Slashdot Mirror
Unemployed? How Long Until You Find That Next Job
An anonymous reader writes "If you're unemployed like me, you probably want to know how long it will last. Well, someone decided to see if they couldn't stastistically predict how long they would be unemployed by polling others - the results page is up for a variety of industries and it's interesting. Clearly the more data put in, the better the results, so while your at it, submit your own information."
Ill find a job when they stop sending me that check baby!
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
How hard would it have been to make this international ?
Well, he sure won't find a job in a department that's involved in any kind of statistical work, that's for sure. The main thing which comes out of his tables is that there is little no correlation between salary and unemployment length. The only remotely useful table in there is the unemployment by industry, but there the sample is far too small to derive any conclusions...
There's nothing wrong with not finding correlation per se, but the author of the site presents the tables as if they had some meaning, without mentioning the fact that their only meaning is that they have no meaning... He should certainly make a note about it, and that page would certainly gain from having the Pearson correlation coefficient calculated for each table (and having only two data columns in each table).
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Now why link to the site? It has practically no data so far, and that is all it's good for... There is no verification of the data, and the data is input by random visitors.
/. poll asking the same question would be many times more accurate.
A
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Asks you to enter a state and salary in dollars Any chance of including UK ppl somehow ?
I went 12 weeks without a nibble, then had three offers in February. Then nothing.
Screw the unemployment checks, I took the job.
-j
I've been unemployed since January of 2002. Thats about 28 months so far
but anyways.. I've noticed that things look like cr*p lately and it'll be a while before they improve. So i've decided that i'm going back to school to get my master's. I've wanted to do it anyways... Hopefully that'll put me in a higher standing than I am now..
On a side note; I'm not sure if this has anything to do with the times or not, but a friend of mine told me that even if someone has a ton of experience, and then they graduate college with a bachelor's or masters or whatever... Some employers tend to ignore all work experience prior to graduating. does anyone know if this is true? if it is, i think it's the most retarded HR practice i've EVER heard of. Can someone PLEASE enlighten me on the subject.
p r m t h s
strikes me as a little odd.
I am a Software Engineer and the majority of engineers that I see that are unemployed for a period longer than 1 month are either fresh out of college or were previously employed only because the industry was desperate.
My advice: Unemployeed engineers that have been unemployed longer than 1 month need to find a specialty and find a job in that specialty.
That[']s about 28 months so far - anybody fancy offering this maths/english wiz a job?
A poll on this topic should be interesting... my train of thought goes like this:
:-). There are many ways my assumptions could be wrong.. I'd like to hear some.
Most Slashdotters have BIG ideals.
Most Corporate types hate BIG ideals, (except as in BIG money!)
Few idealists are moneyed, fewer can employ others.
I guess it follows that most Slashdotters are not employed
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
This time around, hit the math books a little harder.
>
I was playing around in the "IT-bubble" for some years until eventually the company was almost dead. No sales = no profit. :)
Then I decided to do the only good thing; go back to school. At the same time I run my own (very small scale system development/management) company to get some extra cash. So in some years I'll hopefully have graduated computer science when there are more jobs.
Ciryon
I don't know if this makes any sense or not... but I would stress that it is kind of pointless to use a tool like this, since you might be an exception yourself.
Statistics often make sense on a demographical scale, but never on an individual scale.
.: Max Romantschuk
that you're going back to grammar school.
For the unemployed out there, I can only offer some economic view on what needs to happen. According to Okun's law, there needs to be a 2.5% growth in the GDP in order for unemployment to go down. The GDP figure was released last week and well, unemployment won't be going down for a while. Sorry guys, until the economy picks up somehow either through increase consumption spending, govt expenditures in the form of jobs, or increased business investment the economy will not grow to the required 2.5% and will not lower unemployment.
Click here to have a look at their bottomless stoopidity. (Yes, I know, I used the word "bottom". Don't be afraid, it's not what you think it is)
To say the current economy is the way it is because the industry is no longer desperate is to ignore the larger picture. The current unemployment situation is not being caused by companies trimming their people; it is being caused by companies imploding.
Eh? Sounds more like they are seeing if they _could_. Why would they try and see if they could not?
This is not the first recession in our history; nor is the last one for sure. Unemployment does not sound too great and does affect your confidence and all, but it happens to everyone (which is to say, much of it depends on luck not so much your skill or personality). As a matter of fact, some of, what we call, successful business men experienced the same. Have you heard of this guy, Michael Bloomberg? Well, Solomon Smith Barney fired him almost 20 years ago. He ended up starting up on his own and he's a billionaire now.
I can't say that you can be next Mike, but the point is, maybe it's a sign. Maybe success is calling you. Maybe you are not supposed to be employed (by anyone except for yourself).
Odd Tood (the site this is hosted on has some of the funniest Flash animations I've ever seen. Esp. his first one "Laid Off"... but didn't he get busted because he made some damn good money in his "tip jar" and never reported it to the IRS? Anyone have the skinny on this? PS: watch the videos. You'll laugh. www.oddtodd.com.
oh please. step down from that soap box and back down to planet earth where coders code and pedantic people have a foot shoved in the wrong place.
/. and it's quite silly in my opinion.
yeah, we don't check our spelling or grammer when posting to a silly web board or when posting an article to said board. we do, however, submit our resume to serveral recruiters. the good ones will take 10 minutes to look over spelling mistakes and to help polish it up. those are the recruiters what will most likely get the sale too.
we spend our day using software that will tell us when we haven't declared a variable or included a particular package/header. do we pay attention to details? sure, when the specs say that system needs to send a email report daily to a given group of people... the system will send a daily report to go given group of people.
those who can, code. those who can't worry about weather your posting proper english to a web board. i've seen this issue over and over on
The Tech boom is gone. And will probably not happen again. The days of $100k a year for using front page is over. So no longer expect management to treat you like gods. You are like everyone else in a tough echonomy. That being said you will have to find ways to be more adaptive in your skills and you may have to do some things you may not want to do. Including working with Microsoft Stuff, accecpting payrole of around 40k a year (depending on your locataion).
Also you can nolonger expect people to be looking for you. You will need to be proactive. Look for companies from all different types of areas. And post your resume even if they dont have any job openings, write a coversheet for the company. Then if you dont get a responce withing a week give the company a telephone call and ask them if they got the resume.
So it really depends how long it takes for you to get a job offer. If you just sit their with your resume posted on the web and mabey e-mail a resume to a couple of places asking for a 100k job it may take a years until inflation rises. But if you are really active then you can get a job within a couple of weeks.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I fight unemployment by being unemployed and not taking other people's jobs. If you want the position, take it: one unhappy unemployed less.
May John Higgins win the World Cup.
"The Tech boom is gone, And will probably not happen again."
:P
Not so! It may be gone for now, but mark my words the next tech boom is the semantic web. Companies will want their services exposed via webservices so that intelligent agents can search for goods and services automatically. This will mark a new era in terms of data accessibility, much like the internet boom in the 90's.
That's my reckoning anyway
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
... posting an article on the front page of an interracial forum that has at least 25% of non-White readers, ... with the article still being intended for White people only ... and not even mentioning this in the article
strikes me as a little odd.
I just graduated carnegie mellon for computer science. I haven't even seen an interview.
God spoke to me
To nitpick you: the spelling the grandparent post was fine, it's the grammar that needs work.
The future isn't what it used to be.
Right.. You just go on and tell that to Taco
Unable to read configuration file '/bigassraid/htdig//conf/14229.conf'
Geocrawler error message.
I personally would like to know when i will next get sex.
I was hoping to use to statistics coupled with the data gleaned from slashdot....
oh.
silly me
Man sometimes I WISH I could get laid off again.
In California... filing unemployment insurance means calling up a 1800 number and giving them your information on the phone where they schedule a time for someone to call you who asks a few more stupid questions... then every couple weeks you receive a letter in the mail where you promptly check "Yes I looked for work," and "No I didnt make any wages," and maybe one or two other similar questions... wether you want your income tax taken out of it or not... then you mail it back and go back to laziness.
Hope this is relevant. JobStats.co.uk is an interesting compilation of stats about the UK job market, e.g. average earnings by skill, region etc.
Vacancy for signature. Apply within.
A year (or two (I ferget)) California increased the ammount you get from unemployment insurance in your bi-weekly check.
So many friends were estatic... The line was "I did such a good job doing nothing... their giving me a raise."
What's sad is realizing that i'm working a 40+ hour week... doing a good job... and the previous co-worker who got laid off for NOT doing a good job... is now making ~$50/mo less then I am from unemployment insurance.
there's a big difference between what you're describing and what the internet boom of 96-00 experienced.
in a web services world it will be companies that have a solid business plan, and compines that think things trough. in the Iboom, it was anybody and everybody putting up a web site that provided nothing. there was also the fact that there was this Y2K issue that many many of companies spent millions of dollars for legal reasons to change 5 lines of code in their software systems and spend enourmous hours testing said changes across the board and saving every test log file and going through various levels of audits of the testing. basically y2k projects coupled with the internet boom kept a lot of people employed and brought in a lot of others.
exposing webservices will let a few good people work for a while.
<Rusty Voice> I remember in my day when a boy could get a job at 12 and retire with the same job at 65. None of this new fangled Screens tell people how long they will be unemployed...</Rusty Voice>
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
But I have other problems with the analysis. For example, he lumps all restaurant jobs together. This apparently includes a wide-variety of specialties (e.g., manager, cook, waiter) under a wide-variety of skill-levels (e.g., McDonalds and a Five-Star Restaurant). Similar comments could be made for Engineering. I might expect a difference in say Civil Engineers (the construction industry is doing well) and Electrical Engineers. He also doesn't consider years of experience directly. For those jobs requiring a college degree, he doesn't consider degree level. The list goes on...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
I would add some time there fella being that you are still using Cold Fusion for web applications.
four-oh-four
How about those people that figure that their sector is so fsck'ed that they change careers altogether? Or just retire? The data is a best-case estimation, really. It could be a lot worse..
Stop the brainwash
Whilst i am waiting for the page to open (and by the looks of things it has been slashdotted into oblivion) it struck me that an unemployed person is a lot likelier to make up a page like this than someone with a job :)
Never mind waiting for someone to "give" you a job.
If you want something to do, start doing it.
Instead of selling a lot of your time away to big corporations (unless you really want to, of course) and such, start your own little company. It's not that hard.
The most important thing is that you do something that you want to do and that gives you satisfaction. Don't wait for someone else to "employ" you. Take control of you own life. In the end, that's what counts for most of us.
And it's usually more fun.
(Oh, btw. don't buy into pyramid-schemes, Get Rich Quick-stuff or MLM. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.)
Wish me luck!
I have traveled to three other states besides my own looking for work. It has been just over a year since I was 'downsized' and things are very tight. Friends that know my capabilities have recommended me to their companies and they have need for more people, but not one is hiring to fill the need. My contact at the unemployment office told me last week that he may be job hunting soon, they are going to have to cut back too.
I am capable and willing to work, even starting a business of my own. Then I got to watch my savings burn up while every single business I did work for waited months to pay me. If it were just withholding payment for services, that wouldn't have been so bad, but I paid for hardware that they were using. It took me four months to get paid for a couple of large jobs and that was my limit. I closed the business and went job hunting.
Now I am in the trap of being way over qualified for the advertised openings like roofing labor and convience store clerk. They either don't want someone they know will be gone as soon as the first decent job is offered or they don't want to hire someone that has much more managment experience than they have. Some quirk about not hiring their own successor, go figure. Thanks for letting me know that my previous employer was just providing me with income because of my good looks and not because I was the highest paid technical employee they had.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
Exactly. In Michigan you don't have to interview with a live person. You interview with MARVIN -- Michigan Automated Response Voice Interactive Network (or something like that). You dial a 1-800 phone number on a specific day, and a computer asks you the questions an interviewer would ask. You enter your answers using the telephone keypad. I think you can collect unemployment for up to 2 years in Michigan -- it depends on how long you were employed, I think. Generally you get some percentage of your pay or $400, whichever is less. For most IT people in Michigan, you'll be at the cap which is $400.
;)
If you miss *one* telephone interview with Marvin, you get the chance to make it up on a Thursday or Friday, but if you miss your makeup day, then you have to go in and explain your case. It's easy to do it though because you can interview anywhere you have a touch tone phone, and you can even do it on a cell phone with the caveat that if you get disconnected in the middle of the interview, Marvin will mark your interview as incomplete and then you have to go into the office.
(I work in the auto industry, so I've got lots of experience with MARVIN.
My journal has hot
Guess what moron, 100% of those unemployed already do that. And they stand no fucking chance in hell, let me tell you.
Here's the key to job hunting: "networking"... And not the type involving NICs. My wife couldn't find a job as an accountant for over a year. Until I winced to an influential friend of ours. He made a few calls and the next week the phone started ringing.
The moral of this is: Rather than learn the next pile of buzzwords, you stand a better chance of getting employed if you play lots of golf. I'm not being nasty just telling you that as a friend.
Your pizza just the way you ought to have it.
"Well, the world needs ditch diggers too."
Judge
Looking for part time help. College students, laid off workers or whatnot. Email your resume & requirements to byron at turboweb dot net.
:)
Small Web hosting company that IS profitable, IS growing, doesn't have HUGE expenses and is self suffecient (no outside loans, no debt load, no foreign investors to decide policy).
Seeking people for:
Sales - Selling Hosting, Dedicated servers and custom development work.
Java/JSP/Servlet developer. Must have developer experience as well as understand JVM's and be able to work with Oracle 9iAS, JBoss, Tomcat and Web Sphere. Struts Knowledge requried. - Most projects are for extended Compiere CRM and building customer projects as well as in house code.
Support Staff - Mainly a "CSR" type position. Tech support is handled throught trouble ticket system and need a person who is customer oriented, who can answer questions and help solve issues as well as be able to make a sale, answer general hosting sales questions and be a general Customer Service Rep.
All a salaried/Hourly positions. Sales associates earn commissions & salary.
Send me your resumes
I found a job no problem, and I am right out of college. Good pay too! Everyone I know who is "looking for a job", isn't willing to re-locate for a job and would rather suck on unemployment. Bad economy what? I interviewed on a Thursday and had a job offer that next monday.
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
Irrelevant. It's not just tech jobs that are hard to find, it's ALL jobs. People are fighting over retail jobs at this point. A 40k job working with Windows would be heaven; but even those jobs are insanely hard to find. And every opening will result in HUNDREDS of applications.
Another great thing about not having a job is that I can say.....
First post you biotches!
Bet your ultra pleased your tax dollars are paying for this!
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Where do all of you people live who can't find work? My last employer laid off 1,000 people, and every single one of them who wanted to return to work was employed within 90 days. I even got 4 of them hired at my new job and landed $8000 in referral bonuses.
The differences (plural) between these pairs of words (plural, good) is (singular -- oops!) very easy to learn.
:-)
Physician, heal thyself
Lots of tech people are long-term unemployed. But some are obviously succeeding.
When times are tough you have to (and I hate this phrase) "re-invent yourself". During the boom it was sufficient to be a surly technology prima-donna with the social skills of Spock in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Competition is much harder now. Where I live, 18 months ago, there was at least one tech job in the weekly paper each week of the C++/Java type. Currently, there's about one every three months. Our entire national population is only 78,000 so you can imagine that we don't have exactly masses of tech jobs to start with.
The last two jobs I got weren't advertised. In fact, the jobs didn't even exist - the positions were created.
What was the secret to my success in getting employers to create a new job for me? Networking. Not the type you do with a NIC and a reel of cat5e (although it ultimately involved quite a bit of that) but going out and socializing, and meeting people who ran businesses or were in charge of IT departments.
In the current climate you can't sit at home and surf the web/newspaper/have an agency pimp your {CV|resume} - the advertised positions just aren't there. (One agency told me they hadn't seen a tech position in 9 months). You have to go out of the house and get to know people. If you have an interest that many people who run businesses share, that's even better - I'm into flying and I've met many valuable business contacts through the flying club.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Flamebait? I guess some Microsoft Flunkie moderated my post. Oh well I got karma to waste. I think you should mod this one down too!
I want my rights back. I was actually using them when our government stole them after 9/11.
What's up with the waiting list for accountants? I got the impression that was one of those industries that were always in demand.
My wife (Level 4 CGA) got her first accounting job after graduating in Commerce last year after a couple of months searching. She didn't like the commute, and later in the year find another job in a month or two with a big pay raise and within walking distance. She's now decided she doesn't like working with the disorganised and flighty people at the advertising company, but is fairly confident that she can find another job close in a short period of time. It seems there are lots of jobs on the CGA's web site (Toronto).
Companies get their yearly budgets usually on January 1. Makes sense that they would spend January looking at candidates, then hire in February.
As a *brick and mortar* architect (I read /. because I am conscripted into IT "manager" postition here), I can tell you that other professions have it far worse. We make half the money and are laid off en masse far more regularly than programmers et al. Welcome to the real world.
I've done a thorough check of google sites, and I've found that the average period of unemployment was 2.2 months, at which time the person started MAKING MONEY FAST with the brand new techniques he learned through a unique program he was able to find over the internet.
I hate it when programmers call themselves "Architects", and more when they use it as a goddamn verb.
I use to work at.. (I don't want to mention any names since they fired me for no reason, which they have a reputation for if you work there for too long, so we'll just call them Bestbye..) for 3 years, when I lost that job it took me 6 Months to find another job, and then it was just a 3 month temp.
---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
Buck up little camper! We'll beat this mountain...together.
"War makes me sad." - Me
You will need to be proactive.
Being proactive in a passive way sometimes works well. Just by posting my resume to Monster.com and making it searchable landed me an interview or two.
There are lots of openings that aren't posted but are put into the hands of recruiters/head-hunters who then do keyword searches on the WWW. I'd bet some companies prefer to do this, because actually posting a job would create a useless deluge of "will work for food" resumes.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
I just want to offer some encouragement to my fellow IT brothers who are unemployed. I've been fortunate in that (so far) I am working, although I am doing things I'd rather not do just for the sake of a paycheck. I look and see extremely qualified people laid off for very long periods of time, and I know it must be extremely discouraging. Some resourceful folks are taking advantage of the time to better themselves and that is wonderful. Have faith in God, faith in your abilities and keep on plugging away.
Not so! It may be gone for now, but mark my words the next tech boom is the semantic web. Companies will want their services exposed via webservices so that intelligent agents can search for goods and services automatically. This will mark a new era in terms of data accessibility, much like the internet boom in the 90's.
This is a definite possibility, but I don't think it can happen as long as Microsoft is #1. The entire reason the Liberty Alliance exists is that many competing businesses didn't want Passport/Hailstorm. Only when businesses are confident MS isn't using them as guinea pigs will the WWW really take off.
Seriously, we need to keep the WWW out of the hands of one company. IE and IIS have already done heaps of damage to any idealism we once had.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
anyway, good luck to all job seekers.
Here's a relevant article that's been on Yahoo's Most Popular news stories for the last day or so:
= 68 &e=5&u=/nyt/jobless_and_hopeless__many_quit_the_la bor_force
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid
What's notable is that the current 5.8% unemployement rate is artificially low because it doesn't include people who have stopped looking. Anyone have any idea of what it would be if it did include those people?
Is it just me, or is spelling and grammar the easiest way to determine if someone pays attention to what they type and/or what they know?
When you post to any site, the words represent you ideas. If you don't feel like you should take the time to proofread (e.g. spelling, clarity), then why should someone read it? When you type a word, you should KNOW whether you can spell it or not. If not, take some time and learn. Who knows, you might not have to look it up the next time you want to type it.
I do agree that bad spelling != sloppy code. The compiler will see to that, but, the content being fucked up is a turn off. I won't buy anything from or reference to a site that doesn't care about their "appearance".
Granted, if the language you are writing in isn't your primary language, then you are allowed some room (if it is obvious). Or if a keyboard is messed up, like the SHIFT key not working.
The question we can try to answer is: do people who spend long periods unemployed do so because they waste their time filling out on-line surveys?
~Idarubicin
kinda funny, just read the submission page
'how many hours a day do you spend outside'
wonder how many of us were startled by the lack of a '0 hours' option
heh
Mickey-D's called. They wan't to know if you can start that new job next week.
Sending out resumes is like sending them to a black hole. Nobody responds.
And I was reading the Chicago tribune's job section where they have "helpful advice" for job seekers. They get some of these staffing company goobers to submit tips. One of them said she was being deluged with resumes and was getting tired of reading them all.
Another one of their tipsters suggested those who are getting dissillusioned with job hunting to...take a vacation. Reminded me of Marie Antionnete's "Let Them Eat Cake".
I've burned through 10,000 in savings the past year and a half. Now it's time to become a service sector slave. Weeeeeee!
Most Slashdotters have BIG ideals.
Most Corporate types hate BIG ideals, (except as in BIG money!)
Few idealists are moneyed, fewer can employ others.
Actually, that depends. If your ideals are in line with the ideals of your boss, that can be a real selling point. For example, there is a common stereotype that engineers are lousy liars. I know several who are even worse liars than the average. Some of them use it to their advantage. They are working as consultants and have cultivated a very open, direct style of interacting with clients. Those clients trust the advice they get. But more importantly, their clients are fairly open about what they need and want because they don't expect to be sold something just to make this month's quota.
Yeah, no doubt.
My city has two pages of unemployment section and only 3 or 4 actual jobs, with the rest being those pyramid schemes where you pay them $75 for the job and then you can sell other people jobs for $75 each.
My unemployment ran out this morning, so unless I can get an extension I'm going to be amongst the hundreds of applicants for a $6 / hr job at a fast food place.
Sure glad I got those two BS degrees while the economy was so good instead of working.
Dec 1, 2001 (saturday afternoon) receive FedEx package from employer - I'm laid off. One month of severance.
Jan 1, 2001 - started collecting unemployment.
June-August, 2001 - spent EVERY DAY at the beach!
September 2001 - started looking for a new job - unemployment ran out - started working as a bartender and doorman at local rock club.
November, 2002 - started new job.
But over these 11 months I was using Dice, monster, flipdog, etc. to send out resumes - I sent hundreds and hundreds (into the thousands) out - and only recieved a handful of interviews - and fewer job offers. I declined most until I found what I was looking for.
I think alot of it depends on one's financial situation, and whether or not they have wives and kids - as mouths to feed tend to make one find jobs quicker and make the job seeker a bit less picky.
[Connection closed by foreign host]
Untrue.
If 1000 polled people all indicate that it took them precisely one year (365 days) to find a job, then - assuming good random selection of the sampling pool - there is a statistically strong case that an individual will need one year to find a job. On the other hand if 1000 people indicate it took them on average one year, but their individual times were uniformly distributed between 0 days and 730 days (2x365), then there is a strong case that an individual's experience will be unpredictable... despite the average time being the same.
The likelihood of a group statistical inference being representative of an individual's experience is encapsulated in the standard deviation. A wide standard deviation indicates low individual correlation, while a narrow std dev suggests that an individual experience would correlate well to the group statistic.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Here's the URL made a little easier:
Link
Everyone except the management. ;)
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Sounds like this guy has WAY too much time on his hands.. :-(
There is no reason to stay out of work. A job is available to anyone. When McDonald's is hiring at $9.00 an hour you can get a job. I can not believe the people who sit back and take unemployment. That is true laziness. It has nothing to do with the work available it has everything to do with people don't want ot do something that is beneath them. If you would temporarily take that crappy job and look for reasonable work you will look harder knowing your life is gonna suck until you find one. I can see unemployment as a temporary fix. It is not a solution for 26 weeks.
There's been a lot of slamming going on here about this page, what its good for, etc. First off, the url ends in oddtodd just because the idea actually started on the oddtodd forums. Beyond that, it's completely seperate. Yes, I realize the report pages offer little information statistically - at least at this point - I know that comparing one's unemployment and salary There's been some criticism that I don't say that the tables don't mean jack (yet). A few things in my defense - I sent the link to a few yahoo groups. In each of those cases, I pointed that out. It also says so in the help, and up until recently it said so on the main page. I also figured that people have a brain and can figure out that if you are comparing yourself to 7 people.... Anyway, the site's mostly for fun with some statistical stuff being pulled out. IT's a general audience site. Someone here suggested I just list correlation coefficients. Common, would anyone understand it? Finally, it's much harder to calculate correlation coefficients on the fly - simple everyday "I can understand what that means" figures like averages and maximums are much easier and people actually know what they are. Does that mean that I won't try to use the questions for some "real" stats? No, I do plan to, but I'm not able to run SPSS regressions on the fly - mostly cause I wouldn't know where to start to make it work. Anyway, thats it. Comments / thoughts welcome.
--it's bad now and getting worse. The federal government is cooking the reality books on the true figures, I would guess it is probably almost double of what they claim. People who exhaust unemployment get taken off the official figures, as well as people only working a few hours a week in some part timer. In addition, a lot of the private corporate pension funds are in some serious problems, uber serious as in "it just ain't there". Many many millions of people who are close to retirement are going to find out there won't be any money for them. Last year 5 out of 38,000 corporations in the pension insurance deal went bankrupt, and just those 5 were enough to strip the funds from the emergency cash stash they have. Some of the largest corporations out there are *this close* to not being able to pay their retirees. Fortune 500 guys.
My basic recommendations to anyone still working and making money is to make sure you have a small rural country place paid off. Even if it's a ratty trailer, as long as you got a well, a garden and a woodlot you can probably make it through a great depression version 2.0. You don't have to live there right now, but get it paid off, free and clear, then all you have to worry about is scraping up the taxes.
I spent many an hour talking to older relatives about their experiences in the great depression. It got to the point of an actual barter economy for millions, and it happened quickly, and lasted a really long time. Some of the stories I heard were downright scary. The geopolitical and economic reasons aren't near as important as your personal bottom line on survival. You will always NEED a roof over your head and food and water and some sort of cheap "energy" source which is "firewood" in it's simplest forms.
People who are in a position now of being "at work" and well paid should note that there's no full 100% guarantee that things will always be that way. The dotcom boom should be lesson enough for anyone with more than a few neurons clanking around inside the bio hard drive. And those young folks starting out with great hopes, ditto. Take care of those human basics first, then go to the luxuries and more affluent day to day lifestyle if you choose, keep that rural place as a backup if you can't live there full time, and it can also be a nice place for weekenders, etc.
This is a learn from history or repeat it sort of deal. I know some fairly well off people who during the build up last decade, instead of paying something off, just keep using credit to buy more and more property, now they are stuck with trying to dump property just to scrape together enough to pay one of them off, as their businesses are hurting bad. Because they were "wealthy" they didn't bother with necessities, they just ass-umed it would always be there for them, I guess because maybe they though they were "special" or something.
Whern I was a kid, you could walk into the five and dime store-literally stuff in there cost a 5 cents and 10 cents mostly- and one of their things they had in the novelties was packs of "stocks" from the boom years of the roaring 20's then the great depression. You could get a pack of them for a dime, knowing all of them at one time were bought by people with high hopes, using real money they worked hard to get, then it all poofed away on them. They were just turned into pretty pieces of paper then,of no real worth, a kids toy next to the slingshots and packs of trading cards with bubble gum.
They don't even give you the pretty pieces of paper anymore, it's usually just bits on a screen..
If you can't get the job that you want, take the job (and buy that rural place) that you need. Rolling Stones nailed it on that one.
Sitting in the cubicle next to me as I type this is Walt, a coder who couldn't spell to save his life. He's not the best coder, but he's not a bad one either. But dealing with his spelling 'disability' is frustrating at times and funny at times. Reading his commented code is a trip! However, in general it doesn't cause problems - if he names his variables hedder, poynter, and lupe I don't care. The only times it ever causes problems are when he misspells items in a GUI; customers see that. So I know to double check anything he does that the customers see.
You sound like a dot-commer; you know, "be hip", "be relaxed", "let it flow; it's coo...". Being somewhat anal-retentive is one of the first steps to being a good coder[1].
It's not just a matter of being pedantic. I wouldn't want to hire a mechanic who thought that four out of five lug nuts was "good enough to hold the wheel on." I wouldn't want a food service worker who thought that washing "most" of the counter with disinfectant would cut it. I certainly wouldn't hire a surgeon with a reputation for accidentally leaving sponges and tools inside of patients.
All of the above behaviors show one thing -- a lack of attention to detail. Those that do pay attention to details, while certainly more "anal retentive", don't tend to make monumental fuck-ups like those listed above. Likewise, anal retentive people such as these will go over their resume with the proverbial fine-toothed comb, looking for spelling errors and grammatical mistakes.
Some of them might even do something completely extraordinary...like "learn to spell" by memorizing the proper sequence of symbols required to reproduce a given word?[2]
[1] Conversely, one can't be so anal retentive that one's people skills disappear completely -- you have to be anal enough to keep as many errors out of the code as possible, yet flexible enough to work with others. Talk about a tightrope...
[2] On a cultural footnote, I think that the Japanese are one up here -- messing too much with grammar or particle position will destroy the meaning which you are attempting to convey, and you certainly can't draw your Kanji wrong, as it changes the meaning drastically -- for example, the difference between inu (dog) and futo (big) is in where you put a small comma-like accent mark.
An unemployed OS developer is very different from unemployed VB scriptologist. Nothing personal though, good luck with the job search.
3.243F6A8885A308D313
Thats what I'm doing, MAD sleeping. I sometimes sleep 48 hours straight. At least I'm sorta happier sleeping than I was puting in all that work at college. Not to mention I didn't get much sleep when I went.
God spoke to me
I lost my job on Sept 11, 2001 of all days... After almost a year of unemployment, in which I couldn't find a bloody thing, I decided to cut my losses and return to school. I have an electronics diploma (I'm an Electronic Technologist - which is inbetween a technician and an engineer). I'm now doing my comp sci degree.
:
What I quickly discovered was that, as a normal unemployed person I was of little interest to companies. Once I became a student I was in high demand! It didn't take me long to find work (regardless of the season though there are distinct hiring times) and I could choose from really good jobs! The reasons why I found work so easily were
1) I was much more skilled then the average student (I've got almost 5 years of solid SW development experience).
2) More importantly: as a student under 25 (I think the max age was raised to 28 now), I could fall under the federal government programs here in Canada where the government would subsidize my salary (it's an incentive for companies to hire students). I don't have to apply for it; my employer handles that.
3) The Canadian Federal government has a good website to connect students with jobs in the government. Anyone that applies for funding gets their job posted on their website (real jobs! holy @#%$#!). They also have a special program called FSWEP that helps students find jobs in the federal government. What's really cool about it is that they don't want to know what level of experience you have, only the basic skills. When a hiring manager wants to find somebody the program randomly pulls 4-6 names of people that have the basic skills require (i.e. knows MS office, speaks French, knows C++, etc) and they have to hire one of those people. With that program I got 4 calls - many of them for web development. Looking back I should have taken one of those jobs, a part time job, as the websites in question were really big and complex - it would have been interesting (I'm a C/C++ hacker at heart).
4) I was available for part time working during the school year. Lots of part time jobs during the year! The disadvantage is that it severly effects the time I have to study; I take the minimum amount of courses to be full time. As such, it'll take me 4 years to get my (honours) degree (if I took a full course load I could be done in 2.5-3 years, even less if I took summer courses).
The work has always been interesting and in my general field. The first place I worked at, a charity, I was writing custom video conferencing software using this nice SDK and accompanying hardware (it was very interesting work). I now work in an IT team in the Federal government, on a project to migrate from Win98 to XP.
As for pay, there are definite advantages to being a student. First off, since I fall under those government programs, there are guaranteed minimum levels of salary. At the moment I make $15.61 CND per hour ($10.71 US). Next year I can expect to make around $18/hour if I continue in the federal government. The other advantage is that by being in these organizations, I have the proverbial foot in the door (i.e. where I work now I can apply for any internal job postings).
I think that the biggest advantage of being a student, aside from that fact that I will get the degree I've been desiring for many years (actually I care more about the education then the degree), is that I pay virtually no tax. What I do pay, I will get (virtually) all of it back at tax time!
I know this isn't an option for everyone but in my case I really wanted to get my degree - everything worked out well. Life is good at the moment.
BTW, slightly offtopic but one of the HUGE advantages of being unemployed here in Canada is healthcare: it doesn't cost a cent (well, you do pay for drugs but generics are common & cheap). My wife made extensive use of the healthcase system here (got quickly treated by uber-experts for what, at first, appeared to be cancer). If we had to pay anything at all for the treatment she recieved for 3 months (i.e. even 10%), we'd be completely broke and living with my parents. The parking at the hospital, by itself, burnt a significant hole in my pocket!
You got what you voted for. A real sweet economy. CEOs looting companies of millions while 10,000 employess are laid off.
Q1: no
Q2: no
Q3: yes
Q4: no
Q5: no
Q6: no
When you post to any site, the words represent you ideas.
Dude, proofread your rant about proofreading!
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
Yet another naive little boy. First you deign to gift us with your 'wisdom' on how to go about getting a job, then you declare that using your valuable insights it won't take anymore more than a couple of weeks to find work.
Move along, you little twerp. The last thing I want to hear is condescension from some snot-nosed little brat who's been incredibly lucky but is too blind or too egotistical to recognize that fact.
Jesus H., where do these ignoramuses come from?
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
If you are willing to work for less money, and have the education -- you could always go to India and get your old job back.
Other than that -- the only safe bet is to become a doctor or mortition. (Those jobs seem pretty steady.) An air conditioner repairman in Arizona would seem ok to I guess.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I had already set up several interviews when I found out I was being let go and one of them panned out. My starting date for my new job is May 1st, so I essentially won't even have a day without pay, but I will have had a month without a job.
$40K a year?
/year.
Hell, I saw a job posted in the Austin-American Statesman wanting an MCSE (and of course, 5 years "experience" in various M$ networking tasks/tools) for a range of $32-$37K
That's a lot of experience for a salary lower than retail.
"100% of those unemployed already do that."
you would think that, but many IT people I know who are out of work STILL depend on a recruiter. I know several people, and only 1 has bother to ask me if I know someone who is hiring.
I actually do know some who is looking for 3 people, so I passed his resume along. unfortuanatly, he skill sets are wrong for the position, but I did give him a good recommendation.
Unless you have an in demand skill, the days where a company or over, and the days where the employee pays the recruitor are comeing back.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I was fired from Worst Buy last week.... All in all it was because I was Jewisha nd because... well... they are evil. However I had another job a few days later. However I did do webdesign for a company in New York City for almost a year and when I lost that job I could never get back in. So I guess I can say that it is awhile to find another job. YAY for retail... and if you want to know my opinion on Worst Buy... don;t go there don't suppoer the discriminatory company!
Josh Fink
http://www.ussamazon.com
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
While I still have a job, a relative of mine recently lost his. He's a top-notch processing and fabrication magician for III-V and other exotic compounds (diamond), but with the telecom industry tanking of late, there's little interest in breakthrough developments in optical communications.
So this guy may well end up doing something completely different for a living in the future. I don't know if he'll ever try to go back into processing again. Which is a shame in some ways, because it means the industry will lose someone with 20 years of experience and a great deal of talent.
The drastic acceleration of the late 1990s and the deceleration of the early 2000s are going to have some long term implications for the technology job market. Since people's career's can't be turned off and on and redirected on any short time scale, the longer that this job slump lasts, the longer it will subsequently take to gear up in the future.
[Long ago, the rule of thumb for job seeking was number_of_months_to_new_job = salary / $10K.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I understand that the job market out there, in general, sucks. Personally, though, I currently have the best job situation I could be in on a personal level. At the beginning of the Internet bubble, people started to get hired because they knew a little about computers, and got paid well for it. The problem with that is that many of those people never expected on the skills they had while the market had employeers paying for job training, and sitatutions where companys allowed employees to take time to teach and train themselves. A lot of folks took the cash and never expanded on their skills.
Myself, I got my foot in the door because I knew a little more about computers than your average idiot. And I then took every opportunity to expand on my skills. When I was hired at one place, they gave me respobility for backups, because nobody else wanted to do them.
Well... backups may not be sexy, but they lead to something for me. (1) I leadered a lot about several various UNIX's because I had to know how to back them up. (2) I was the only person in a very large (10000+ employees, over 500 UNIX servers) company that knew the root password to EVERY unix box in the company. (3) Because of 1. and 2. I was a person that had to be consulted about anything (major or minor) done to any of the UNIX servers the company had. Because of that, I got to sit in on meetings and training classes that most people either didn't get invited to, or didn't want to go too. I know... It was a major pain in the ass at times. But after seven or eight years of doing a lot of shit work, I had not just a minor understanding of things... I became the EXPERT in many things.
Come port 9/11 and all the Interest in Disaster Recovery (as opposed to backup-restore) I got tons of cash to build out new DR systems. Got to learn a lot of things.
In all that time... I know of people who didn't really learn much, who didn't try much... etc. Come the bubble-bust... and a lot of those folks who didn't learn anything, who assumed they were computer gods because they knew how to do "ps -ef" or "ps auxwww" or about the -c option to grep (so they didn't have to do wc -l)... well, they found themselves out on the street because they didn't stay very current. A lot of folks know UNIX basics. Not very many can talk intelligently about Kernel internals, or large scale system design and building. Being that I was there, I know a lot of people who had the chance to learn that stuff that said "ah, screw it. Somebody else around here will do it they'll only get the same pay check I get now. Not worth my effort."
Well, now I still have a job and they don't. I don't know if I should really feel that sorry for them.
Because I know what I know now, I still get job offers from some companies. I can pick and choose my options... where I want to live, what I want to do, control of budgets, etc. The bubble burst had kept my pay under some control of late, but that seems to be lifting again. I don't know why... maybe just companies in a reseasion who have decided to pay a bit more to get real quality people rather than just have across the board pay caps now.
Is it possible the stats put out by the Labor Dept are skewed this way because of some agenda by the Bush Administration to make things look better than they really are?
Indeed, I can testify that this is a VERY important step to take. In fact, I recommend to all my friends that they have pro re-write their resumes. The reason?
I was out of work for 14 months. Not even a tiny nibble. Then I read an article about "re-energizing" my job search, and one of the suggestions (besides check your own references to see what responses they give) is to get a professionally written resume.
I did it. It cost like $150, but she did a kick-ass job, and I got an offer for an IT job about two weeks later.
She told me she knows a lot of people who make their own resume and just list their duties, dates, and degrees, then can't fathom why they aren't getting interviews/offers. The fact is, employers can get a pretty good idea of what your duties were based on your title. What they really want to see is stories where you kicked ass on some problem or project, and how you did it.
Examples:
BAD: Wrote C++/C code for enterprise application eWidget 2.5 before deadline. Assisted other developers.
GOOD: Coordinated with development team to ensure eWidget 2.5 application was code complete in advance of the agreed upon date. Led efforts by working non-required overtime hours to check code written by junior developers.
Granted, even with a good resume you still have to slam-dunk the interview to get hired, but the well-written resume frames your experiences in a good light, and gives you the opportunity to have an interview.
Who did what now?
Actually it's more important to have data that is representative of the whole, not merely as much data as you can get.
That's how the Gallup poll became famous. In 1935, the Literary Digest, then the most trusted poller, predicted Landon over Roosevelt 56/44. But LD came up with its results by polling a huge number of the upper class rather than a smaller number of everyone. Gallup polled a much smaller representative sample, and was correct in predicting Roosevelt's victory.
I have the unfortunate pleasure of knowing a developer that is doing interviews to replace himself. He's going to get his degree while still working for the company but someone needs to be there during the day.
This is a job in the silicon valley. This job has been open for over a month. This job has received resumes exclusively from that portion of the developers in the area that represent themselves on paper like a retarded monkey with a hangover. Yeah, unemployment is up, maybe some of us should get an english tutor?
In the Washington, DC area, jobs have been added over the last year. This is the place to be.
Yes, the surf isn't good, and you have to deal with the occasional snow, and you may have to work for a company that designs better ways to kill people (fortunately I'm not...)
With the current HUGE surplus of tech. people, HR's can be as picky as they like, and place all sorts of arbitrary requirements on the few open positions they have.
Masters? Nahhhh don't do it. I have a Masters and consider myself unemployed since 10/1997.
Indeed. More education may actually count *against* you because they think you will expect too much in terms of a "challenge" and salary. "Overqualified" is a common expression in this economy. Further, I have heard studies that show that although higher degrees (masters, PhD) make your average earnings a bit higher, they do *not* decrese the amount of time you are unemployed. (Further, the computer industry is different from say chemistry, which does not change as fast. So considering all disciplines may not give full answers for IT people.)
Maybe get a MBA or something to help make you "one of them", or at least think like them. Making yourself more geeky with a masters in IT will not help your employment situation, I am sorry to say.
Table-ized A.I.
There is no way this will support the kind of explosive growth and job creation we saw in the late 90's.
What has happened to the job market is that professional services and most of the tech market has become commoditized. This is actually good for everyone who isn't providing these services: production costs can go down, manufacturers don't have to pay what became a sort of IT extortion racket. Ultimately, this leads to a reduction of costs.
The problem is, of course, on the demand side. We have a large, specialized laid-off workforce, that invested time and money into a skillset that has become commoditized. They will retool and retrain, but with less vigor than before and over time. In the meantime, they will compete with people whose original focus has never had to change.
In the US, the problem is that we have a demand-side crisis with a supply-side administration. Coupled with the commoditization of skilled labor (which is what programming and IT services are) this means that capital will flow overseas; any tax savings enjoyed by working people will be offset by weaker job markets and reduced wages.
On a global level, frankly, this is fair, although no one in the US likes to admit it.
Whenever I read that someone has been unemployed for over a year, I wonder, "Have they even tried other industries?" It may be hard to accept, sometimes, but there are lots of people who earn money by not programming or sysadmining! Or am I delusional?
One is then a newbie competing for jobs against non-newbies in whatever that "other industry" is. I am not suggesting that one does not look around, but most white-collar jobs are laying off also. If it is so hard to get a IT job with say 8 years of experience, imagine getting another where you have zero years.
Perhaps retail or carpentry or plumbing or something is the best bet. IOW, the non-cubicle economy is a bit better than the cubicle one. The closer you are to consumers the better.
Table-ized A.I.
It tends to be between $50 and $90 (depending on the level of service you purchase). This is a small price to pay to get some exposure, but has anyone used it and can say anything good or bad about it?
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
The state said that he didn't have to pay back the unemployment because in all reality, he didn't make squat from the tip jar.
Now that moron from savekaryn.com made like $26,000 to pay off debt that she got her dumb self into - Todd made like $1200, if even that.
http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/mana gement/outsourcing/story/0,10801,80661,00.html
+5 dis-informative
Maybe I should move to Canada...
-Joe
Believe it or not they are still lobbing for more foreign workers.
http://saveie6.com/
Have you tried any of the following yet? (i am sure you have, but it never hurts to check)
:P). It
is not just a list of US sites, there are UK/HK/CH/etc sites on there, and
if you run across other sites that are not listed, submit them. You would
not only be helping yourself, you would be helping many others too.
Go check out http://www.jobomagic.com (no this is not spam to some worthless jobsite). It is a huge listing of job websites, just start down the list & setup your profile/agent at each site (then setup your mail filters
Make sure your coverletter (which is important, most people dont care for an email with the only thing included is a resume as an attatchment) is up to snuff, & start posting it & your resume site by site. You could even go through the local gold/platinum reseller list from Novell.com, maybe even give microsoft's local reseller list a shot, citrix, etc...just email/hand deliver a copy of your coverletter/resume even if they dont have job openings. At least you would already be on their list when they do decide to start looking for someone new.
You may even look into becoming a dba (doing business as, like $10 to start), or LLC. Perhaps find some other unemployed IT people in your area that would compliment your skillsets & start a business together, or subcontract to them. Snag a local non-profit & help them, get them going as your company's demo case with all the latest slickest stuff out there and as a show of what you can do. Given time you could have your own consulting business. www.giftsinkind.orghas a great Novell product donation policy, & www.techsoup.org has some other good stuff too.
Thanks & good luck with the hunt
Yeah... as a friend. *winkwink* *nudgenudge*
My experience: I applied for all sorts of jobs, even jobs AT Microsoft. Since there are gazillions of MS developers out there, why should a company look at an obvious Unix-head like me?
I did find a job after a few months. It's at a firm where most everyone uses Linux. Am I lucky??:-)
Here is a free job search tool that I wrote with a Java Swing GUI that searches Dice, Monster and Craigslist for jobs and allows you to e-mail your resume very easily. First you download the app and configure your settings, set your e-mail info, select your resume attachments and message. Then you can search for all the job sites, or any one of the sites at a time. It gives you a list of the jobs found, so you can select the jobs of interest by checkmarking it. You can then apply to all the selected jobs by selecting a menu item to mail out the resume/message with attachments.
Requires JDK1.4 and works on Mac, Windows and Linux.
http://www.sharperlogic.com/reapply
Good luck
According to the media in Canada, business admin degrees are even worse off than technical people. Or at least all the BBAs and Bachelor of Commerce degree holders are finding themselves competing with MBAs. Maybe companies are finally realising that it's better to have employees with actual knowledge...
I'm under-employed because I prefer it to the alternative (unemployment). There's little call for a person with 2 years scientific computing background without a Masters/Ph.D. and probably not much more call for one with the pedigree...
Tuition is going up 30% at the SUNYs, don't think that's going to happen for me anytime soon. So, I guess 10/hrs a week as a research assistant followed by 30/hrs a week at the local Barnes & Nobles is better than nothing.
And for those of us fortunate enough to work, our Republican friends in office are ensuring that we can become even more flexible (thus becoming a more valuable commodity to our overlord bosses) by letting companies eliminate overtime. Yes, this wonderful bill exempts even more people from overtime pay by expanding the "management" umbrella down to the "assistant manager" kiddie working the late shift at McDonalds. Don't want to accept comp time for those extra hours we make you work? We'll give the OT to someone else that doesn't want the money. We'll even tell you when you can take the comp time.
I've been looking for a good random number generator, someone finally came up with one! :)
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
You interview with MARVIN -- Michigan Automated Response Voice Interactive Network (or something like that). You dial a 1-800 phone number on a specific day, and a computer asks you the questions an interviewer would ask.
"I've been ordered to interview you about unemployment insurance. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to interview you about unemployment insurance. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
"Life, loathe it or ignore it, you can't like it."
And as the old saying goes, "It's not what you know, it's who you know."
No kidding! A friend of mine is interviewing for a job tomorrow. She's perfectly qualified for it, but fears she won't get it because the company tends to hire people they know, or people recommended from within. We all told her she'd be nuts not to call the company's president, who she knows through church, and let him know she's interviewing for the position.
I see it again and again, especially in this tight job market. After all, when a friend desperately needs a job, don't you keep your eyes peeled and let him know about opportunities that could be helpful to him? ("Rachel quit today. Why don't you send in your resume?") Pity the unconnected person who has only one set of eyes and ears working for him.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
I've been considering going back to school full time for my masters also, but there's one big problem: cost. I live in the US and I don't know how I'd be able to afford a masters program with little to no income. Of course I would go after scholarships and such, but they're hard to come by. Financial loans (at least for the schools in my area) can't completely cover tuition for the masters programs. I suppose they're hoping you're working part time. So the question becomes: go for scholarships and financial aid with the risk there won't be a job available after graduation? Plus come out with a huge debt? I don't know...
Developers: We can use your help.
I've been unemployed since 05/2002, my CV now has a large gap. I've been doing some home calls to repair Windows and PC problems and that's about it.
I've entered in my CV that I have been a self-employed computer engineer but I just know that employers will see this and think I can't be much good at it otherwise I wouldn't be looking for permanent work.
Advice?
It's bizarre to read these newspaper stories about people who were well into six figure salaries now working minimum wage retail. At least the constant whining on slashdot about "if you have the skills you'll always have a job" has wound down significantly.
Pasting on to blog is not an essential and just exist to serve the purpose of exchaning ideas. Its just you. I think people who try to nitpick others and try to judge a programmer based on spelling is probably a manager who got there by kissing ass, and not by technical merit.
Unfortunately, you are quite right. Very few jobs are gotten through blindly sending out resumes or through headhunters. Most jobs are gotten through knowing someone in the company.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
The problem with Social Security will occur when the Baby Boom generation retires (unless they seriously raise the minimum age for retirment benefits, to 75 or so). This is because the number of people working vs the number of people drawing benefits will be something like 5 to 1 (or less).
In contrast unemployment insurance is supposed to be a (very) stopgap measure, and is funded much more through a "banking" type mechanism. Additionally, unemployement insurance (as well as other emergency entitlements) is really aimed at low income people. Wealthier people (persumeably anyone who is maxing out what Unemployement insurance will give you) are supposed to have sufficient savings, and enough "fat" in their lifestyle, so that through some thrift they can make it through a dry spell. Unfortunately, I don't think that many people in late 90's IT industry (or other "boom" markets) saved enough money and the demands on the local economies near the "boom" centers drove the costs of living through the roof so these people never felt rich.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
"I've been ordered to interview you about unemployment insurance. Here I am, brain the size of a planet and they ask me to interview you about unemployment insurance. Call that job satisfaction? 'Cos I don't."
:) I figured that the guy *had* to have read THHGTG.
*LOL* That's what *I* said when I first heard the name was MARVIN.
My journal has hot
"Its not who you know, its who you blow"
Get on your boy!
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Also - the "is your spouse/gf/bf also unemployed" only has "Yes" and "No" - I need a "Not Applicable"
Once again, the working class pays for the upper classes nannies and cheap busboys.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
....or a million, as the case may be.
You tell him to keep trying harder than anyone else. But that is impossible--"him" is everyone. What you are REALLY saying is that in our red of tooth and claw system, you had better keep working ever harder and harder until you die.....
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You're revealing your ignorance by that comment. Right now with CF MX and flash remoting coldfusion is one of the most exciting platforms for application development on the net. The market for third party applications is growing and there are now two magazines catering strictly to CF. Not to mention that with blue dragon there is now a second source for CFML with their base product being free. If you want to use a better tool go for it - but PHP isn't in the same league as CF MX. Man Holmes
Good grief! Am I the only person in Mississippi that reads Slashdot? I take the survey and I'm the only one. I hope it changes by the time someone reads this. How embarrassing...
This reminds me of the Steve Martin joke..."how to be a millionaire and not pay taxes."
...
First, get a million dollars.
-pyrrho
H1B's are not to blame!!! We live in a global economy period and whether you like it or not, this is a double edged sword my friend. Sure, we like when U.S. businesses go abroad, expand, get more capital, etc. But when it comes to the other direction, we like to put a road block? That's not how it works. Freedom is a bi-directional highway my friend. If you can't compete with other foreing nationals, well go back to school. Learn more. Lower you expectations.
I'm in the US on a H1B visa because my employer couldn't find any local skills. Do you know how much they paid for all that hassle? Do you REALLY think they wanted to go through all that pain? I'm sure the answer is "NO!". First of all, you can't simply hire any "H1B's" out of the blue. The job has to be vacant for a certain period (it used to be 1 year back when I was hired). They have to give proofs to the Immigration office that they posted this job on magazines and job boards (for 1 year) and that NO ONE was fit for the job.
I won't go through the whole process but basically, I came here because there was a demand for me. Because other americans couldn't do the job basically!
And for those who think H1B's are here to "steal jobs", that's not the case, we're here because there is a need. Also remember, we pay taxes just like anyone else, yet we will NEVER benefit from unemployment and retirement income. This is "free money" to the government. And I'm sure the congress is well aware of that (and likes it too!).
I don't wanna hear about "this isn't fair" or things like that. This is how global economy works! You don't like the fact that your local shoe factory moved to India? That everything you buy is "made in China"? Well get used to it, this is only the beginning! More and more companies are moving abroad. How long before USA becomes a 3rd country and India/China becomes a super power (economicaly speaking)?
Just remember that America was founded by foreigners looking for a better life. This pattern is and will always be true! Your ancestor was just like me and other H1B's, looking for a better life...
It's still a loss, because government isn't producing this "wealth". It is simply taking it from one segment that actually produces it, and shifts it to other people. Sure, some people get paid with that "overhead" but government has no incentive to be efficient in its operations, because it's guaranteed its income - it's the law. That's a loss right there - inefficiency. In the private sector it's, "you snooze you lose". If we stopped the redistribution of wealth, 1) the people being taken from would have more money to invest in whatever it is that's making them profitable to begin with, 2) the subsidized would fail, creating an area for a more effective replacement to come in, and 3) the gov't workers would be back in the private sector pool creating wealth rather than being a drain on it.
Road expansion is a valid service of government, though. It is a true public service in that it serves the public as a whole, not a specific subset of the public.
Bollocks. Even if you are right in what "stimulates the economy" more, you're answering the wrong question. The question isn't simply about stimulating the economy. The question is should government be meddling in the economy to begin with? What right does gov't have to take from one and give to another? Why must I pay for "targetted spending" somewhere else? Even if "the economy" of the country benefits, what right do you (as an individual) have to take my money for your own gain? Answer: none. And you can't give gov't a right you don't have, meaning it has no right to take my money for someone else's benefit, either.
You may legitimately tax me for things that truly benefit us all, like defense, roads, etc. But it's not right to tax me so that Acme Inc has a healthier bottom line which raises the GDP. That connection to me is too remote to be considered "public good". You're really taxing me to help Acme's owners (or whatever other small group is the recipient of your targetted spending), and that's not right.
To make it more concrete, as "money" is a rather abstract concept, think about actual property ownership. Was it right that Donald Trump tried to have Atlantic City evict an old woman and condemn her house so that he could expand a casino? Sure, gov't can use eminent domain in cases where there is a genuine interest for the public good - but this was not one of those cases. It was pure transfer of property from one to another, using gov't as an intermediary in the theft. The normal person would look at that and say, "Why that's blatant abuse of the system!" Even if the argument was that a casino would yield more tax revenue to the city than a home, and that in turn would benefit the entire city - it's not right. It only directly benefits Donald Trump. And why should we treat money (which can be taken by force through taxes) any different than physical property (taken by force through eminent domain)? Government was instituted to protect our life, liberty, and property, not to aid and abet those who would like to steal it.
Constitutionally Correct
I had 3 mod points left yesterday, but they expired already. Crap, well said.
Bad spelling is not always a sign of lazy or sloppy people. Most dyslexics are bad spellers, but make great programmers. We are not all built the same, don't blame everyone for being different.
All of these replies have been helpful and thought provoking. A big problem in the main area I been looking is that much of my consulting work has been here. I worked for and then took over a successful consulting company in the area, my reputation does preceed me. I wrote software years ago that is still used in some companies that you would know of (in the US). That limits some of my dumbing down options in a town of less than 20,000.
:)
I do have a couple of different versions of my resume, but the 13 year span at the consulting company keeps me from trimming much substance unless I limited it to my janitorial type duties.
My best lead so far is a bank that is putting on 50 new people in their credit collections division . Hopefully the businesses that need people badly will take the end of the war as a sign to try some expansion.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
A couple of points - in musical chairs, there is always one left out: but not if you add a chair. I've 'added a chair' twice now. I didn't think things like that happen, but they do.
Times are harder now than they were in 2000. But these things are cyclical. At the moment, you DO need to work harder at getting jobs, but that doesn't mean you'll have to keep working harder and harder until you die. Besides, doing a bit of networking is not what I call working harder and harder - going out to the club and having a pint of beer or two is quite nice in fact, especially if you get to meet new people who are bitching about how crap their computer network's running and can offer to fix it for them.
Sooner or later, the gross oversupply of IT people compared to jobs will cease, barring civilization-threatening disasters. Maybe it will never be like the dot-bomb boom, but then again, the whole dot-bomb thing was bogus to start with. Even with my business acumen (which resembles the business acumen of a concussed rattlesnake) I could tell most of the dot-bombs had a bad business model and were going to go tits up even during their meteoric rise.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Two whole magazines. You are right, Cold Fusion really does rock! It is so very exciting, I get a big old boner just thinking about it! and its not just from the Flash Remoting centerfold.
four-oh-four