
All the best advice we could find on how to get a job - BenjaminTodd
https://80000hours.org/career-guide/how-to-get-a-job/
======
graham1776
The one thing I always tell anyone on the job hunt, which few ever seem to
take me up on: Informational Interviews. These are informal "can I take you
out to coffee?" talks with people in your industry to see what they are
working on, what is happening with them, what is going on in the industry.
Every job I have ever gotten is through informal meetings with people I have
met through my network (whether its the current newspaper, your friends,
parents, relatives, or other).

At the end of every one I ask: "Is there anyone else you think I should talk
to?" and "Do you currently have any opportunities at your company for me?".
Rinse repeat.

I guarantee investing in 30 informational interviews will yield huge dividends
vs. 30 career fairs, a personal pitch deck, starting a blog, dusting off your
resume, or God Forbid: applying to jobs through Linkedin.

[http://www.grahamwahlberg.com/book](http://www.grahamwahlberg.com/book)

I wrote a free guide on this if anyone is interested, would love feedback.

~~~
kirykl
I've tried advice like this before, and always results in rejection to even
talk or after talking a nice referral to a frustratingly useless Taleo
application portal. Maybe i'm not asking the right people but in my experience
talking to people and hoping for a job goes nowhere.

~~~
graham1776
I hear this often, and yes it can be very frustrating to get rejections. I've
done 200+ informational interviews over my career, and probably gotten turned
down by 2000 requests. I wrote a post about this problem specifically a while
back: [https://grahamwahlberg.com/2016/03/22/informational-
intervie...](https://grahamwahlberg.com/2016/03/22/informational-interviews-
what-to-do-when-they-say-no/)

But summary is:

1) Are you the people you are reaching out to “warm contacts”? By that I mean
is there someone you know who knows them? If not you may want to try to start
with people you already know.

2) What level of experience are you targeting for coffees? 1-2 yrs experience
engineers? 5-10? 30-40 years? I have found that targeting people your own age
yields worse results, but people just a little ahead of you in their career
are more likely.

3) What kind of people? Some people are intimidated by going to coffee with
someone new and some aren’t. If you can (and this is tricky) figure out who is
more likely to say Yes.

~~~
kome
> 1) Are you the people you are reaching out to “warm contacts”? By that I
> mean is there someone you know who knows them? If not you may want to try to
> start with people you already know.

So, people with already a well developed social capital are doing better of
people without it. News at 11.

The point is that having this "social capital" is not neutral or random.

------
merpnderp
One thing in this article that really caught my eye was "Do free work". When I
was a young kid I remember my grandfather, who was about to retire from a long
career at the power utility having been head of the union, and much beloved by
all his coworkers and managers, told me about how he got that job. He had been
laid off at a grain mill, and was getting by as a butcher. But a friend of his
got him in the door to see the hiring manager at the utility. My grandfather
said I'll work two weeks for you for free, and if I make you happy, then you
can hire me. After the first day, he was hired. I guess this also touches on
the article's point about networking.

~~~
oppositelock
It's illegal to work for free today, unless you're a Congressional intern,
since they exempted themselves from the law. Lots of "my grandfather..."
stories are illegal in today's US, land of freedom and such.

~~~
gregw134
What about free internships?

~~~
jdelaney
In the US, unpaid internships are only legal when they pass a six-part test.
Generally, if the intern is doing stuff that benefits the company the
internship must be paid. [http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-
human-re...](http://smallbusiness.findlaw.com/employment-law-and-human-
resources/unpaid-internship-rules.html) lists the six-part test

------
henryaj
More generally about 80,000 Hours rather than this piece in particular: their
advice was pivotal to my taking a dev bootcamp and becoming a software
engineer, and donating a percentage of my income to highly-effective
charities. They did a one-on-one consultation with me (not sure if those are
still available or not), put me in touch with other bootcamp grads, and were
generally super helpful.

I'd recommend their advice to anyone, particularly people who think they might
be in the wrong job, and want to think about how to best spend their working
lives.

------
BenjaminTodd
Hi everyone,

I'm the author of the piece. If you know any other good resources or
statistics we should incorporate, I'm keen to hear about them. If you disagree
with something, feedback is very welcome.

~~~
sshykes
Please get rid of the annoying "this will only take a second" popup, I was
reading but closed the window immediately when that shit started.

~~~
BenjaminTodd
Sorry about that. I find popups annoying too. Unfortunately we just find we
get a way higher conversion to the newsletter when we use popups, and since
people need to engage over several months to get value out of the advice,
getting people onto the newsletter is really important.

~~~
rhizome
Just a side comment, these are starting to be called "doorslams," and you may
also be interested in alternative views of your "No thanks, I don't want a
raise" dismissal link at
[http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/](http://confirmshaming.tumblr.com/)

~~~
mdpopescu
Thanks; some of these are so bad they reminded me of [1]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_under_the_World](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tunnel_under_the_World)

------
linkregister
I really liked this link that was mentioned deep in this post:
[http://cultivatedculture.com/how-to-get-a-job-anywhere-no-
co...](http://cultivatedculture.com/how-to-get-a-job-anywhere-no-connections/)

I find that most new grads' biggest problem is not getting the first phone
screen.

I could have really used this guide when relocating cross-country. Surprise,
the interviews and subsequent offers I got were from direct referrals from my
personal network.

------
p4wnc6
I've been unemployed for about 14 months since resigning from my most recent
role -- a role which my close family and friends characterized as "destroying
me."

After becoming unemployed, with enough savings to sustain myself for a long
search, I then faced a significant family trauma that required me to move away
from Boston (where I had lived and worked for most of the past decade), back
home to do basically full-time care for the family situation -- located in a
very rural part of the Midwest where e.g. I don't even have reliable access to
internet connectivity here.

Despite this, I've managed to start a newsletter/website for one of my
interests (by teaching myself simple usage of the Hakyll Haskell-based static
site tool), and start a pedagogical side project using Cython to write some
stuff using fused types and typed memoryviews. It has been utterly
demoralizing to try to do these projects in the midst of my family situation
and the lack of resources here in this rural area.

I've done literally hundreds of phone interviews, had 7 different on-site
interviews, and received offers from 2 of them (both of which I rejected
because they asked me to accept compensation/benefits packages that were
substantially worse than what I had when last working).

Most interviews have been OK, but I reject a lot of companies if I pick up on
red flags, especially related to start-up culture bullshit or poor work/life
balance, to protect myself from the insanity that led to this in the first
place.

In my experience, tech hiring is just an unbelievable shitstorm of
irrationality. I've been rejected for over-engineering (because I included
tests and wrote a necessary sorted dict data structure for a take home
submission), for not "focusing enough on product" when submitting statistical
analysis code for a data science take home test, for not remembering an
obscure fact about GCDs and integer lattice points (even though I had
correctly solved two difficult coding problems already in that interview), for
not having X years of on-the-job experience in any one of Hadoop, Spark,
various DevOps tools, and web frameworks (I am a statistician with lots of
scientific computing experience, never applied to positions that list DevOps
or web development as important needs, even though I'm happy to learn them on
the job).

At this point, my extended professional network has basically given up on me.
My grad school friends have recommended me for jobs with biotech companies,
Facebook, fairly prestigious finance companies, with endorsements like "he is
the best Python programmer I know, and it's not even his primary skill set"
\-- most reject me immediately because of the gap on my resume.

I don't have any more people to ask for job leads. I scour Indeed.com for
hours every morning, which is extremely demoralizing. I have a reasonably
significant amount of Stack Overflow rep (> 17000) and joined their career
site long ago but have never found a single realistic lead since it's
dominated by web framework jobs. Most employers (or their needlessly combative
tech hiring staff, anyway) seem to make a point of saying cutting comments to
me about my university degrees (two Ivy degrees) and my Stack Overflow rep --
even though I don't ever try to project pride about these things and fully
welcome and prefer to be judged solely by my talents and do not want any form
of laurel-resting, especially not based on "prestigious" degrees (though, to
be fair, I did work extremely hard in university and accomplished many things
that now seemingly no one cares about).

Recently I got rejected by Snapchat literally less than 11 minutes after
submitting my resume and application through their online application site. It
was a form letter rejection in 11 minutes. I started to wonder if maybe the
application portal just sends them a Snapchat photo of my resume, so they have
to accept or reject before it gets deleted. But I'm so cynical by now that it
wasn't really funny.

Practically the only ways I can stay motivated after such a long and soul-
crushing spell of unemployment have been focusing a ton on personal exercise,
focusing on my family and continuing to help them, and focusing on creative
efforts that are 100% not related to software or coding.

The degree of burnout frightens me greatly, but currently the financial
demands placed on me by my family's situation are so great that as I no longer
can afford any form of health insurance at all while unemployed, I cannot even
see a counselor or anything to help process my feelings.

Much like this elementary school parable I read where the Sun and Wind have a
competition to see who can get a man to remove his jacket, I am like the man
when the Wind character just blows harder and harder -- he just pulls the
jacket tighter and tighter.

The more that interfacing with the labor market causes me to deal with
bullshit start-up culture, the _less_ willing I am to take a job. I simply
will not compromise my standards, even literally to my own destruction. It
reminds me of a David Foster Wallace quote: "I had kind of a midlife crisis at
twenty which probably doesn’t augur well for my longevity."

I've been surviving this long enough to know there just is no answer to the
problem of seeking a job that actually makes your life better, certainly not
here in the Hacker News echo chamber -- just look at all of the Who Is Hiring
threads, where, for my given skill area, there has been somewhere around a 1%
relevance rate (just try searching for NumPy).

I'm not looking for encouragement, sympathy, or (more likely here)
unsympathetic market-perspective brass tacks criticism. I just figured it was
worth sharing.

~~~
ryandrake
Wow, I feel for you, having been there myself a number of times. The playing
field is so stacked against applicants it's not even funny. One thing though:

> I've done literally hundreds of phone interviews, had 7 different on-site
> interviews, and received offers from 2 of them (both of which I rejected
> because they asked me to accept compensation/benefits packages that were
> substantially worse than what I had when last working).

That might have been a mistake. When nobody's hiring (as is the case today),
you kind of have to take what you can get. Plus, being already employed
increases your odds of later getting another job, hopefully back where you
should be compensation-wise. If I were an unemployed tech worker today, I
would literally take the first job I could get, so at the NEXT interview I
didn't have to admit that I'm out of work.

~~~
p4wnc6
There are a few reasons why I didn't agree regarding places that I've turned
down. First, if the family situation continues to require on-going financial
resources from me (likely), then it's literally not sustainable for me to
accept an offer where the compensation/benefits are substantially worse than
what I earned previously. Yes, if the situation becomes dire enough, I may
have to, but until it does become dire, I would be setting myself up right
away to struggle to make ends meet in that new job, and I don't feel
comfortable doing that.

Secondly, taking a job doesn't fully solve the problems that you claim it
does. For one, because I have a short stint on my resume followed by a long
gap, that makes employers skeptical. If I just take the first job I can get
and it turns out to be mind-trashingly horrible to the point of literally,
physically not being sustainable to live with it, then I'll have to quit
again, making _another_ short stint and gap on my resume.

Most people think that about the 1-year mark is the shortest reasonable stint,
so whatever job I take next, I have to believe _at least_ that it is live-
with-able for 1 year (my last job emphatically was not) before I am at the
point where I could send my resume out and look again. Based on the
experiences I've had, this is a fairly significant risk. Not to mention that
my earnest, true goal is to find a place where I actually fit in and can focus
on investing time in a real career for a long time frame.

Finally, I know reasonably well what I am worth based on past jobs, offers I
got in prior years when I was already working. I suspect in at least one case
that a company was intentionally trying to use my situation as leverage to
low-ball me, and that just won't work. It communicates up front that they
aren't excited about me, don't plan to treat me in a minimally healthy way,
etc., and is just a massive red flag that I should avoid them for the sake of
protecting myself and by extension also my family from what could happen if I
take the job and end up being treated very badly.

~~~
outworlder
> There are a few reasons why I didn't agree regarding places that I've turned
> down. First, if the family situation continues to require on-going financial
> resources from me (likely), then it's literally not sustainable for me to
> accept an offer where the compensation/benefits are substantially worse than
> what I earned previously.

Maybe I haven't had enough caffeine for the day. However, even if the new job
doesn't even cover your expenses, isn't some income better than no income?
Unless you are using your current free time to gain something.

~~~
p4wnc6
The current free time is mostly dedicated to attending to the immediate needs
of the family situation (which is a complicated mix of medical and legal
issues).

If I move, I have to have enough money to adequately cover costs for making
arrangements for the situation when I'm gone. If I stay here, I can do most of
those things myself, and with little overhead for the ones I can't fully do.
Living far away would change it substantially. And there are absolutely zero
jobs related to any of my skill sets in this area, and in fact most jobs in
this area barely pay a living wage to begin with.

It's not to say I don't want to move -- I very much do and feel it would be
best. It just means I have to protect my compensation level and ensure it is
adequate for the financial responsibilities that fell in my lap. Earning
something close to what I earned previously would be sustainable. Earning
something far less would not be, and could easily result in me having to
relocate here again once the differential in what could be paid for caught up
to us over time.

------
yumaikas
Haven't read the article all the way, but the "Hey HN, sorry to do this"
dialog caught me off guard (I know that referrer headers can be used for it).
Nice touch, BenjaminTodd.

~~~
Xcelerate
That made my day as well. I'm actually debating subscribing — it's not often
that you find someone who tends to that level of detail.

~~~
robertwiblin
We hate pop-ups too, but it's the only way we can make ends meet and keep the
site running. :)

------
Theodores
For me it comes down to this. Step 1 invest in some skills. That also means
skills demanded by the world. In my instance PHP based stuff is fine even if
not fashionable. People actually use PHP and there is enough there for me. I
have had other skills to get work with in the past but for now I only care
about a few code keywords for codebases I use.

As well as a skill in demand I like to have a second string to my bow, this
being another work thing. This can be an appreciation of retail sales through
working in a shop, this may be useful to a client in retail that has bricks
and mortar stores. Having worked in science can also be that second string of
related experience.

Then there is the matter of being able to show confidence and enthusiasm in
all communication. As per the mocking quote at the top, confidence and showing
that does matter. As does enthusiasm.

Also, aptitude is important. You have to actually believe the job is as good
as yours and to be convinced of that fact. That has to be as certain as your
mum doing Christmas Dinner, not to be questioned or thought negatively about.

I very much believe that self belief is really important and that it should
come if you do have in demand skills and acceptable recent experience. Exams
etc. matter not in an in demand sector.

------
lazyant
> it’s better to have 2 impressive achievements than 2 impressive achievements
> and 3 weak ones.

This is logically false but psychologically true.

------
known
Project yourself as a highly skilled wage slave

------
Hoasi
"Do free work" "Negotiate after you’ve started"

Terrible advices, right there.

------
mjevans
The connections section is both focused entirely on LinkedIn (arguably a worse
form of Life Invader than Facebook; I refuse to use either of these or any
other such service).

How is someone that values their privacy supposed to get a job or even break
in to having a job where they make connections to peers?

~~~
merpnderp
I'm not sure there is another way. But if you are in IT, and don't mind
working with recruiters, LinkedIn is an incredibly efficient way to hook up
with tons of recruiters willing to find you jobs doing exactly what you're
looking (and qualified) for.

We just lost a guy with barely 2 years experience on a lark response to a
recruiter on LinkedIn. He made some ridiculous requests and the recruiter
hooked him up.

~~~
p4wnc6
This is not how it works. Recruiters generally spam everyone based on an
inventory of jobs they have, and half the time, the recruiter is more
interested in pumping you for information about where you currently work or
where else you've applied.

When recruiters do put you forward for a job, they require you to give up all
negotiation power in advance, and generally they are paid bonuses on top of
their commission if they can ensure a candidate accepts a low salary. When
they say "my commission is based on the salary you get so I'm trying to get
you the most that I can" it is, truly, complete bullshit.

When you make ridiculous requests of a recruiter, they don't help you. They
just get off the call and figure you're not enough of a shmuck so they won't
be able to fool you, and auto-dial the next possible shmuck.

Even if you're a LinkedIn user (and it is very, very dubious whether LinkedIn
adds or subtracts value for users), dealing with head hunters is a terrible
idea unless you love being jerked around, misled, and having your time wasted.

The cases such as what you describe are so exceedingly rare as to warrant
basically being ignored. That guy won the recruiter lottery, but it was still
irrational for him to play.

~~~
taurath
After pouring through your comments throughout this thread I'm kinda left with
the following conclusion (take it for what its worth, a random person on the
internet): you have a mindset problem, and you're generalizing to the point
that you wouldn't be able to accept nearly any job, or be happy in one.

You've determined: Most companies are bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines All
recruiters are either spambots or leeches

If you have this mindset, you've set the bar way too high. You say you've
turned down many positions, and yet are in a big financial struggle now. Take
a job that doesn't sound quite as bad as the others, before you're forced to
take ANY job. I'll bet this rubs off on anyone who's interviewing you as well.
You obviously have the skills and experience necessary to be a good engineer
from what you've said, but engineers are in higher demand now than just about
ever. If you can't find a job to your liking, the problem is you, not the
industry.

~~~
p4wnc6
I understand where you're coming from, but I also feel there's a serious
argument to be made, Moral Mazes / Peopleware style, that most companies _are_
bad/wrong/awful/burnout machines. The fact that open-plan offices are widely
used is a perfect example. It's a condition fundamentally at odds with the
productivity it is alleged to facilitate. Cost has long been disproven as a
favorable factor for choosing open-plan, as the productivity losses quickly
destroy any real estate savings. Instead it's about status and affiliation --
accepting non-functional designs in order to seem impressive looking in a
superficial way.

And something like open-plan offices are merely the tip of the iceberg.
Superficial reasons for big showy tech re-orgs around the latest and greatest
trends are very similar. The ambient background of political dysfunction
intensified in start-up environments, etc. Huge exposes in major media outlets
describing the way e.g. Amazon employees are made to cry frequently at their
desks and encouraged to use gossip hotlines to backstab colleagues, followed
shortly by their own CEO releasing a statement to shareholders basically
saying if you don't like the cutthroat, anti-human environment then just get
out. ...

It is a mammoth challenge to find employment that is minimally acceptable for
human cognitive health. The way corporations behave, a la Moral Mazes, is just
exceptionally maladaptive for human cognitive function. There is real theory
behind it.

In my own experience, part of what made my previous employment so disastrous
is that it involved an employer doing some substantially illegal things to me
-- to the point that I had to hire an expensive employment attorney when
leaving that company and go through a bunch of hoops to document things. Maybe
you've been lucky to never have been treated this way by a company, but I can
tell you it's real, and many, many executives go absolutely unchecked and have
incredibly harmful views about how they believe they are allowed to treat
people.

~~~
taurath
You're getting all your news and concepts about how to work from one
perspective - your reply confirms to me that your assumptions are killing you.
Many many companies allow remote work. I have an open office which I dislike,
but I can also work at home 2-3 days a week.

It's true, people don't trust companies like they did in the 50s, for good
reason. Many many people though have families and work is not the highest
priority in their lives. There are entire industries full of people that
respect each other and just work 9-5.

You are being taken in by the anecdotes and horror stories and ignoring the
vast majority of people who are paid well, go home to their families on time,
rarely have to do overtime, and aren't terribly worried about a layoff but
could find another job easily. People in many companies are treated with
professional and personal respect. It's not that hard to find one even. But
you need to believe they exist or your mindset will just be one of trying to
find all these triggers and land mines you've set our before yourself.

I have no college degree or any eminent qualifications, and am not the best
coder around. But I have had no problem getting hired into good companies that
respect me and I think its because I don't allow myself to get jaded after
many setbacks.

~~~
p4wnc6
I appreciate your reply, but I also feel you are too nonchalantly dismissing
something like e.g. Moral Mazes, which is a significant longitudinal study of
bureaucracy and management hierarchy, using tools from academic sociology.
It's not just some fly-by-night opinion.

In my experience, it is extremely hard to find jobs that provide a combination
of paying well, allowing you a personal life, and having reasonable enough
hours to avoid excessive fatigue or burnout. I've interviewed with places top
to bottom and had four post-graduate jobs, all of which failed in at least two
of those categories while having appeared like they would succeed in all of
them when I did interviews. All of my friends and colleagues report similar
anecdotes, as do many, many commenters here. The anecdotes describing jobs in
which you feel you are well paid, have a feasible work/life balance, and
freedom to pursue a personal life, are unequivocally in the minority. That's
not "my perspective" ... that's just collecting data in the wild.

And though I think I've had it bad, my experiences have been like a dream
vacation or something compared to what my mother has lived through in her job
as a court reporter in a small town courthouse. Rampant sexism, ageism,
uncompensated overtime which is not allowed for her position, bosses (judges)
who demean her, yell at her, do illegal things like carry out their private
landlord affairs in their judges chambers during work hours and force her to
handle the paperwork for it.

Or my brother, a factory worker in the area whose work stories almost cause me
to have an aneurysm out of frustration. More uncompensated overtime, overtly
insulting and demeaning bosses, sales staff who make jokes about all the
catered meetings they get and how they will leave the day-old food out on the
factory floor because the floor workers are so desperate for a free meal that
they'll eat anything. He earns just barely over the poverty line, has no
vacation, commutes around 40 miles each way plus traffic, and every single
other job in the region that he could possibly get is no better. All so he can
just barely service college loan debt that has been utterly useless for
getting employment.

The problem of finding employment that can sustain human cognitive health is
_massive_ and hearing you utterly dismiss it like this makes me feel like you
reside in an incredible bubble where you've been shielded from what it's
really like, and that while I appreciate your advice, it is just not
applicable.

~~~
taurath
Again, I'm just saying you're comparing the perfect vs the better than almost
anyone else (by your own admission). Paying well to you might mean 400k a
year, I don't know. I think its eminently possible to get 100k-150k/yr as a
senior developer and not work over 40 hours a week. Maybe not where you live
though, but remote I'd imagine you could easily find something for 80k at
40hrs a week or less.

I do understand the drudgery of work, and how it can hold back cognitive
development and just plain be unhealthy at times. I don't understand how you
can compare against your mother and brother's experiences and still come out
saying you won't take a job. I'm admittedly in a fine place right now, but I
remember very clearly when I wasn't.

~~~
p4wnc6
I'm not talking about mere drudgery. Look, I've got a decent amount of work
experience. I know the 40-hour grind. I know how to navigate tricky
relationships with colleagues. I know how to deal with and succeed in average-
case corporate politics. None of that is what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about abject treatment. Being demeaned, discriminated against,
yelled at, spoken to in exceedingly unprofessional ways and having no recourse
to defend yourself, and being 'punished' for things that the executives may
dislike, but for which it is literally illegal to punish employees (like
violations of the NLRA).

That's the big stuff. Smaller stuff would be the ubiquity of unhealthy working
conditions, bait-and-switch jobs that require incomprehensibly higher quality
work experience than what they plan to give out, severe politics, and overwork
(which, seriously, I don't know where you are finding these magical 150k jobs
for 40 hrs a week. The experience of literally every single software
professional I know is completely at odds with that, and my own experience is
as well).

That you glibly throw in things like "but remote I'd imagine you could easily
find something for 80k at 40hrs a week or less" is frustrating. For example,
in my current rural living situation, I do not even have access to stable
high-speed internet. I use 4G tethering through my phone just to browse the
internet most of the time, and _even that_ is slow and spotty. There is no way
I could work remotely here, and even at that $80k would not be enough for
basic cost of living _plus_ support for the on-going family obligations (and
would be a drastic pay cut for me anyway). To boot, there really isn't a large
supply of remote jobs. I frequently check for them at Stack Overflow Careers,
We Work Remotely, and other sites, and there's just nothing. Like most other
sources, I have to filter our tons and tons of irrelevant web framework jobs,
and for what's left, nothing is remote. Even finding jobs that offer adequate
(or any) relocation assistance is incredibly hard. Basically, if you don't
already live in a glamorous urban area, you get shit on. That's not just some
angsty comment. That's just simply what has happened when I search for a job.

Many of the things you say sound reasonable on a surface layer, but there
isn't the substance behind them. The reality of the situation is just not
within the bubble you've been able to experience. That's not your fault --
indeed it is near impossible to adequately get someone to understand my
situation. Many of my friends are used to spending tons on eating out at
expensive urban restaurants, buying expensive subscription services for
fashion and entertainment, living with ubiquitous public transit and easily
available access to high-speed internet, etc. They can't understand life in
poor America when you flip all those things and live hundreds of miles from
any region which could even remotely offer a relevant or minimally-well-paying
job to support your immediate needs.

~~~
taurath
If you live in an area like that and don't even have a reliable Internet
connection, then no wonder you don't have a job. Blame yourself for where you
have chosen to live rather than the evils of corporate greed.

~~~
p4wnc6
Have you even read any of the rest of the thread? You sound ridiculous.

I had no choice but to move here due to a significant set of family medical
and legal circumstances that I am supporting (both financially and by doing
full-time care, childcare, and other tasks every day). This is where my
immediate family is from (one of them still owns and operates part of some
farmland, not here but in North Dakota) -- I didn't choose this, but it's my
family's history. I don't prefer living here, but I prefer to make sure my
family is OK rather than abandon them for urban entitlement.

The fact that you think people should "blame themselves" for choosing to live
here is outrageous to me. At the least the people around here are good-hearted
and care about other humans. I'd rather live around here than around people
like you, absolutely.

------
kelukelugames
Does HN take feature requests? I wish there is a save button.

~~~
el_benhameen
Vote a story up, then go to your profile and click "saved stories". All
stories that you've upvoted are listed there.

~~~
gear54rus
Which is annoying to no end, these should be 2 different things IMO.

------
moribondus
The article is a bit absurd.

If someone can do all of what they propose, he could as well package his day
into some kind of product or service, and then sell that instead.

One reason why people want to be employees and not enterpreneur-cum-salesman
is exactly because they do not want to do all of that, or are simply not
capable of doing all of that.

Ever since I learned to repackage my hourly efforts into sell-able products
and services, I stopped looking for jobs and just sold products and services
instead. In the end, an employer is just someone who repackages your hours
into sell-able products and services.

------
nicerobot
Don't be "old".

~~~
idrios
But still have "experience"

------
sqeaky
> since people need to engage over several months to get value out of the
> advice

This is false.

> I find popups annoying too

I do not believe you, if you did you would know that often the first response
to popup annoyance is to close the window.

What do your analytics actually say happens when that popup shows? It will
show that I was reading your article up until that appeared, then I entered
garbage for an email and closed the window.

Will my email GoF##k@yourself.com be counted as a success or failure for your
popup?

~~~
random_rr
calm down. Newsletters drive Internet business. If you don't know this...
Don't walk outside, it's an even scarier place out there.

Don't like pop ups? Close tab, move on.

Or... Throw a childish hissy fit on HN over free content. You know, whichever
sounds better to you.

~~~
mhurron
When the content owners of something that is annoying you show up in the same
thread your in, it is appropriate to voice your complaints to them.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Sure, but there's mature ways of voicing your complaints that involve tact and
common sense.

------
J_Darnley
Summary without all this marketing/HR bullshit: have Linus Torvalds' skill and
be willing to work for 10k.

