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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."
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
They'll stop sending you that check when you don't look for a job. Or when you miss out on 2 interviews with the unemployment officers. My friend was unemployed, it sounds nice, $400 a week for doing absolutely nothing but there's alot of work involved.
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....
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
Excuse me, but have you read the FAQs of Slashdot? Click here if you have not
--sig fault--
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
insightfull indeed. to my knowledge, this isn't tax dollars. the unemployment system is a governement system, but it's funded by companies who pay into the system. i'd like to see the budget where the outpays comes from actual tax dollars. if employers didn't have to pay into the unemployment system, chances are (albeit quite low) they would pay their employees a little more who could save for such an event.
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.
It is an unemployment tax. Just because it's not what you think of as being a common tax (income, sales, etc) doesn't mean it's not a tax. In fact, in my state, it's called exactly that.
Oh, and when is the last time the welfare system came out ahead? If you don't think that some money from the general fund doesn't go there, you're delusional.
Regarding your last paragraph:
Sounds like a poorhouse to me. Sounds like imprisoning people for their debts. Sounds like something we don't do any longer.
But if you want to bring back the old ways who am I to argue?
Just keep in mind some of us might like brigandry, highway robbery, banditry, just plain thieving and other old timey ways of earning one's keep as well as or better than the new fangled ways the educated folks is always tellin' us 'r better'n the old tried an' true ways.
Put that in yer pipe an' smoke it mister PhysicsExpert.
The requirements and benefits vary (sometimes wildly) from state to state. The variables can be--
1) Number of weeks you can get benefits (some states offer as little as *one* month of benefits, while others offer up to 6 months of benefits (not counting federal extensions which can push that over a year right now)).
2) Maximum amount benefits can be each week (I've seen numbers as low as $380 quoted, and I guess one state gives a maximum of $560 a week-- in Washington state, the maximum is $496/week, and naturally every state has their own set of formulas and work periods they use to calculate what YOUR unemployment will be).
3) Work search requirements (again, can vary greatly from state to state-- in Washington, you have to apply for a minimum of three jobs a week and keep these in a log which you can randomly be required to show and have authenticated; if you go on Extended Benefits (EB, something seperate from TEUC/TEUC-X, but still federally subsidized) you have to apply for four jobs a week (or, as they define it, 'job contacts')).
I mistakenly made the assumption that every state was identical, but they're not. Unemployment is, as I understand it, mostly funded by each state through taxes on businesses or other fund collection methods. As far as the federal extensions go, the Department of Labor gives out the cash but gives states the choice on how to implement it (legislation language not withstanding, of course, but generally the language is such that each state can easily integrate the extensions into their own state-funded plans easily).
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
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
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.
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.)
Aye, same deal in MA. I think we can do the reporting over the phone as well, but I always just sent in the card they'd send me every two weeks. 3 yes/no questions:
Did you look for work?
Were you able and available to work?
Did you work?
That's it. If you did work, there were some salary questions as well. If you didn't, it was just those three questions, a signature, and a stamp.
According to the materials I was sent when I signed up, a "journal" of sorts is required here too. I did this, although I was never asked by anyone for it (it's not like it takes that long to record who you apply to, speak to, etc.. if you're actually looking!). I can see how it would be *very* easy for someone to exploit the system and never look for work at all.
Up a bit north from here, in NH, the process is a bit different. AFAICT, claimants need to actually meet physically with an Unemployment Office employee every week or two, produce proof that they actually *did* actively look for work, and basically justify their claim.
IMHO, the NH system seems the better of the two. I'm sure there are loopholes, etc... but it definitely would cut down on claimants looking for a 26-week vacation after being laid off.
If you think unemployment is a lot of work, then what is your opinion of employment!
I was unemployed in TX about a year ago for 4 months, and my impression was that the unemployment offices are so overloaded these days that they're flat out incapable of checking up on most people. The net result for me was that I had to make a single phone call maybe once each week into an automated system verifying that I was still looking for work.
Mind you, I'm not complaining here. The last thing most people need when unemployed is to waste additional time putting up with The Man.
Social Contract? I don't remember signing any Social Contract!
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.
Yeah, the medical insurance thing to me was a joke. Let's see.. I got that CORBA/COBRA (whatever stupid acronym it is) paperwork that says my medical insurance will be costing me hundreds of dollars a month, obviously not something I can pay on zero income, even with unemployment checks. So then we go check out the state-run medical coverage system (in Washington state, this would be 'Basic Health'), and whee, wouldn't you know it, unemployment counts as income for purposes of eligibility determinations, and I easily surpass the highest program they offer! As you say, eat, or get to see a doctor, but not both.
And it gets even better. In *every* state, unemployment compensation is taxable, so at the end of the year you owe taxes on any unemployment you were paid (most/all states will deduct 10% of your unemployment for you from each check, but sometimes this is not the default, so you can be stuck with a nice hefty bill come April 15th). Why unemployment is taxable is beyond me, as one elected official once put it, it's like kicking people when they're down, and it's just plain wrong.
All I know about Bush is I had a good job when Clinton was president.
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
You're going for the sysadmin job too? You bastard! You live in the states, right? I'm coming for you from across the pond. That job is for me. You can have one of the two toilet cleaner jobs.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
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
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.
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.
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!
> Try going from $1200/week to only $400/week without losing your home,
... wow.
... damn.
> car, savings, and everything else you've worked your entire life for.
Wow. I
I know that you have to fund your family, but I've been working for something like a decade and a half (though only half of that has been in my chosen profession), and I'm feeling mildly put out that the unemployment rates being reported by posters seem to be in excess of my salary.
Damn. I mean, I wish you the best of luck in keeping your family safe and getting back on track, but
-JC