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Laid off? What are You Doing w/ Your Newfound Freedom?
dmorin asks: "Like many of you I'm recently laid off. So as I wake up every morning wondering what to do with my day I got to thinking, how everybody else is handling the new found free time? My original idea, that I would simply spend all my time working on my own software projects in order to learn new skills, went out the window when I realized that I'd burn out far too fast if I thought that the most important thing in life. My wife is working part time so I have at least 3 days a week to take care of my 10month old daughter, time that I would not have had if I was still employed. I'm doing my share of the chores around the house, not just taking care of the lawn but also doing groceries, laundry and so on. As for geeky stuff, I play with projects and technologies because they are fun, not because I think they will make me more marketable. I put away my "personal Java portal" and lately am playing with voice synthesis on my Zaurus just because I think it's cool. So how about everybody else? What are you doing with this new free time that's been forced upon you? How much of it are you using to job search? How much is 'honey do' list, how much is just free play time? Disclaimer: I'm researching an idea for a possible book. Not planning to quote anybody without their permission, just looking to hear what people are up to."
Reading and posting on Slashdot... a lot.
When I was laid off, I made looking for a job a full time job.
You could've hired me.
Post in slashdot asking for input, write a book, make it a best seller (so many unemployed), never work again.
my $0.02:
... without having the ability to try out the things I was trying to learn none of it stuck. Also tried to catch up on music (I'm a songwriter), but it turned out without work to piss me off I didn't have as much to write about :-)
My last job ended late last fall when the company went under. 2nd time that happened to me in two years. The first time, I slid right into the new job with no gap in employement. Yes, I know I was very lucky. This past fall, I thought I'd take the rest of the year off, relax, catch up on my life, de-stress, and job hunt. Aaahhhhh, peace.
I made it 3 days.
After 3 days, I was going absolutely batty. Without having the regular schedule of work to frame my day, I just drifted along getting absolutely nothing accomplished. I'd never been one to do much work from home, so I wasn't really set up to do any programming or technical things. I tried catching up on my techie mags, reading some programming books
So I took part time contracting type work to keep myself occupied, and found my current job (working as a contract employee, programming) which started Jan 1.
I blame all this on my parents, of course.
Learn a different skill and stay out of IT. One less person to compete with. Not that i need to worry about that based on your question you lazy BUM....
0. Talked with EVERY developer I had known and asked about job leads.
1. Spent 2-3 hours a day targeting resumes for the job(s) listed on about 10 different sites. What a waste of time... Over 300 hiring gits that never responded to me. I mean _NO_ response.
2. Found a short term contract.
3. After 10 weeks, ended up taking an internship @ $10/hr. It was easy to get a job against others that had no experience vs. my 5 years.
4. Worked so DAMN hard at the internship, it has now evolved into a real job with decent pay.
5. Paid off ALL of my debt, so the next time I am unemployed, I won't have so many bills to worry about. Read: cut up ccs, stopped buying gadgets, paid off car.
6. ???
7. Profit and retire at 70?
Kill me now!
Antiquated competence won't be a job skill forever.
Join a programming project. Create something you can show when you're looking for a new job.
If you're single or polyamourous, now is the best time to start clubbing and have some fun while you can!
Sit in front of the TV all day eating pizza with extra cheese and drink diet coke.
Find a new job.
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
... what people do with their free time after they get laid off.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Go to Distributed Proofreaders and help put some public domain books online!
"The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it." -- Ayn Rand
On top of that, our daughter is due at the end of June, so I'll have my son, wife, and newborn to care for this summer. Have you priced infant care? If I find a job and go back to work, I'll have to make at least $24,000 a year just to pay for child care. We only get to pocket anything above that, but it's got to be significantly above that or we'll have to sell this house and find a smaller one.
We are truely blessed to live in the house of our dreams, on 5 acres out in the country, but we got it on two incomes and we won't be able to keep it on one. We figure we can go about one year before it comes to that. On average, they say it takes 9 months and at least three interviews to find a job here. After 3+ months I have had zero interviews.
Meanwhile, when I can find the time, I have to empty the basement so I can sheetrock the walls, build the bathroom and office/guesroom, and finish the rest as a playroom. So we can move the office/guest room furniture out of what will soon be the baby's room.
So I'm in limbo. Do I apply for any three jobs just to qualify for unemployment, become a stay-at-home dad, and move to suburbia where we can spit on our neighbor's houses without leaving our back yard? Or do I attend all the job hunt seminars, help an open-source project just to keep my skills up, and do anything to find another job, putting my kids into daycare in the process?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm a writer, so I was kind of waiting for the Writers Grant of unemployment when I signed up with a startup. It ended up lasting much longer than I thought it would, but when it collapsed I started in finishing my novel. Whoopee!
I built a webapp to help me do this, where I have to write a certain number of words per day or an email is sent out to all of my friends. The site is called SHAME. Writing through humiliation.
I've been fundraising for the AIDS/LifeCycle
Doing something good, to help people out, helps keep me from getting depressed. I strongly suggest that you find a charity and do some free work in your free time. It keeps you from wasting away.
This is my 4th such ride. I've got a team and everything. Though this year, I am WAY SHORT on donations.
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Certifications are BS for the most part, but people looking through resumes and doing the hiring don't know any better, so it looks great on your resume.
I was unemployed for 3 months, and I wish I would have taken the time to get my CCIE. I'm studying for it right now, and it's a pain in the ass between that and work.
Other than that, I spent an hour or two each morning looking for jobs to apply for, and spent the rest of each hanging out with my other unemployed friends at coffee shops and did some people watching. I read some books, I cleaned my house, worked on my yard, and relaxed.
You only get probably a couple of chances in life to really enjoy yourself, and this is one of those times. Just make sure you actually spend a bit of time each day looking for another job, because if your unemployment runs out, the fun is all over.
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Converting my skills from MS to Linux having been an MSCE
Wired the apartment for CAT5
Studying for the Cisco qualifications and nearly there
Sent out a hundred or so CVs with a 1% reply rate
Learning Hungarian
Just because you're an unemployed techie there's no need to put on the pounds watching daytime TV and eating cheeseburgers. Make use of the time so that when you get that interview you can tell them about everything you have done during your time off.
If you are paying more than a grand a month in child care, consider sponsoring an Au Pair from Europe. The ones I looked into were recent high school grads with average English skills, wanting to spend a year in the US before they go off to college or whatever. My expenses would have been $255 a week, or thereabouts, plus including her in the household grocery expenses.
... but the agency got upset when they found out I didn't have a child. Those pesky agency clerks ... mess up a perfectly good dream.
Sounded like a great deal, have an 18 year European woman live with me to help out with the housework, etc
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Ice Cubes - they are cold and hard, like the truth.
: .COM flunky wannabe's have already flooded the poster with lies err... resumes.
Statistically speaking
1. You are not going to find a job on Monster, Dice, etc... A job may find you there, but if a job is posted it is either a scam, fake job because some recruited is collecting resumes, or 1,200 other Random L. User
2. You are not going to find a job in the Newspaper want ads.
3. You are not going to find a job watching TV.
4. Job fairs are a joke. I think the only purpose of job fairs is for people with jobs to go to a zoo-like environment where people without jobs are laughed at behind their backs.
Where are jobs found?
1. Personal references. Odds are your next job is going to be a direct result of you being walked in the back door by the hand of someone that knows someone.
2. Friend of a Friend. Just because the company where your friend works isn't hiring, doesn't mean that your friend doesn't know someone at a company where they need someone.
3. Existing Professional Contacts. If you interacted with other companies, you collected a bunch of business cards and you left a very good (memorable) impression. Do not email them, emails containing 'looking for work' get deleted faster than 'bigger schlong' spam - call ahead of time and meet them for lunch. Discuss your situation with them, see if they have any leads.
4. Contract solutions. They suck, and they suck even more if you don't speak Hindi, but if you are willing to suck it up and work for peanuts just to get your foot in the door and are willing to lie a little on your resume (actually the placement agency will create a wonderful work of fiction and put your name on top of it - don't laugh) then you are back in the workplace. The purpose of being back in contact with loads of new people isn't to make a lot of money, it is to make a bunch of new contacts because your existing contact base failed the first three options.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
About two years ago I went through this.
First off, I allowed myself one week of nothing, then I would get to schedule and do the job search and all that. I had severance to tide me over for a few weeks anyhow. So I made a short list which mainly consited of seeing all the sights in the city I hadn't had time to do, seeing movies during the day, running all the errands I never got around to, cleaning house, etc.
After the week was up it was hardcore job hunting time, but not so hard core I burned out. I did find the most important thing to do was not fall into a funk and sleep til noon. Get up, do your job hunt, take a shower ... basic stuff. I didn't want to fall into the pattern of waking up at noon, not taking a shower til 3 and realizing the day was over, so not going out, basically becoming a total hermit / night owl, playing video games all night. It was actually hard to resist this ... after all, when you're unemployed, you have no place to "be".
The next important thing for me was to cut expenses immediately. Seems like many people assume they'll get a job in a month and proceed to blow their severance on a trip to Thailand or something. Resist it! You should act as if you're not getting a job for months. Cut cable, cancel magazine subscriptions, stop eating out, etc. I think the only liberty I allowed myself was to keep the broadband going as it would aid my job search.
Once you find a job, that's when you get to slack off. The two weeks or so after you've signed the offer letter and you KNOW you just need to show up at work are the best two weeks known to humankind. That's when you sleep til noon and slack off, with not a care in the world because you know you got it made. I wish there were more times like that in a lifetime.
My idea was that braintrusts NEVER go out of fashion. I took 2 weeks off and then spent 8 weeks stalking Universities and BioTechs. I think i damn near resumed every University in the Western Hemisphere.
I shit myself when the fuckers didn't respond.
Thankfully, in the meantime, i'd spammed enough businesses in my neighbourhood with rent-a-geek flyers to keep myself in a hand-to-mouth existence. Savings got lower and lower until the a flood of invoices from mom 'n pops coughed up. I was actually making a living on my own! Whoopie! Some advice - work around retainers - sell saving 5-10 desktop + 1 server companies money on a dedicated IT guy - then hit 'em up for $2-400 a month + expenses or per Desktop + per Server flat rates. Resell 'em prerolled website packages (opensourcecms.com). Sell Dell machines. Sell soho firewalls. Sell MS SBS and SUSE office server. Swing by a couple of times a month for new machines, virus updates etc. Get 5-10 clients and you have enough to pay the mortgage and feed yourself. Do a good job and it snowballs from there.
After 2 months i started to get responses. A lot of responses. Universities are so swamped with dot bomb resumes that even getting a response is almost a bloody lottery. Academia moves at a glacial pace anyway.
When i started interviewing, i was in the luxurious position of having a choice, again. I was in the driving seat. After another 2 months, i accepted a position in Harvard. I.S. here is a mix of laid back, relaxed hippies and semi-rigid offloaded corporates like myself.
I can reliably state, i'm better off for the experience. Knowing i can bounce back and stand on my own 2 feet is a great comfort.
Bookie or porno director... Certified electricians and plumbers don't do so bad these days either, and it takes less time and money to get certified than it does to get a degree. Seriously. Unix admins who are used to installing there own cat5 cable and stuff should have no problems getting certified as good old fashioned electricians. I've heard a lot of stories about _huge_ sums made by electrical contractors on major construction projects, or simply those doing residential wiring who are known and trusted in a neighbourhood. We're talking lawyer/banker-sized paychecks. This stuff is well paid because it isn't glamorous and nobody thinks about setting up in plumbing or electrical contracting after years running up student debt & cramming their heads with useless abstract 'middle class' knowledge at university, ergo:- You won't be competing with thousands of unemployed MIT & Stanford Ph.Ds who have no family to provide for and are prepared to work 16 hour days. People need a plumber to stop the poo backing into the shower _even during recessions_.