
The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment - vellum
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/the-terrifying-reality-of-longterm-unemployment/274957/
======
cletus
This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the
importance of social proof.

Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech
companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions
don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have
Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's
why academic staff who have a Harvard degree have a much easier time than
those that don't.

How long you've been out of work is more social proof. Were I in this
situation I would absolutely without a second's doubt invent fictitious
employment and get a friend to back up any reference check and I wouldn't feel
the least bit bad about it. I know employers are filtering on superficial
things and those that have had difficulty finding work is a pretty quick and
easy filter.

There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home
ownership.

10+ years ago I remember reading a study in Europe that showed the rate of
unemployment was directly proportional to the rate of home ownership across
the entire EU with a very high correlation. Spain had the highest rate of home
ownership and unemployment. Britain (then) had the lowest for both.

We push home ownership as a political agenda. While it has benefits for
creating stable communities it also creates an inflexible labour market as
people won't move to where the jobs are.

~~~
enraged_camel
>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home
ownership.

Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is
positive.

Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane.
_Absolutely insane!_

Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting,
and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by
the shoulders and shake them violently. It's like the housing market crash did
not teach anyone anything!

It comes down to this: a house is a terrible, terrible means of investment.
It's a fixed asset that, contrary to popular belief, is not guaranteed to
always go up in value. In addition, people don't really take into account the
negatives. Primarily, a house ties you down. You have zero mobility as a labor
market participant if you own a house, and this significantly reduces your
leveraging power when it comes to negotiating salary. Besides that though,
houses have a ton of expenses, and as fixed assets they are subject to a lot
of uncontrollable risk (fire, floods, earthquakes, the neighborhood
depreciating, etc.).

Instead of having that money tied down on a house, people are much better
investing in the stock market, which has, over the past 100 years, gone up by
7% annually.

The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids. The stability of the
environment has a lot of positive benefits for their growth. It also makes
social integration easier.

/rant

~~~
nostromo
A few things you're not accounting for:

* Leverage. (The most you can leverage a stock investment is 2x. For homes people can leverage their money up to an insane 20x, for example: by buying a 500k home with 25k down. The proper comparison is not to compare buying a 500k home vs 500k worth of stocks; it's buying 25k or 50k worth of stocks vs a 500k home.)

* Mortgage deduction. (Imagine if you could invest 500k in the stock market with only 25k, and then the government let you deduct your interest payments!)

* Inflation. (I've heard of people living in Manhattan in apartments they bought in the 1980s that pay a mortgage of $500. Inflation has reduced their mortgage debt to negligible levels. Time has in a very real way erased much of their debt.)

~~~
dredmorbius
What leverages up can (and will) leverage down. The problem with the housing
collapse was that people with low or zero down-payment mortgages found that
the property value fell, wiping out their entire stake (if they had any at
all). More skin in the game should (though there's some research suggesting
otherwise) make the market more stable by reducing the ability to speculate.
This is a lesson that goes back to the crash of 1929 and the Dutch tulip
bubble.

The mortgage deduction is priced into your home (as are low interest rates).
Absent the deduction, real estate prices will fall. As interest rates rise,
housing prices will also tend to soften.

What inflation giveth, it also taketh away: your mortgage costs are reduced,
but so is the appreciation of your house.

~~~
rdtsc
Each of those is an contribution to risk and and potential reward, I guess it
still comes down to whether people think their house will appreciate or not
faster than inflation.

There is also:

* Closing costs. 5k to 10k can easily go to that only. So just buying and selling constantly could end wasted eaten "transaction costs"

* Chance of moving. Are you likely to move? If so think twice about a house. This is offset in the software world by working from home.

* You effectively get a 4% loan and pay it off in 30 years. That could be hundreds of thousands of dollars over the cost of your house you end up paying to the bank in 30 years. That completely escapes many people. Now there is inflation and the opportunity cost to do something else with the money but:

* You have to figure is your salary going to keep up with the inflation? You hope so right...right?

* Opportunity cost. Could you make more by buying some stock, and sell it after 30 years?

* Do you think housing is going to go up again or is the stock market going to go up faster. Same compounding for interest rate goes for reinvesting stock dividends.

~~~
dredmorbius
Add to the "chance of moving" cost: your opportunity cost in lost income (or
additional expenses) by being unable to sell your house in the course of a
move. Either you lose out on the income opportunity (which is what this
subthread started with), or you're left with the higher costs of renting out
your home (likely not covering mortgage) while renting at the new location.

We saw this last situation for a new hire who last year was unable to sell his
underwater midwest home while finding rents in a markedly hotter housing
market much higher, especially when proximity to good schools and low crime
rates were factored in.

------
DanielBMarkham
"It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed."

What the fuck? If you measure something you do not like, the immediate
response should not be to grab a hammer and try to kill it. It probably exists
for a reason. Understand the reason. Then take action. It may be that there is
nothing you can do -- directly. Only a small few percentage points of the
problems in the world go away through direct action.

Prima facie, this argument seems to be that if employers don't like an
attribute in a job applicant's resume, we should either make it illegal for
them to discriminate based on that attribute or "fake out" that attribute in
some other way.

It seems like anything I'm going to say is blindingly obvious, but I'l say it
anyway: we cannot provide "recent experience" in X simply by hiring somebody
and giving them a nametag that says "I do X!". It doesn't work that way.
Employers want experience, not simply words on a resume. You can't create lots
of experience for a job position in a market that simply might not have that
many job positions of that type available. In addition, sometimes (not always
by any means) companies let go the people who are deadweight first.

I could go on. There's a plethora of various speculations I can make about why
this measured observation is true. More research, most likely by job seekers
themselves, is required to fix this. Politics by correlation, just like
management by correlation, is a terrible way of running a ship.

~~~
rayiner
Eh, there is something to what he's saying. The idea that the labor market
behaves rationally is a childish fantasy. Employers are not rational. They do
all sorts of irrational things, and discriminating against the long-term
unemployed (and also women returning to the work force from motherhood) is one
of those irrational things.

It's almost a dating mentality. They jump to the conclusion: "well if nobody
else wants him, why should I?" In reality, people can be long-term unemployed
for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with them being a bad
potential employee. Maybe they have really specialized skills or want a really
specific kind of job--the nature of such situations is that there is going to
be gaps in how long it takes to find the next employer looking for those very
specific skills.

~~~
marknutter
Well if they act irrationally they will be sufficiently punished by the market
(no childish fantasy required). There aren't enough jobs? Then create more
jobs. Starting a company, at my last check, is incredibly simple to do. Of
course, turning a profit is hard, which is why people turn to the government
to provide them with work rather than take the risk of starting a company. The
government doesn't need to turn a profit, it collects taxes. Therefore it's a
very attractive alternative to the cold, hard realities of the market. Of
course, there's only so much tax money to go around..

~~~
rprospero
Companies will eventually be punished for acting irrationally, but, in the
short term, they can be rewarded quite handsomely.

This reminds me of an old trick I've heard used on multiple occasions. We've
all read the Hack News posts about how no amount of programming can compensate
for a poor personality. Image that you're looking at an applicant and their
former employer tells you:

"He was a good coder, but he had a serious anger management problem. You
should do code reviews over the phone if you don't want books thrown at your
head."

You're probably not going to hire this candidate.

Now, imagine that you're a manager who has a great, professional programmer
who is leaving your organization. When other companies call for a reference,
you could tell the truth, causing your competitors to hire her and their
business to improve. On the other hand, you can make up a story about poor
inter-personal skills and keep this talented worker out of the workforce. If
you can't have her, no one can. On the reverse side, you give glowing
recommendations to your worst coders so that their terrible practices fill
your opponents sites with massive security holes and performance bottlenecks.
As an added bonus, when your current employees figure out that they'll have a
hard time finding a new job after working for you, you can keep their salaries
below market rate.

Now, this won't work in the long term, since you'll eventually gain a
reputation as a liar and your recommendations will be ignored. However, as
long as you remain small, it will take you quite a long time to get this
reputation. Is the CEO of FerriDyne systems honest or a liar? Meanwhile, you
can keep a promising employee out of the job market for six months until they
come crawling back for their old job at a fraction of their old pay.

This technique also makes recruiting difficult, since your employees won't
recommend their competent friends for new positions. On the other hand, you
can just get in the habit of hiring other people with large gaps in their
record. If they're incompetent, then you let them go and recommend them to
your competitors. If they're good, you hire them on at a discount since they
haven't been able to find a job in six months.

Granted, I'd never do this and I'm sure you wouldn't either. It's underhanded
and, ultimately, irrational. Lying leads to a breakdown of trust that weakens
the whole financial system. However, if you're leading the charge towards that
collapse, you can make a lot of money on the way.

~~~
UK-AL
How common is this sort of stuff?

~~~
kevinskii
I think not common, at least not in the US. The risk of liability is too
great. My company has a strict no-comment policy, and won't affirm anything
beyond dates of employment and job title. This seems to be the norm for
corporations.

Smaller business who don't have their own HR and legal departments protecting
them may be a bit more forthcoming, but probably not much.

~~~
flyinRyan
Big companies find other ways to do it though. Don't believe for a second that
nut job managers won't do everything they can to screw your career if they
feel slighted.

------
bryanlarsen
I've been on both sides of this divide. I've interviewed people who have been
unemployed for more than 6 months, and I've been without formal employment for
longer than 6 months.

If all you've done is watch TV and send out resumes, nobody's going to hire
you. You have to be able to say that you've done something. The easy answer is
to go back to school. That costs money -- hopefully there's a government
program you can take advantage of. But it gives you something you can put in
that hole on your resume, and hopefully gives you relevant skills.

The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty much
anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or just
making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely related to
the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion. There's
nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something with it.

The question is whether or not you should put your "forced sabbatical"
projects on your resume or not. They'll plug the hole, but I imagine that it
will also cause you to be filtered out by HR departments in big corporations
if the work isn't "relevant".

~~~
enraged_camel
>>The other good answer is "I worked on X", where X could have been pretty
much anything: a failed business, an open source project, volunteer work, or
just making stuff to sell on Etsy. I didn't even care if it was remotely
related to the position. I just wanted to see some initiative and passion.
There's nothing wrong with a forced sabbatical as long as you do something
with it.

Ideally, yes. In reality, it's easier said than done.

1\. Most unemployed people need a way to pay their bills. This is not possible
if you're dicking around with open source projects or volunteer work. Starting
a business requires a certain amount of capital. And "making stuff to sell on
Etsy" works only for a tiny minority of people who have the creative skills to
make cool stuff.

2\. When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job. You
should get up at 8am and look for jobs, make a list, take a lunch break, then
spend the afternoon tailoring your resume for those jobs. Then you can get off
at 5pm or whatever and do other things. What most people do however is that
they do other things during the day, and then in the evenings they sit in
front of their computers with Monster.com open and browse job openings, and
maybe send out a few resumes. Which doesn't work of course.

Basically, the only people who can afford to work on something meaningful
while unemployed are those who have a significant amount of money saved up. In
today's economy, most people who are at risk of unemployment don't.

~~~
VLM
"When you're unemployed, finding work should become your full-time job."

This assumes there's enough of a job market "out there" that after more than 6
months you can still burn 40 hours per week on it.

"This is not possible if you're dicking around with ... volunteer work."

This doesn't even make sense. Most volunteer work doesn't require much money.
You may be confusing setting up a charity or donating to a charity with
volunteer work at a charity. Even something "time consuming" like serving soup
at the church soup kitchen can't burn more than a couple hours.

~~~
maeon3
I did volunteer work at a soup kitchen and through the connections I made
there I worked with someone who kicked my butt and fixed my resume. If that
hadn't happened i wouldn't be making the salary I am now.

The ancient wisdom: give and it will be given you is mysteriously powerful.
Humans want to help those who help others, it's in our genetics.

~~~
pvdm
I can not recommend this advice enough. Give and it will be given you.

~~~
maeon3
It is the first step of forming an alliance and symbiotic relationship between
adversarial systems.

When two humans want to acquire all the assets of the other and make the other
one the slave, the first step in starting an alliance is doing a cost benefit
analysis of how things would be easier for both if cooperation was done. Often
times the one persuaded is reluctant until one human takes a leap of faith and
gives, in expectation of receiving. It's all highly mathematical and I could
create an algorithm to describe it. But you wouldn't recommend that either.

------
tptacek
Two things.

First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious
cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume
callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is
that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches.
If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed
to extract basic facts from a resume and screen based on that, _and_ there's
high unemployment and so increased demand for every position, it stands to
reason that unemployed people are structurally disadvantaged when competing
for jobs via resume blasts.

Second: Six months, you say? Can any of us think of a cohort of job seekers
that _routinely_ needs to contend with 6+ month employment gaps? I wonder,
maybe, just maybe, do you think that has a powerful "objective" stigma
attached to it disproportionately often might find it difficult to compete
equitably in the job market? I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask
to find out more about this.

~~~
jdminhbg
> I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about
> this.

I assume you are looking to ask the 50% of the population with lower
unemployment, shorter median unemployment duration, and lower % long-term
unemployed: <http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/>

~~~
tptacek
Women are more likely to work in sectors not as hard-hit by the recession.
They don't tend to work construction. They do tend to work in the public
sector sharply more often than men. You have to take those statistics in
context.

------
incision
About 13 years ago, I was unemployed for about four months.

I've had a few people positively grill me about that blank despite the length
of time that has passed and evidence that I didn't spend the time idle
(Obtained a certification, did freelance work and eventually pivoted my
career).

In each case, it was an older person who upon my asking explained that they
saw any extended period of unemployment as blatant laziness.

I ended up getting those jobs, but came to learn a bit about how some people
can come to think of life as so straightforward and easy.

In each case the people judging me hadn't had to look for work for at least 20
years. In one, the person judging was the son of a prior VP who was widely
despised by his peers for having made a nepotistic ascent through the ranks.
In another I ended up seated at a desk next to the son of the judging CTO.

~~~
flyinRyan
>upon my asking explained that they saw any extended period of unemployment as
blatant laziness.

What judgmental fucking assholes. It's a shame such people are the ones doing
the interviewing instead of the ones rotting in unemployment.

We only get to live one time, so if you see me taking off two months as
"blatant laziness" then fuck you.

------
ChuckMcM
What bothers me most about the long term unemployed is the lack of visibility
into what they have been doing during the down time. I recently got to look at
two resumes, both people who had been unemployed for > 6 months, one guy has
this big blank spot, the other has a narrative about what he's been doing. The
active guy got in shape, he rebuilt is basement drainage system, he did odd
jobs helping people with "handy" work (he was a highly paid system
administrator at a New York bank before he was laid off) and he's been
reading.

I am _much_ less likely to call back the blank spot guy and much _more_ likely
to call back the active guy. What I'd like to know is, there any correlation
between callbacks and intra-employment activity?

~~~
pnathan
Whenever I read a resume, I wonder about blank spots over about 2-3 months. I
don't really get excited that they exist, but I do want to get a grasp of the
rationale and what they did.

I suppose I am ok with it if someone just wanted to spend 3 months in his PJs
recovering from burnout. But I'd rather hear about him spending 3 months doing
gardening. Better yet, I'd rather hear about the technical things he did in
that time frame. What I try to distinguish is apathy/laziness vs.
relaxation/recovery.

------
tsunamifury
3 years ago I ended 18 months of unemployment by listing every friend, person
I spoke with, or acquaintance as one of my clients for my 'very successful'
consulting business.

I regularly do help out on side projects or test out ideas with friends so
they were more than happy to provide a reference for this period. In the 3
years since i've been able to climb from no income, to medium US income, to
top 5% income bracket. Its hard, but not impossible to recover.

------
redmattred
It's a terrible trend and its absolutely true.

With the unemployment rate so high, employers are now getting absolutely
flooded with resumes for every and any job posting. There is a high volume of
completely unqualified people applying to positions they have no relevant
experience for. There is also a much higher volume of qualified people, and HR
departments need some way of prioritizing these applicants. Fair or not,
filtering out people by whether or not they have been recently employed is a
relatively effective way to find the most promising candidates.

If you are out of work and looking for a job, your best chance is to try to
bypass HR altogether by either reaching out to hiring managers directly or by
networking your way in. Most jobs are filled long before they are ever even
posted online. It's never too soon to reach out to companies you want to work
for - they may not be hiring immediately, but you want to be top of mind when
a new position does open up.

------
jmsduran
The negative stigma that is placed on long-term unemployment is an issue that
needs to be addressed; measuring how long someone has been unemployed is not
really indicative of anything.

The rationalization that _"If no one has hired them in X months, there must be
a reason not to"_ is just flat out dumb. And while it may be a red flag when
purchasing physical goods or real estate, it's a baseless stat when it comes
to measuring how well an individual's expertise & qualities may be suited for
a particular position.

In my opinion, there are much better stats an employer can take off a job
application, and wouldn't mind the federal/state government passing
legislation against this type of discrimination if it gets out of control.

~~~
pekk
Hiring is based on flat-out dumb reasoning, as long as it is a stupid reason
to exclude someone rather than include them.

------
larrys
Not surprising at all.

Same thing happens with real estate (well known) as only one example or even
dating as another. (Price with real estate and market conditions are also a
factor but a house on the market to long gets stale).

Generally the fact that others have passed on something is taken as a marker
to less attractiveness all else held equal.

The question could be raised "if this person or house is so good why hasn't
someone else taken advantage of it to date?" With respect to both employment
or dating the reasonableness of the person in question could also be a factor.

Lastly, there is the theory of getting a "find" before someone else has
discovered something that works in favor of less time on the market.

------
reinhardt
As someone with zero debt, minimal financial needs and enough savings to take
voluntarily more than a few months off work, this is downright scary. I guess
if it comes down to this, I'll just have to fudge the hell out of it in my
resume.

------
jiggy2011
Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a
prospective employer?

"Unemployed" suggests that you spent 6 months sitting in your pyjamas watching
TV. Why not simply say you were freelancing, even if all you actually ended up
doing was a few data entry tasks from mechanical turk.

~~~
theorique
_Why would you advertise the fact that you were unemployed for 6 months to a
prospective employer?_

This. No one is unemployed any more. They are just "freelancing" or "self-
employed" or "working on personal projects". Anybody can make up (and
preferably actually do) some resume items that makes your non-working time
look incredibly productive.

~~~
jarek
And do you think the screeners won't start screening out "personal projects"
if enough people start doing that? "Freelancing" for eight months after a
career of working for other people, and suspiciously little to show for the
freelancing... I wonder what that's about?

~~~
pc86
It's already happening.

Last time I applied for a job was after just shy of two years of contract work
full-time. They asked for a portfolio which I sent over. I was confused when
they asked for _more_ as I had already picked my best work. After supplying
some more samples I asked the hiring manager why they had requested more and
was essentially told they were looking at not only quality, but also quantity.
_They wanted to make sure I had been doing this for two years._

Personally, I think this is good. Saying you're freelancing when you're
actually unemployed is no less dishonest than saying you have a degree you
don't have or you worked at [X] BigCo for six months longer than you actually
did.

I worked my ass off when I was a consultant and I'd be pretty upset if John Q.
off the street has been resume blasting everyone for six months while drawing
unemployment and saying he's been "consulting."

~~~
jiggy2011
To be clear, I'm not suggesting somebody flat out lies and claims they were
consulting when they were really playing xbox.

I'm suggesting making some actual effort, saying "part time freelancing whilst
seeking other opportunities" sounds better than "collected unemployment"

~~~
theorique
Absolutely. I think padding a true blank spot is a problem.

------
batonka
It seems that from a hiring manager point of view the logic is this:

-Good people are hard to find

-If I find a good person, I snap them up right away

-Other hiring managers in my industry probably do the same

-If someone hasn't been working for 6 months they've probably been on a bunch of interviews

-In those interviews, no one thought the candidate was good enough to hire

-Odds are the candidate probably isn't worth hiring

Real world example, one of my co-workers was hired less than a week after his
large corporate investment bank employer collapsed. Main reason was that it
was obvious that he was smart, hard working and organized.

~~~
pekk
Also it's obviously not his fault that the bank collapsed, whereas we will
blame someone if they do not have work in a few months

------
sebastiano
This article hits home for me. I graduated from a Top 20 university here in
the UK in 2009 with a First Class in Computer Science. I have always been the
type that never really knew what they wanted to do with their life and made
the mistake of not forcing myself to pick a career path.

The first year after leaving uni I worked in a job unrelated to my degree. I
left and decided to take the grad scheme slog that is so common. I applied to
10-15 big companies' grad schemes in their Tech departments (IBM, MS,
investment banks etc) and reached at least the first in-person interview for
around half of them. I had a few offers but turned them down since I realised
I was not passionate about the role (big mistake).

Since then I have spent the following 18 months unemployed. I work voluntarily
at my parents' business, again, in a field unrelated to my degree, while doing
some freelancing and hacking on some personal projects.

I am scared to apply for programming jobs now because of the gaps in my
employment and lack of 'formal' experience. I have a massive fear of the
rejection, mixed with a good amount of Impostor Syndrome.

It's a vicious cycle. I am scared to apply and be rejected, which is in turn
adding to my unemployed period and making the situation worse.

I have had some savings which meant I could survive unemployed comfortably
(probably worked against me in hindsight), but it is quite a depressing
realisation and I feel as though I have wasted my degree and am starting from
scratch.

------
droithomme
It's not a terrible metric. There is an actual correlation between long term
unemployment and being unemployable because of lack of skills and
incompetence, or serious personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental
disorders, criminality, violent behavior and laziness.

Few long term unemployed are long term unemployed for no reason at all. It's
hard to take the claims seriously of those such as the article author who are
unable or unwilling to acknowledge this.

If authors and social workers are concerned with advocating on behalf of the
small minority of long term unemployed who are actually employable, it would
be more helpful to have articles that address the issue of how to find the
small number of long term unemployed who would make good team additions,
without having to spend far more time interviewing bad candidates than one
does when hiring currently employed and short term unemployed persons.

Advocating for the government to hire unemployable people for positions in
government is one of the worst suggestions I have ever heard. Things are
already bad enough with endemic incompetence and corruption in government
bureaus without seeking out even more of the incompetent and dangerous and
giving them the power and influence that comes with government positions.

~~~
xentronium
> There is an actual correlation between long term unemployment and being
> unemployable because of lack of skills and incompetence, or serious
> personality defects, such as drug addiction, mental disorders, criminality,
> violent behavior and laziness.

There is an actual correlation between being black and drug addiction,
criminality &c.

Discriminating on skin color is illegal, though.

~~~
Flimm
If you read two resumes that were identical in every way, except that one had
experience listed and the other had none, wouldn't you go for the first one?
If not, what's the point of listing experience at all?

------
t0mbstone
Here's an idea. Think outside of the box: If being employed in the past six
months is really such a big deal, just start your own LLC and do contracting
work of some sort. Hey, look at that. Now your resume shows that you were
employed during that period. Sure, you might not have made all that much money
while you were employed at your own business, but at least you were employed.

~~~
yen223
If finding contracting work were easy, the person wouldn't be unemployed for 6
months now, would he?

------
tbrownaw
So, being unemployed is being taken as a proxy for being
incompetent/unemployable. I'd think getting fired after 6 months or less would
be a much better indicator (even if you just look for once, rather than
repeatedly to control for having gotten a crap boss)... is this just a case of
HR departments being overconfident of their own collective skills?

~~~
bluedino
Part of the theory is that the first people to be fired at a company are among
the least productive or least competent. Therefore, the longer someone has
been unemployed, the less competent they are.

------
b0rsuk
Do you have some tips for someone like me ? Unemployed for 3 years, graduated
from IT but worked in another industry (nautical charts). I have little to
show. I got an interview quite often, but that's where it ended. 80% companies
just have HR department and don't ask any technical questions.

Should I focus on building my portfolio ? (recently focused on Django)

Is it easier to find a job in some "common" field, like software testing or
PHP, or rarer like Django where there are much fewer offers but also less
competition ?

------
rdouble
This seems to also affect software engineers. I used to split my time between
18-24 month consulting projects and then would take 3-6 months off to travel.
I've been lucky to see all of the US and parts of Africa, Europe, Japan,
Australia and Mexico. This was pretty easy to do in the late 1990s and early
2000s. However, after the last time I traveled, it took quite some time to
find another contract. It seems much riskier in the current economic climate.

------
stretchwithme
The worst thing about the interventions into the labor market is that they
prevent people from being hired.

It would be far better to hand aid to the working poor directly than to have a
minimum wage or impose regulations that make hiring the working poor more
expensive.

Many people seem to think making the employers pay somehow reduces their
profits with no other ill effects. But in reality, it is also likely make
prices go up. OR the take home pay of workers go down or rise more slowly.

Just because these effects don't happen immediately doesn't mean they don't
eventually happen or that they don't accumulate. And just because you don't
understand how artificial prices interfere with supply and demand doesn't mean
the effects aren't real.

If you are one of the least productive laborers, your labor may not be worth
the minimum wage to anybody. You're completely shut out. Good luck finding a
place to live under the nearest bridge.

------
mgkimsal
At some point the pendulum may swing the other way, and employers may not hire
anyone who even _has_ a current job, using "loyalty" as a filter. "If they're
so bold as to take time off work to go interview here with me, why would I
ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off and leave me high and dry in
the future?"

If we want to affect quick change for 'long term unemployed', start offering
tax breaks to employers (hasn't this been done/tried already?). Reduce payroll
tax by 2% for every year a person has been unemployed (2 years = 4% reduction,
etc). That would, I'd think, get employers' attention.

~~~
VLM
"why would I ever trust that they won't just lie for a day off"

That's just bizarre. I've been around a couple decades and I've always taken a
personal or vacation day for interviews. I guess there are people who call in
sick although thats not my style. I've never even heard of an employer so
controlling that they get to decide if my day off activities are "worthy
enough". Salaried jobs I just took off for an odd lunch hour.

~~~
mgkimsal
People will rationalize anything. Who might have predicted years ago that we'd
be in a position like this:

Employer: "I just can't find any qualified people to work! I'll have to import
people from overseas who've never done this work before!"

Person: "But... there's load of people right in this city who have these
skills who'd like to come work for you."

Employer: "WTF? They've not had a _job_ in 9 months!"

Person: "That's because your competition closed down and you're one of the few
places in town that needs their skills but you didn't want to hire them, even
though you need workers to keep up with demand."

Employer: "BUT THEY HAVE NOT HAD A JOB IN 9 MONTHS! NEXT MONTH IT WILL BE _10_
MONTHS!"

Yes, I understand that long-term unemployment can bring about changes in
people wrt skills and perhaps socialization (keeping 'normal' hours, etc).
That's not what's in play all the time. We had a HUGE increase in job seekers
- employers had their pick of whoever they wanted for most positions, and some
will continue to make the criteria harder to fill if it means they'll get
something out of it (tax breaks for hiring long-term unemployed, relaxed
immigration bills for cheaper foreign workers, ability to keep wages down in
their region, etc).

------
aurelius83
"In other words, the first thing employers look at is how long you've been out
of work, and that's the only thing they look at if it's been six months or
longer."

This seems intuitive to me. With the large number of people applying to jobs,
there has to be a way to quickly filter resumes down.

It's unfortunate, but HR probably decided that six months or longer is
probably a signal that there is something wrong with the applicant. Because of
the vast amount of resumes being sent in, they can afford to miss out on the
diamond in the rough that is hidden among the mass of resumes of people out of
work for 6 months or longer.

------
el_fuser
Not surprising. I know quite a lot of professionals that took a couple of
years off to care for babies and can't find work.

As a corollary, I've also seen quite a few engineers that were just slightly
out of date get passed over.

------
jlarocco
At some point wouldn't it be easier to create their own jobs?

It seems like a waste of energy to organize a protest with "We want work"
signs when they could be starting a business or something.

------
bennesvig
If you can't land a job in your desired field, get another job that pays a
wage you can live on. Then in every single free moment you have, do work in
the field you're interested in. Even if you have to do it for free (assuming
the free work looks really good on a resume). It lets you keep something
current on your resume and develop skills in the field. Doesn't work for every
field and situation, but I've found it useful.

------
spikels
Then did extending unemployment insurance to 99 weeks actually screw the
people it was intended to help?

I have not read the details of the original study but this article seems to
indicate that a recently employed person in a different industry has an easier
time getting a job than a long-term unemployed person with industry
experience.

------
grimtrigger
Long term unemployment is unfortunately a signal of low productivity. While
being long term unemployed doesn't necessarily unproductive, it is highly
correlated with low productivity.

The same thing happens for race,unfortunately.

<http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html>

------
Apocryphon
In tech itself, open source organizations should make a push to hire long-term
unemployed developers. Promise to give them recommendations and references if
they do a good job during the interim.

The downside is the long-term unemployment problem is probably not as
significant in software, compared to other industries.

------
fredgrott
a question:

any engineer would recognize the symptoms of what may be a systematic failure
in a system. There was no mention in the article of studies fo studying the hr
system from a sysatem perspective.

My thinking is that the drastic increase in applicants for any job posted acts
as a feed back loop adjusting the system into chaos as hr personnel choose to
reduce workload via reducing quality.

Is thee any studies somewhere where a team took on the task to study the
problems as a system?

even my assumptions could be wrong..it would be nice to attack with some
actual facts based on some science.

------
auctiontheory
If you are unemployed, please read _Ask The Headhunter_.

------
bluedino
>> It's time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed.

Hiring them to do what? The government not only has to hire people it doesn't
need, but it has to hire from the 'unwanted' pile that private employers have
already selected the best from?

>> Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-
term unemployed.

What happens after a year, when the tax credit expires for that newly hired
person, and another unemployed person comes along and applies for that job?
Fire the first guy and hire the new guy so you can get that tax credit for
another year?

------
AznHisoka
I wonder if the same effect applies if you took a couple of years off to do a
Masters or PhD full-time?

~~~
crpatino
Short answer, yes.

Long answer, I happened to teach at undergraduate level during my days ad grad
school (not really a T.A. but a sort of associate professor position that in
the US is normally filled by PosDocs). At the time it seemed like a great idea
and I was proud to "not having a single day of unemployment in my record".

The problem was when I decided to go back to work in industry instead of
pursuing an academic career. Most employers would see me not as a fresh
graduate from a prestigious graduate program, but as "just a teacher" trying
to "switch careers".

It took 4 and a half months of eroded expectations, biter exchanges with H.R.
folks and learning the ropes of the hiring game to find someone to actually
give me a chance to prove myself in a support position that required no
advanced degree and minimal technical skills (basically: speaks English, knows
ksh and SQL). Then came the appalling realization that after 9 years of post
K12 education I was apparently not qualified to answer the phone properly.

Of course, your mileage may vary. Much of my experience not necessarily comes
from being in grad school, but from lack of soft skills and the ability to
manage perception of potential employers.

------
michaelochurch
The Corporate System is actually collapsing. That doesn't mean that
corporations themselves are going to go out (that won't happen for another
100+ years) but they're no longer an efficient way of turning human efforts
into salable work.

The value of managed human work is going to zero (anything that a manager can
tell a person to do, a person can program a machine to do) and independent
creative work's value is going up exponentially-- _but_ there is a massive
unsolved problem of how we pay people for the latter, given the high skill
requirements and intermittency of payment. What kind of insurance system must
we build?

Convexity will end the Corporate System for good. See:
[http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-
macle...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2013/04/03/gervais-
macleod-21-why-does-work-suck/)

Unfortunately, we have a regime in which the Satanic Trinity (housing,
healthcare, and tuition fees) have not only eaten the middle class, but have
left people utterly dependent on a monthly income. Also, we have
_generational_ creative poverty. There is generational poverty, which is
cultural as much as it is physical. Then there is the American middle class,
which lives not in material poverty, but in a de-culturized zone that
annihilates human creativity. That _is_ generational and hard to reverse
(parental and peer expectations). We have millions of people bred to be middle
managers and junior executives that the world no longer needs, because the
grunt work is increasingly being done by machines.

The generational cultural poverty, coupled with _actual_ material scarcity
since 2008, has left a generation unable to survive as the Corporate System
ceases expanding and begins its decline.

~~~
tptacek
The share of Americans working for enterprises larger than 500 employees is
rising, not falling.

I think this analysis is more wishful than factual. It'll get upvoted because
of course tuition and health care are satanically expensive.

~~~
toomuchtodo
My organization is hiring for ops and java engineers right now. We pay well.
We're having a hard time finding anyone who wants to work full time. Most
people we're talking with would rather work on project basis or work part
time.

After working in IT for 12 years, I can't blame them. If you can, why sit at a
desk for at least 5 days a week, at least 8-10 hours a day each day.

~~~
tptacek
It's going to be hard in this thread to shake off all the biases high-end
software people bring to the table. We are, as a collection of people engaging
with any topic, particularly bad at seeing things through anything other than
the lense of our own experiences; maybe that's because we spend so much time
in a heavily-amplified online echo chamber.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I agree very much with your post.

------
venomsnake
Hire half unemployed to dig holes with a shovel all day, and the other half to
fill them and pay them 30% below minimum wage. Or do something useful - there
is always infrastructure in need of repairs. If won't cost much compared to
wars and will do wonders for the self worth of the people.

~~~
Vivtek
You've just invented the Public Works Administration! A huge proportion of
America's infrastructure was built in the 30's by the PWA - including the vast
majority of infrastructure in federal and state parks.

They had to stop because that's socialism - and as we all know, socialism is
unAmerican and bad.

