for the state as a Chemist I, but she won't apply for it. She clings to the fiction that the fluffy web-dev Javascript-and-Photoshop jobs she wants are still out there. And she clings to the absurd notion that a just-graduated kid deserves $40-60k+. Shit, I graduated in '91 with a triple major at a US-top-10 private university, but I landed right smack into the Bush Sr. recession. It took me 2 months to land a $20k job. I could have held out for a better job then, but I don't regret taking the one offered for a moment. This isn't some sage BS about how I suffered this way or that -- you just have to take a realistic look at your situation, use your brain, and exercise your best options.
She's got another month, and I'm kicking her out. If the entire US economy were taking a complete shit, instead of a minor dip that's hitting tech kinda hard, maybe I would feel differently. But I have the same sentiment for her as I hold for every other whiner who thinks their trivial grasp of logic and knowledge makes them a technical genius deserving of huge wages. She can go take her unrealistic, job-market-clogging expectations and go live with her parents until she gets a clue. If there are ex-tech-sector workers who would rather go to a homeless shelter than move home or take a job that offends their out-of-balance sensibilities, I only feel sorry for the actual involuntarily homeless folks who have to listen to their whining.
J
I think not...(*poof*)
Depends on how trivial the code should be. "Write a function that reverses a C string in place" should be OK with no references to the man pages, up on a white board. In the past I have asked exactly that question, given the interviewee a xterm with vi or emacs running and let them at it.
On the whiteboard I would forgive simple syntax mistakes and the like. There don't need to be any function calls (a lot of people call strlen, which is fine, but not needed). I'm looking for things like "did you malloc a buffer you don't need, and then forget to free it, or worse yet return it?". If they did the online version, did they test it? With both even and odd length strings? A zero length one? A single byte?
A lot of people who claimed to know C couldn't get the syntax right for the function (given a compiler, I expect one to be able to compile edit compile until you at least get syntactically correct code!).
More people didn't know what "in-place" means (hint, if you aren't sure what you are being asked to code, ask for a clarification).
Still others merely used a poor algo, like malloc'ing a second buffer, copying the string in reverse to that buffer, and then moving it back to the first buffer. Those people are minimally qualified. If they do well on other questions the may still get an offer.
Remarkably few made one pass over the string to find the length, and then a single extra pass to do the reverse. Those are the people I was looking for :-)
The thing to remember when interviewing is any environment you give them will be unfamiliar. They will be under a whole lot of pressure (esp. now, the three people I have interviewed since my multi-month unemployment have received more simpathey from me, but not easier questions). Don't base the whole outcome on a single question.
Seriously don't base it all on a logic puzzle. They may have heard it before. Two flash lights, five people blah blah. Why are manhole covers round? So on... You may end up with a drooling idiot that red the same interviewing books (or logic puzzles...with answers!), or who got asked those same questions last interview and at least was smart enough to find the answers later!
I do show potential maintance programmers a buggy line of code and ask them to spot the bug, or short functions with obvious bugs. But these are clear bugs (like if (a or not a) then x), and not the whole interview.
I attend job interviews (as an interviewer) on a semi-regular basis where my role is to ask the technical questions. Out of 10 people I may interview, only 2 or 3 will have any decent knowledge in therr area - the rest really struggle with even basic concepts/situations.
I find it really depressing that there are so many people in the IT industry with useless skill sets or with no in-depth knowledge. And to make it worse, most times they don't even realise (or want to accept) that their skill base is so poor.
From what I have seen, skilled IT people have no problems getting jobs - it's (generally) the unskilled ones who do.
Just how much of this is due to the insane
rents in the SF Bay Area? I'm (almost)
willing to bet that no such story is happening
over in Boston, which certainly saw enough
of both the boom and bust, and where
rents are high but not insane.
Ive been reading articles about teachers, police officers, ambulance drivers and other public workers living in missions in California. The rent is too high for these lower income jobs, that people are sleeping in thier cars, staying at missions.
Here in Washington State we offer Police Officers in Cali, houses (with local credit union bank loans) and moving expenses to move up here, and live in our smaller cities where they need trained police. Works great, better or same pay and they can now own a house, and afford to have a family.
I havnt been worried about dot com'ers ive been worried about all those people who make the cities run on a daily basis, not being able to ame ends meet. Sounds like a total collapse waiting to happen.
c'mmon, 4.2% unemployment is not that bad. In my country, unemployment is around 10%.
4.2% is bad, but not for the reason most people think; with only 4.2% unemployment, it's hard for the economy to grow, because most of that 4.2% are the hard-core untrainable.
Go into any American fast-food restaurant or convenience store right now, and it's quite likely that you'll be dealing with idiots who can't even work the cash register without their manager present. If they treat you like crap, they won't get in trouble, because the manager knows he'll have trouble replacing them.
It's a little better at 4.2% than it was at 3.3%, but the principle still holds.
I'm no economist, but I bet the "ideal" unemployment rate is somewhere between 5% and 7%. Remember, 5% unemployment doesn't mean 5% starvation due to months of being out of work; it means 5% are out of a job some time during a given time period. That includes anybody who leaves one job before they find another, and then finds a new job two weeks later that pays more.
I'd further be willing to bet that 3% of the potential job pool are people who couldn't hold a job as a greeter at Wal-mart if it paid $50,000 a year, and that if any one of 'em were taking your order at McDonald's you'd consider physical violence.
-
Sorry, I can't moderate and post the same thread. Besides, you're at 4 as of when I'm replying. That and I didn't get any points today, anyway :-)
One of the problems in the technical fields is that there has been a huge influx of new products, tools, languages, features, and systems to learn. Then businesses end up making (usually stupid, and often horrendously assinine) decisions about which of these things to commit themselves to, then when they look for a techie, they demand only someone who has precisely that set of skills. If one skill is missing they can't "hit the ground running". And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive". This greatly complicated the effort to find technical talent. For every 100,000 people out there with hireable technical talent, maybe 5 to 10 actually were exactly what they were looking for (because they were so picky about an exact match) and of course they were not in the local city.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I find it hard to believe someone that used to earn around 100k is now homeless.
Don't you have any savings?
And what are they doing in the sillicon-valley anyway? Move to somewhere else, find a decent job, if you where good enough to earn 100k, you're good enough to do lot of other jobs - c'mmon, 4.2% unemployment is not that bad. In my country, unemployment is around 10%.
So don't work in what you used to do - find some other job
intersect in this topic. To name a few: the laid-off overpaid and underskilled former dot-commers who too quickly got used to living beyond their real means in the white-hot bubble economy of the Bay Area dysfunctional region; what it means to have lost a job (for whatever reason, due to no moral fault of one's own), and dealing with that, going through recovering and getting on with it - first surviving, and then finding the next viable situation - and succeeding; and, how to search for and find the right new job effectively. These are all interesting topics to discuss at some length here, because everyone reading this has or will someday deal with such issues in their own life (well, maybe not being overpaid and underskilled then abruptly fired).
The days of employment-for-life are over in the post-industrial economy. It's simply a fact that everyone in the first-world countries will very likely pursue multiple careers within their lifetime (as an aside, this is why continuing to learn throughout one's life is healthy and good). There are some exceptions to this, of course - some academic, science, clergy, military, and bureaucratic careers come to mind - but even many of these aren't forever, or change a lot over time. But, for most of us, we'll change careers two to five times during the course of our lives, and we'll like the changes.
I've had over a dozen jobs so far. Some of the earlier ones weren't paid, or paid rather little (how'd you like to make $1.25/hour for a 12-hour harvest shift on a ranch, then have them deduct 25 cents per hour for your room & board? I rode my motorcycle 300 miles each way to take that job for a couple of months when I was 17... it was the best summer job I could find at the time, and I even went back the next year - to drive a forklift. I learned some things there, saw a culture previously foreign to me, and had interesting times. Some friends found the Peace Corps of value for similar reasons).
OK - here's my jobs list, in chronological order: paper boy (afternoon), paper boy (morning), HS projectionist (carbon arcs!), HS radio announcer and disc-jockey, summer field-hand, commercial announcer, materials handling office-manager / salesman / driver, coffee shop short-order cook, data-processing operator (tape-ape), DP night manager, H200 assembly and COBOL programmer, DEC TOPS-10 computer operator, DOS/VS computer operator, DP supervisor, COBOL Programmer trainee (twice, let's not get into that), network install manager, network support manager and programmer, OS/VS1 systems programmer, MVS systems programmer (three different companies), Big-8 IT senior consultant, Big-5 IT manager, IT consultant for a small private firm, and now an IT management consultant for a large multi-national firm). It's not just a single career, is the point (though I'll admit it's been IT focused for quite a while, and is likely to remain so - but not in the same position for longer than a couple years at a time).
I was laid off once, and I've been fired a couple of times too. Some suck-ass managers can't handle honest communications, so what else can I say? (With few exceptions, don't trust an IT tech manager who's never been fired - (s)he's more politician than honest, won't work with you when you're right; (s)he will likely stab you in the back at the first opportunity that may present itself. Ah, here's another juicy topic - IT politics rears its ugly head.)
Early in one's career it's easy to find the next job. That's all it is, then - a next position - and all you need are the technical skills on your resume and showing up (clean, rested, and well-dressed) to convince the hiring manager and her technical interviewer that you've got the chops and want to work for them. However, as your career evolves (and one hopes it will) other factors beyond mere technical skills start to become increasingly more and more important for finding that next right position: things like appropriate presentation and personal style, smooth people skills, fitting into a company culture and ecology, good communication and negotiation skills, management judgement, thinking on your feet, and coolness under fire. These factors all become more important in your job as you (and your pay scale) rise in IT management. No dot-com buzzword lamers need apply.
Losing a job unexpectedly is emotionally devastating. Personally, I'm not sure I'd keep a position where my next task would be to tell people they were simply being laid-off. I guess it would depend upon how well it was going to be done and what accommodations the company would make available to them. (Working through the process of shedding an obviously bad employee is another matter though, as they will get ample warnings to shape up or ship out in that process.) Still, it's a hard thing to lose a job. I believe it's harder on most men than most women, because many guys tend to define themselves through their work, whereas most women are a little more balanced about working to live rather than living to work, in my experience.
Losing a job is a high stress event in anyone's life. It ranks right up there with a death in one's own family, or a divorce. As such, it's not something one just deals with rationally at first - or even for some period of time. (This might go a way to understanding why a few former dot-com staffers are now staying in homeless shelters in the Bay Area.) The process of dealing with the loss of a job is a lot like the one that is inevitable for any other major loss - impending divorce, death of a spouse or child, even the imminent prospect of one's own death. It's the progression through denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and finally, acceptance. I've been through it, have you? If you have, it wasn't very much fun at the time, was it? Like those other major life changing events, it's a time to draw close one's supports, find a way to get through the darkness, and seek another path to peace with what is, and go on to what's next, whatever that may be. (I lost both parents to cancer in the late '70s - it took years, a failed marriage, and a good friend, for my grief.)
However, when one gets laid off - you're supposed to pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and then get back in the race. Yeah, I know it's not much fun at the time, but that's the only way you're going to find your next position, so you might as well get with the program. There are more free or low-cost job finding resources out there now than ever in the entire history of this planet. Want to work in Saudi Arabia? You can find that job today! Like the idea of Las Vegas? There are all kinds of IT jobs seeking your skills there. South Florida, Manhattan, Chicago - same thing there. If you're presently unemployed and willing to relocate and make a new life, there are lots of jobs available. And we haven't scratched the surface of all the independent contracting yet. There's work out there, just waiting for your shining self and skills. If you need a job, go out and get one real soon, or quit your snivelin'.
It's a blessing in disguise. Now's their chance to really help society, and get the homeless up to speed on technology. They'll learn Java! They'll set Google as their default search engine! They'll learn to turn off JavaScript in their browser! They'll change the world! They'll be no more "digital divide".
--
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Heh, if you're living in a homeless shelter, then that should be a big, red, blinking sign that your life is not on track and you're not following a sustainable path for employment in the future. Learn how to do something else. Go back to school. Assess what you're trying to do with your life. I think anyone paying $3 grand US a month for rent in Cali is insane. Move somewhere else. Reality-check time.
Nobody - but nobody - that I know who legitimately understands technology, has good qualifications, and most importantly, can do something besides useless "process meetings" and powerpoint slides - is worried about getting a job, or keeping a job. I still get cold calls, and a quick scan of monster.ca lists loads of jobs in technology. This is in CANADA! Our unemployement rate is more like ~8-10%, and in my area (Atlantic Canada) it's more like ~20%. Most americans need to contend with a rate below 5%!
Mind you, I did my time in the trenches, I produce product to deadlines, and I understand what I do. I have a Engineering degree, not a CS degree. I might have done CS, but there were way to many of those cookbook .com'ers in CS when I looked at it - people wanting to program for the money, not because it was what they were good at. That devalues the degree in the workplace. I suspect it's these people that are screwed.
Those who can do things will never have a problem finding work. If you can't do anything, then you're in big trouble - and you should be.
Another few words of wisdom are to make sure you have at least a few month's bills worth of cash in the bank. If you don't, then you're spending too much money. Having debt is one thing (ah, I love my student loans..), as long as you're able to service that debt through a dry spell.
..don't panic
And if they have excess skills, they are "too expensive".
This seems to be the tip of the iceberg in a major anti-tech backlash - probably consistent with the "irrational exhuberance" against solid techs in the stock market.
I've been dealing with private company funding (yea, nice timing, eh?) and have had to deal with a consistent thread: technical people are making too much money.
Mind you, I'm paying a CCIE and RF expert $75K, a CTO $85K and the CEO is still under $100K - for a growing startup with good performance and a team with exceptional industry experience (these people are starters as well - commandos who build, operate and manage with solid backgrounds doing this before). These wages, which would be considered poverty levels in the tech industry a year ago, are only marginally balanced to the recepients by their equity.
Yet I'm hearing frequent whines from prospective individual investors about "how horribly overpaid the technical people are" by an alleged factor of double (this coming in many cases from old money, and Wharten MBA grads, mind you!). There's also the frequent reference to how technical people really shouldn't have equity stakes, since they "don't understand the business the way an MBA would."
Suggested retail price for techies?
CCIE: $45K
Wireless Engineer: $30K
Network Operations Staff: $6/hr
In other words, the establishment is having its counter-revolution and working with great vigor to counteract the impact technology has had in creating new wealth (and disrupting the social order).
*scoove*
I have applied for many jobs for which I'm incredibly well qualified, and been turned down for various reasons. Many times they won't hire someone with my qualifications even at entry-level salaries because they believe I'll hop to the next available job when the market picks up.
Other times I can't get someone on their end that can even understand my thrice-simplified, dubmed-down resume, since during the beginning of the .com squeeze last year most companies replaced techies in the hiring chain with marketroids and suits, because they thought MBAs would be more concerned with the flow of money into their coffers and less concerned with the needs of the other technies.
And don't even try recruiters right now. Get a clueless recruiter talking to the clueless people on the hiring end, and you're better off walking door-to-door in the more developed areas of town. Even the best recruiters I can find have a hard time understanding my resume, which most techies and even non-technies from other fields have told me is very easy to understand. Filter job-search language through three levels of uneducated indirection and the childhood game of Telephone takes on an entirely new meaning.
But I've seen things pick up significantly in the last month or so, only if you have _real_ skills to offer. I think many companies over-compensated and realized that technical position != .COM position, and many companies have struggled to fill the _truly_ skilled positions since December or January. If you see the same company posting the same job again and again, they could just be trolling to build their resume files, or they could really be desperate! Go seek them out at their headquarters and demand to see someone on the hiring side, and ask if their position is for real, and ask for something reasonably but substantially more than they initially want to pay, and you might get a reasonably mellow job with a good salary even now.
First of all, educating yourself is the best investment you can make during a recession. The opportunity cost is much lower now, than it was two years, because you aren't foregoing a $100k/year job that you could have had (most likely, you couldn't find a very good job right now).
:-)
Second, chances are that the American economy will not collapse, and that the computer industry will not collapse either. The fundamentals are still there, and I think that the industry will continue to be strong, and that the US will be the leader, for the foreseeable future. Even if technology does collapse, your degree will you man you're more qualified for that grocery store clerk job than the average joe on the street.
"Top consultants and contractors once named their salaries in the valley. Now, even those who qualify for unemployment benefits soon discover the $40 to $230 weekly check will not cover an apartment here, where rent averages around $1,800 a month."
Which brings up the question:
1. Why didn't they put any money away for a rainy day? If they bought their own hype, expected to live off stock options, and didn't put any savings away, then they deserve to suffer for their own lack of foresight.
2. If it costs so much to live in the valley, why don't they move somewhere else? The saleries may be lower elsewhere, but the cost of living is generally MUCH cheaper. Here in Austin, decent aprtments can be had for $600 or less. And Texas, unlike California, has no state income tax. Nor does it have an artificially induced power-shortage brought about by short-sighted politicians who didn't understand economics and evidently didn't realize that prices can go up as well as down. (Or, like the poor yuppie victims mentioned in the article, that stocprices could go down as well as up.
3. Why aren't they staying with friends or family who are still employed? If they don't have any in the valley, why don't they move away? And this isn't some "if you only walked a mile in their shoes" BS. I spent four years living in someone's living room while I worked temp jobs and paid off credit card debt from my immediate post-college years, when I was making a hell of a lot less than $100,000 a year (try around $20,000 in 1991). Easy? Hell no. But I did it, and I'm currently debt-free. Unless your relations are really strained with friends and family (and there's another sign that something might be wrong with your outlook on life), they can support you during lean times, and expect you to do the same.
4. I've been to the valley twice this year, and I seem to remember a lot of "Help Wanted" signs in McDonalds, Burger Kings, etc. Why aren't they working there? There's nothing wrong with working a lower paying job until something better comes along, and to my mind it's far less injurous to your dignity than mooching off government handouts or the kindness of random strangers.
This story reminds me of that National Pravda Radio story on the woman who got a job with Dell, and then was let go before she ever started working. I felt empathy for her right up to the point where they mentioned she had spent $3000 on a purebreed dog to play in the yard of her custom-built house. Not only did she count her chickens before they were hatched, she spent the money she was going to get from the chickens in advance. If you're going to spend money like an idiot, don't expect any sympathy from those of us who put our money in the bank instead of spending $3000 on a dog. (Here's a tip: You can get a dog that's just as cute and friendly at the SPCA for under $100.)
Look folks, no one is guaranteed a ticket to easy street. No one should be saved from the consequences of their own poor decisions. Yeah, getting laid off sucks, but how you prepare for and respond to those situations is up to YOU. You shouldn't ask society and/or government to bail you out from your own shortsightedness. Thankfully, in a capitalist econonomy, you can generally get as many second or thirtd chances as you're willing to earn. In nature, making mistakes gets you killed.
"3.2 percent unemployment rate"? Poor frigging babies! Go over to France, where they have all sorts of welfare and unemployment benefits. And, directly related to same, unemployment around 15%. That's why high French officials warn other EC countries darkly not to engage in "tax competetion," because they know their creaking, failing socialist economy would inevitably lose jobs and industries to dynamic, nimble economies, like those of the United States. Yes, you're more likely to get laid off here than in Europe, but you're also much more likely to find a higher paying job afterword. The creative distruction and economic dynamism of capitalism offers far more opportunities to rise to the top than tired old socialist economies. That's why people write books with titles like "Thriving on Chaos." Yes, you're more likely to get laid off, but in the long run that's the only way that your children will be able to enjoy better lives than the ones you lead. That's a price worth a few layoffs.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I don't live gratuitously in Silicon Valley. I live in the city of San Francisco, which is in my native region, and wonderful, culturally. I live in an inexpensive 2 bedroom apartment with a friend, and my share of the rent is $1250. So although I had saved up $5000 over the less than half a year of employment I've had since I graduated from college, it is all long gone.
I get the impression that were I a couple of years older (I am 22), I would not be having this trouble finding work. Although _I_ can think of plenty of types of technical jobs I could and would love to do as a generalist (dept. liason, field engineer, alpha geek, internationalization engineer, etc.), apparently employers do not agree.
http://www.jamesarcher.net/images/willcodehtml.j pg
In my past dotcom life I was a "product manager." As an unemployed bum, I haven't had but 2 interviews in 4 months of looking. I think that employers are figuring out that "product manager" means "talentless middle-management hack" and they are figuring out how to do without us.
I am not a programmer, but everywhere I look I see job opportunities for them. That part of the job market looks plenty strong to me. But if you don't actually PRODUCE something, god help you! I'll be working at Kinko's soon for 1/3 the salary. The last few months have definitely been a personal low. (Can I get a +1, Pity now?)
I guess it never occurs to people that they might do what college students, recent graduates, and other financially strapped and/or marginally employed people have done since time immemorial: Find a roommate! Sheesh. When I got out of school in the early 90s and went to live in New York City (making a princely $10/hour -- this with significant business and tech experience and a degree from a top-ten university), I had friends who somehow managed to get by on even less than I did. Typically their living situation went something like this: Minuscule two-bedroom apartment with three or four people occupying it. Either there were bunk beds in the bedroom(s), or someone had a bed lofted over the couch in the 80-square-foot living room. Dinner was ramen noodles, the entertainment budget was sufficient to cover maybe two beers a week (though probably not if you bought them at a bar), and there was nothing as extravagant as cable TV.
This does not make for a glamorous life, but then again, it doesn't require much income either. Assuming rent of $2,400 a month, that's $600 divided four ways. You can cover that working at Starbucks: Every time I visit the Bay Area, I laugh when I see the help-wanted signs offering $9+/hour plus tips and benefits and, probably, a handful of stock options! Maybe that's not quite enough because you've still got student loans or something, so you get a second job temping or whatever. Oh, the tragedy.
Basically, I contend that former dot-commers who declare themselves homeless are either (a) unwilling to stoop to a job they consider beneath themselves or (b) unable to throttle back on their consumption. There are homeless people with real problems: They're substance abusers, or mentally disturbed, or illiterate, or single parents with kids. Them I feel sympathy for. These posers who are whining about not being able to find sufficiently cushy jobs, on the other hand, are not about to earn my sympathy.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
The problem is that I'm simultaneously underqualified and overqualified - I don't have the depth of experience in any one or two skills to make me the "best" candidate for a job with a narrow focus, and all the extras just tell most employers that I'll be looking to leave ASAP, so they'll have to hire someone else anyway (which isn't true in my case, but they don't know that). My last IT job was working technical support for a well-known tax-preparation company's consumer tax software. All my "evaluations" said I was doing well above average, but I was still one of the 98% or so laid off in the middle of April.
And do you know what I'm doing for money now? Any day I don't have an interview (most of them) I'm down at the day labor agency at the crack of dawn; when I'm lucky I get called to work for barely above minimum wage doing semi-skilled construction work.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
No, its not that bad. But most .com'ers won't settle for too much less than the huge startup they're coming from. There's thousands and thousands of jobs, many minimum-wage or aroud there, and they can at least find SOME income instead of that "I can't find a job and will rely on the rest of you guys to support me" mentality.
There's jobs, but no former CEO would catch himself dead flipping burgers or working retail, even though they're perfectly good jobs for anything. No, its not an IT job or something "high tech", but its a freaking INCOME. Glad my taxes aren't only going towards the guys using the money to buy more drugs, but lazy former suits who would rather not work than work for $5-$8 an hour.
- A few weak statistics to "back up" their claims.
- A "personal perspective" (interviews with individuals) to show that the statistics are true.
- "Expert" commentary. (Ilene Philipson, the clinical psychologist).
- Overdramatized prose. Like: a surprising number of former high-tech workers are rubbing elbows with society's castaways
Remember how we were being told that there was a terrible shortage of tech workers one or two years ago? Perhaps there was, but I certainly didn't see it. At the last two companies that I've worked for, I spent a significant amount of time interviewing SW-Engineer candidates. Time I should have spent programming. If there was such a shortage, then were did these people come from? (btw, most of them were very qualified)Like most of what you see in the media, this article is partial-truths, rumor-mongering, hype and fiction.