Diary of the Unemployed: Part 2

You know when they say if you’re angry about something you should write a letter and never send it? This is one of those times. I would love to be able to go back to school, go to the administrators, and ask them one question… “Why did you set me up to fail?” Or maybe one more… “Why the fuck did you accept me in the first place?”… but common sense has gotten the better of me.

In his recent State of the Union Address, Obama talked about how further education is the keystone to a brighter future, and how important additional schooling is these days. I wish I could agree, because this hasn’t been the case with me. What little feedback I’ve heard from applications and interviews, when I don’t hear “completely not qualified” is “way too overqualified”. There has been no middle ground.

Alas, it would actually seem as if my additional grad schooling is making it harder for me to get a job in this economy. After working for eight years and holding a graduate degree, I have had no luck finding anything, even entry level jobs. Some companies have said “we will not even make you an offer because your experience warrants a higher salary than we can offer”. They could care less when I say I’d be willing to negotiate and accept a low salary. In this economy, companies are going for less educated workers that they can train, instead of experienced and educated workers that are perfect for the job.

The other feedback I get, when I’m not overqualified, is that I’m extremely underqualified. Not that I don’t have the necessary skills or abilities, but often that I lack corporate experience on my resume. As an entrepreneur, I worked years with myself as a manager. But for some reason, this seems to signal to companies that I would refuse to work in a group or under someone else. Yes, this is the feedback I get.

I don’t know how these trained and educated HR “experts” don’t realize that I always ALWAYS had to answer to someone. Yes, maybe I didn’t have a “boss”, but I always had clients. And things had to be done their way or I’d be “fired”. There was no unwillingness or inability on my part to work the standard corporate life, I just found greater success on the freelance, consultant basis. After trying it for a few years, it turned out to not be the lifestyle I wanted, so I put myself in a position to learn about corporate life to make myself more valuable to a company I could achieve more with.

So why is it I can’t find a job? I was one of the top students in both my undergrad and graduate classes (3.5 and 3.7 GPAs respectively). I ran a successful small business that allowed me to live a comfortable lifestyle in New York City. I applied for just about any internship or job I was qualified for, even those that were geographically undesirable. I attended info sessions for just about any company hiring within my skill set. I TAed for professors and held leadership positions in student clubs. I made lots of friends and connections with alumni. Do these sound like traits of someone who has been unemployed for a year and a half? And that doesn’t even count the months of school in which I was applying for jobs.

For one, it should have been a major warning sign that after my first year of grad school that I couldn’t find an internship. I had a lot of interviews but no success. Other students were getting these positions, and were being compensated well. I even started applying to unpaid internships, and got rejected from those. Something should have set off a flag when companies aren’t letting me even volunteer my time to help them. But the school just assured me that the economy was bad and things would turn around the next year.

Which it didn’t. And after a while, reassuring does nothing but make us angrier. A year passed and I was still looking for work. But this time it wasn’t like I had another year of school to look forward to. Nope, I was out on my own. No student loans to pay the rent. In fact, I had to start paying them back, on top of all my expenses. At least I had just enough saved up to support myself, but it really sucks just scraping by when most of your friends have signed six figure contracts. At this point, I’m done with all the self doubt and depression that comes with unemployment. I’ve done everything in my power to find a job. So that leaves me to question, why did my school let me get into this position??? I don’t like to point fingers, but at some point, I feel they need to take their share of the blame. No one told me, or gave me any such indication, that I might not have the right experience for an MBA job. If not having corporate experience is such a big deal to employers, why wasn’t it such a big deal for the school? Is it because I paid them a fuckton to take classes there? Were they struggling to fill seats? One student unemployed isn’t going to kill their rankings, so why not just let an unqualified applicant in? I’m sick of being the victim here, and I feel the school owes me an apology. A very expensive apology. I’m starting to wish they never accepted me in the first place.

jbx

Diary of The Unemployed

You know how a lot of people complain that their job interferes with their life? Some could only be so lucky. It seems today, with skyrocketing unemployment and no recovery in sight, that the opposite is worse. That’s right, not having a job is getting in the way of my life.

To some, not having a job and therefore having the free time to do whatever you want seems like the perfect life. How awesome is it to sit around the house playing Xbox, drinking beer for breakfast, napping whenever you feel. Pretty cool, right?

Well not for me…

Wouldn't have been as fun it it was his daily routine...

It’s hard to enjoy free time when all you have is free time. Weekends and holidays mean nothing when you do nothing the other five days of the week. Thing is, I would love to be at a stage of my life where I can comfortably sit down for hours at a time and play video games, knowing all’s right with the world. But not having a job is like a dark cloud looming over me at all times.

Case in point, I spent the last week helping some friends paint their house. Activity and socializing… all good, right? But the whole time, especially during the downtime, I’m just worried that I should be home, lurking around the job boards and stalking strangers on LinkedIn. So the whole time, I’m jumpy, anxious, and actually wanted to break off my social contacts to sit in my tiny bedroom in front of my computer for the rest of the night. Last I checked, the DSM-IV calls that depression…

Thing is, I want to have an active lifestyle. Opportunities can happen anywhere at any moment, but I really doubt they’re going to happen if I’m trapped in my apartment. I’m checking right now… no girlfriend sitting on the couch, no employer in my kitchen, no investors in my toilet… you get the picture.

I want to see the world and enjoy it. Forget the world, I want to get around town and enjoy that. I want to stay out, go to local events and restaurants and clubs and stuff. I want to be that guy who buys his friends a round without even thinking. I want to meet new, interesting people. I want to accomplish things. And I’d like to be this productive member of society without freaking out about how I’m going to pay rent next month.

Worse than the money is that my skills are going to waste. I worked my ass off through my childhood to get into both a top undergraduate and masters program. I’m not saying I’m the one who was going to cure cancer, but I have the brains and the ambition to launch the next cool technological innovation. So sitting around being non-productive is just killing me. When I look back at my life, I’m going to want to see that I did something with it. And right now, that’s just not happening.

Being unemployed actually has a compounding effect on staying unemployed. This is a fact. Jobs are flat out telling people that they will not be hired if they’ve been out of work for X months. So opportunities are lost right there. In the digital age, without access to the resources of company, it’s easy to fall behind in this progressive and competitive environment. Even if you find something to do by yourself, without the accountability of a job you’re less likely (or able) to push your limits. So how do you recover?

For one, I’ve been taking online classes in some current technologies, like Python scripting and Data Mining. Hopefully this can launder my timeline a bit and make it look like I’m not some lazy unemployed bum. The problem though, topics like these take a long time and a lot of commitment to master. I have no idea what is actually going to help me most in my career, so where do I focus? And how can I dedicate this time (programming languages can take months to learn) when I have the dark cloud of joblessness raining over me?

Hard to look ahead when futility is waiting over the horizon… But for now, it’s either apply to jobs while on self-imposed house arrest, or live a liberated life and chance ending up living in a cardboard box.

To be continued…
jbx

Profit Sharing is Caring! and The Trickle-Up Effect

If you've been paying attention to the news lately, it's no doubt that we're in a serious mess. Our lowered credit rating makes us a laughing stock on the international market, and people are only going to further tighten their wallets. Unemployment is still high, estimated to be in the high teens assuming you count the unreported millions who do not or can not collect government benefits. Gas is upwards of $4 a gallon, and companies are consistently laying people off while collecting record profits. So what are we as a nation to do?

The more I consider the economy, the more I realize we are powerless to end the shareholder-minded profit maximization ideals that companies subscribe to. At least without some revolution that would involve some sort of devastating teardown of our country. But this mentality isn't necessarily a horrible thing for the economy. Ideally we want big, rich companies… they are indeed what keeps an economy strong.

We just need to invoke some sort of profit sharing mandate.

That’s right, enforced profit sharing. As in a set percentage of what a company makes need be distributed fairly through the workforce that allowed the company to make said profit. While some economists theorize we need to place caps on salaries or the size of companies, this allows and encourages businesses to grow. There’s no fear of increased regulations or per-worker costs that make hiring unattractive to big companies. The only cost is a function of the gains that everyone works for. Since this is an after-profit bonus, companies can still boast to their shareholders that they increased profits for the year, which hopefully won’t devastate a logically minded stock market. And this cost all goes into building a stronger work environment.

Most companies these days tend not to reward employees for additional effort. Maybe it’ll lead to a promotion down the line, but there’s no direct compensation for immediate effort that leads to an immediate gain in profits. Does the grill chef at McDonalds get more money if the store is packed that night? Probably not. Does the cashier at WalMart make extra money if the line is out the door her whole shift? Doubt it. The customer service rep during a company recall? You get the point. Add in the ability for companies to make salaried workers round-the-clock employees for no extra pay, and you see the mess we’re in. To quote the immortal words of Peter Gibbons, “It’s a problem of motivation. Now if I work my ass off and Initech ships a few extra units, I don't see another dime, so where's the motivation?”


Fire bad, Profit Sharing good. Staplers better!

Profit sharing is a direct investment in your workers. Well compensated workers tend to be happier workers, right? Show them their added effort, that extra money the company made from their labor, is worth something. If Initech had profit sharing, Peter would have seen a few dimes from working his ass off. And trying to lay off people won’t be a ‘fix’ for this issue, since a mandatory percentage is enforced whether the company has a thousand employees or a million. So workers taking on the burden of a downsized department would actually see an increase in the money they make.

We’ve been reading reports about runaway executive compensation for years. Million dollar bonuses for people on the upper levels in return for corporate success. Why do we stop there? Is it fair that only certain people get rewarded? I mean, in football, even the practice squad gets a ring if their team wins the Superbowl. Obviously these companies have the money to distribute to their staff, executive or not. Now this is their chance to reward the rest of the staff for that same hard work.

Now I have to predict that there are some wingers out there who are going to squawk their favorite buzzword… Communism. How dare I try to mention the idea that we tell a company what to do with their money in this country?!? And I’d like to point out that the communist argument just doesn’t hold up. This system still encourages companies to grow. Free markets and all. No tax increases. All the money stays in the company family. One of famed Republican Ronald Reagan’s legacies is the “trickle-down effect” in which we’d develop a system in which those that make the most money pass it through our economy by hiring and buying things from those economically below them… so on and so on down to where the higher populated lower classes have opportunities that leaves them financially stable (ie not struggling to put food on the table) and able to themselves contribute to the economy, creating a cycle that keeps our economy going. And ideally this is a good, reasonable plan.

Except it has never been enforced. Nowadays, the upper class is notorious for hoarding their money, leaving it in banks and big corporate investments. They cut down on the number of people they hire, lest their profits and stock price take a hit. And those who are not as financially stable are forced to follow suit. And none of this is necessarily for amoral reasons, but for security, as the future holds no certainty. We as struggling citizens are forced to cut back on extraneous expenses, ie going out to dinner, or buying that new car, or even going to school to better ourselves.

And this just compounds the problems we are seeing. Now the once-profitable restauranteur can’t afford a new car, and now the car dealer can’t afford to send his kids to a good school, and the kid can’t get a job because he didn’t go to a good school. Didn’t we say the trickle-down effect was a good thing?

What will help jumpstart our economy is a “trickle-up effect”. It’s proven that lower classes spend a higher percent of their income. So if the lower classes had a few extra bucks to spend, they could potentially buy that dinner once a week, and the restaurant owner seeing a rise in business can buy that new car. And the car dealer can send his kids to a good school. We need to encourage domestic spending, and keeping money out of the hands of the masses isn’t the way to do it.

No handouts, no rewarding people for not working, no deterrent to hiring. Just making sure credit is given where credit is due. It may be the only good ‘credit’ we see for a while in this country. And things just might come out ok in the end…

jbx

Episode 2 - The Adventures of Self-Employed Man

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