

Recession Proof Graduate - How to get any job after college - kevinburke
http://www.slideshare.net/choehn/recessionproof-graduate-1722966

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Locke1689
Jesus, it took 19 slides to get to the point which can be summarized in
exactly one sentence:

1) Have skills

Newsflash: What we call a "job" is simply the trading of one currency (actual
monetary currency) for another currency (useful work). If the work you are
doing does not have some element of skill then you will not get a job. If your
degree supplies some of those limited in-demand skills then you may not need
more than your degree. If your degree does not then you will need to acquire
useful skills in another manner. Period.

~~~
baddox
To be fair, what we call a "job" is more than the transactions of skills and
currency: it's also the presumed security of constant transactions for an
extended period of time.

~~~
Locke1689
True, but the base requirement is still some kind of scarce skill set. If it
weren't scarce it wouldn't be an economy.

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Skroob
Sort of a tangental topic, but I hate it when people post slides like this.
These sorts of things should always work better as a blog post. If your slides
are good presentation slides, they're not detailed enough to work without a
presenter, and if they are they're bound to be too wordy for the actual
presentation. Either way, it's not a presentation I want to be in.

~~~
SimonPStevens
Totally agree. These aren't presentation slides, there is way too much text on
them. They are clearly designed for reading, so it should have just been made
as a text based blog.

Why force people to use flash to read text.

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mkramlich
Why do some folks make it so hard on themselves, and for others, just to
convey some idea? Just use some simple, concise text. You can even use 1990's
era HTML to mark it up. It's dead simple. Concise. And do it all in one web
page. The world will not end, honestly.

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DannoHung
If I ever got an applicant for a position I was interviewing for and they
said, "So if you want to look at some of my code, it's available here.", and
they gave me a link to a little project they work on, that ALONE would move
them up near the top of the pile, even if the code was crap.

Maybe it's different because of the industry I work in, but nobody seems to
want to show the goods.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Out of curiosity, what industry do you work in?

~~~
mkramlich
he doesn't want to show you those goods

~~~
buro9
Investment Banking apparently, he's a data miner.

Google + 30 seconds.

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DanielN
I agree with a lot of the sentiment here that the presentation is a little
overly drawn out and meandering, but the end point in spot on.

I recently took the advice to contact entrepreneurs I was interested in
working with on the advice of a friend. The response was overwhelmingly
positive and generous.

I emailed the founders of two companies I've been following for a while (one a
former YC company) simply introducing myself and asking for advice on what I
should do to put myself in a position so that they might want to hire me in
the future.

The response I got from both was more than overwhelming. One responded to my
first email within an hour with detailed explanations of what I should be
doing and what I can do in the future. Furthermore, he responded to each of my
follow up questions almost instantly after receiving them.

The second responded offering to set up a skype call in the next couple of
weeks to talk over my questions with me more thoroughly.

These are both guys whom I have to assume are insanely busy and get far more
important emails than random cold calls every day.

I feel like a lot of people don't take approaches like this and don't reach
out to people because they have the same assumptions I did. I guess all I can
say is, never underestimate the generosity and outgoingness of the
entrepreneurial community.

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devinj
As a software developer, I would have figured contributing to major open
source projects to be equivalent or better than this. Still has the same
element of demonstrating your skills, but also shows that you can work in a
team, do things like unit tests etc., and actually know the codebase for
whatever project you contributed to.

~~~
j_baker
That does fall under the "free work" heading.

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cantbecool
This presentation reminds me of the motivational self help books I see in
Fedex. A lot of buzz words, but not much substance. The key requirement for
landing any job is personal value. If you are not valuable to an organization,
you are not going to be hired.

~~~
robryan
Yeah, it's written in marketing speak, the kind of thing that must have been
rigorously tested as some point to appeal to the widest audience but instantly
turns me off.

"I used to be struggling like you but now I'm on the top the world and I'm
going to show you how", this kind of thing just never appeals to me even if
they are sincere because of all the insincere stuff that has come before in
the same format.

~~~
cantbecool
Excellent post on your blog regarding higher education.

~~~
robryan
Thanks, it's been something I have been meaning to do more once I get some
more time to collect my thoughts on certain subjects.

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juiceandjuice
One thing that's always baffled me is how many students at my school had
mediocre or crappy jobs off campus while going to school. Yeah, you can make
more money working off campus, but you could probably be gaining experience
(and usually getting paid for it) while going to school. Most every state
university has at least one or two large experiments that just need manpower,
be it chem, math, cs, bio (especially bio), physics, whatever.

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makeramen
The first 3rd of the slides sounded like a pyramid scheme presentation.

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RoyceFullerton
After reading his latest post on his blog, it seems he has lost quite a bit of
the fire he had when writing this 'e-book':
[http://charliehoehn.com/2010/08/18/the-5-month-break-
comes-t...](http://charliehoehn.com/2010/08/18/the-5-month-break-comes-to-an-
end/)

------
Towle_
WOW. Thank you for posting. Sincerely, College Senior.

~~~
Towle_
Really, downvoted? The people here are ridiculous. I'm fucking done. Peace
out.

------
HilbertSpace
He's missing some major points; I mention two:

FIRST POINT

Somewhere in the part of the economy he is depending on, the 'rubber has to
meet the road'. That is, someone has to have a business with customers and
revenue. So, he wants to work for that business. So, when the business brings
in, say, $1 million, he gets maybe $10,000 of it, eventually, if his plans all
go well.

So, his work really is providing crucial value for the business, but he is
getting only a tiny fraction of the money from that value. Bummer for him.

So, he would be much better off just being the person running the business and
doing the work that is providing the business value and then keeping all the
revenue for himself.

E.g., if the business is a Web site with ad revenue and if he is a Web
developer, then HE should be the one running the Web site instead of the other
guy who likely doesn't know how to do the technical work for the Web site.

Or, mowing grass is hard work with some value. But why just mow grass for
someone else running a lawn service? Instead, start a lawn service, mow grass
much as before, and keep all the revenue for yourself. That is, once are good
at mowing grass, which is the real work, the extra to start your own grass
mowing service can add a lot of revenue and need not be too difficult.

SECOND POINT

Basically he is advising people to be 'free lancers', that is, with a
'portfolio', 'clients', etc. For what he is suggesting here, that is, software
usage and/or development, there is a big, HUGE problem: Suppose it takes, on
average 1000 times as long to write some software as to learn to use it. So,
roughly 1000 programmers can write enough software that it takes one person
all their time just to learn to use all that software. But the world has many
more than 1000 programmers writing software. So, it is easy to spend more than
full time just learning to use software. Indeed, new software comes forward so
fast that it could be more than a full time job just being a 'librarian'
getting the materials, cataloging them, and arranging them on shelves, DVDs,
or hard disk.

So, it is crucial to reduce, even minimize, the 'overhead' time for learning
to use software.

Here's the BIG RUB: As a free lancer, mostly he must use the software his
clients want used. So, this week it's Windows Vista, next week Debian Linux,
next week Mac, then Windows Server, Android, iPhone, etc. Or it's Excel, SAS,
SPSS, R, Mathematica. Or it's Word, TeX, LaTeX, or some high end thing from
Adobe for making PDF files. There is no end of such nonsense.

Fundamentally, the free lancer has to pay for the learning overhead and gets
paid only for using it. So, it's crucial to keep down the overhead. There's no
shame in this: No one can hope to learn all that junk; just being a librarian
for all it would be more than a full time job.

Yes, maybe Fortran, Cobol, Algol, PL/I, Pascal, C, C++, Visual Basic .NET, and
C# are closer to each other than English, French, Spanish, and Italian.
Similarly for DB2, SQL Server, Informix, and Oracle. Similarly for SPSS, SAS,
R, etc. Windows and Linux are both multiple virtual memory operating systems
on x86 processors with a TCP/IP stack. So, there is a lot of overlap so that
learning 1000 programs is much less than 1000 times the work of learning just
one program.

STILL, learning all that software is TOO DARNED MUCH overhead.

Here's how to cut down the overhead: Don't be just the free lancer; instead,
be the entrepreneur where the rubber meets the road. Then pick ONE of Windows
or Linux and f'get about the other one. Say pick Windows. Then pick ONE of
C++, C#, or Visual Basic .NET and f'get about the other ones. Pick just ONE
relational data base, say, SQL Server. For some 'non-SQL', likely on really
simple operations as for non-SQL, the real bottleneck is disk I/O, and, net,
SQL Server can be about as fast as 'non-SQL'. If at times need more than 'non-
SQL', and the history of computing strongly indicates that you will, then you
are better off with a serious relational data base manager than just some key-
value pair system. Pick just ONE way to develop Web pages, say, ASP.NET. So,
just pick tools sufficient and good for the work where the rubber meets the
road and f'get about competitive tools and their overhead. E.g., my tools just
now are Windows, KEdit, ObjectRexx, Visual Basic .NET, a little C (HORRIBLE
language), SQL Server, ADO.NET, and ASP.NET, and I've never touched Python,
Apache, Ruby, Linux, or even C++. And I don't use an 'interactive development
environment' (IDE) since I use KEdit and ObjectRexx for as much as possible.

Enough for the first two points I mentioned above.

I move on to several smaller points:

COMPUTER CENTER OVERHEAD

He also failed to mention: Now for any very significant work with computers,
especially if working as a free lancer for several clients, too soon need
multiple computers, an office LAN, etc. So, he's talking a home based
'computer center' with just one person for ALL the work to be done --
hard/software installation, computer and network system management and
monitoring, operations, e.g., backup, recovery, repairs, computer and network
security, in addition to the 'money' activities. He's talking significant
upfront, overhead investments of time, money, and effort not easy for a new
college graduate.

FEAST AND FAMINE

People in 'free lance' too soon see that they are in a world of feast and
famine. So, can go for two months with no income and suddenly four clients
each want four weeks of work in the next two weeks. Bummer.

FEW OR MANY

Not quite the same but closely related, generally (although not always) it's
better to have many smaller customers than a few larger ones. A free lancer
has a BIG problem here, but many of the free lancer's clients do not. So, it
can be better to be the client entrepreneur where the rubber meets the road
than the free lancer.

ASYMMETRY

Next, there's the issue of 'asymmetric economic information': A free lancer
who works for one client for a week and gets paid $40,000 lets the client know
that he just paid about $1000 an hour for the work. Then the client will start
to look for cheaper labor. So, the client has too much 'economic information'.
And, really, the free lancer does NOT know what the work was really worth to
the client, and that might me much more or much less than $40,000; so the free
lancer has too little 'economic information'.

Instead it is much better if the customer has no real idea about the
supplier's revenue, cost of goods sold, gross margins, net margins, pre-tax
earnings, and after-tax earnings. These may be small or large, but when they
are large it is important up to crucial for the supplier to keep these numbers
confidential. One cute, old example was in the early days of casino Blackjack
'card counting': A guy went to a casino in the Bahamas or some such, dressed
like a bum, kept complaining about all the money he was losing and how poor he
was. The individual casinos didn't keep careful track of what he was making or
losing so didn't know. In fact, he was cleaning up big time. I made a big
mistake: I was a good Blackjack player and saw the first 'Sports Illustrated'
article and E. Thorpe's book early on but assumed that the casinos would be
swamped. They weren't for years! And only a dumb player would show off how
much money they were making. Net, if you are making good money, then keep it
QUIET. For this, generally it is better to have many customers. E.g., a
neighbor had little peanut vending machines -- put in a coin and get out some
peanuts. How much was he making? There was no easy way for the customers to
know, but he did live in a nicer house than I did!

BARRIER TO ENTRY

There's another big issue, especially over the past 20-40 years in the US
economy: He is recommending being a 'virtual business'. This is DANGEROUS in
the US. Consider someone in plumbing, HVAC, roofing, grass mowing, auto
repair, Chinese carryout, Italian family restaurant, etc. Notice that they are
not in competition with anyone more than 100 miles away. So, if they are among
the best in a radius of 100 miles, then they can do okay. Many industries
cannot have dedicated sales forces so use 'manufacturing representatives'
(MRs) that specialize in one industry and stand between many manufacturers and
many customers. So, can have MRs in, say, sporting goods, commercial building
supplies, etc. Well, typically an MR has a geographical 'territory'. Darned
right they have a 'territory': They don't want any close competition. Net, it
is important to have a 'geographical barrier to entry', and his idea of a
'virtual business' is not careful about this point.

COLLEGE

He runs down college. Well, maybe didn't learn Ruby in college, but he should
have learned some things more important such as how to communicate and analyze
effectively; these are important lessons for a lifetime but maybe not for a
first job out of college. There may be times in life when these lessons are
crucial at a big fork in the road and, then, crucial for the whole life. Also
some of the technical material might be quite valuable in the future.

KNOWLEDGE SHOULDN'T KNOW

One of the biggest dangers of 'knowledge' is not the good knowledge you don't
yet know and have to learn but the bad knowledge you have been led to believe
and then act on. So, 'critical thinking' can be more important than 'skills'.
College is one of the best places to get good at 'critical thinking'.

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BenSchaechter
I graduated in May and got a job with a startup merely because I spent my
spare time building a fairly cool product built in Ruby on Rails. I would
argue if you've shipped a product and can show it off, thats more valuable
than having a degree from a well-known school.

But my real advice: Start a startup out of college if you've got no debt and
have a good idea. It is what I'm doing right now and I'm pretty sure its the
right time to take risks. At the very least you'll fail, have another product,
and be even more employable than you once were.

~~~
Karzyn
_have a good idea_

That's the part that keeps stopping me.

