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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."
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 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
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.
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...
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.)
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
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.
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
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