Working is the easy part…
With some relevancy to my own situation, I point you to this mediabistro.com forums thread:
Topic: my boyfriend needs a job…
The sum of the original poster’s plea: her boyfriend moved to be with her (supposedly in NYC, considering the context of “upstate” and “into the city”) and is now having problems finding work despite his stellar credentials. (I don’t use the word “stellar” lightly; he’s likely to be in the top 10-20% of educated workers if he indeed kept his own successful IT practice and attended a partial bachelor’s education at a well-respected engineering school.)
The response:
Razor(Posted – 3/14/2006 11:43:14 PM)
Title: get a job
Tell your boyfriend to find a headhunter or a web site such as this one in his industry, IT/adm. There must be such a site. You can look at a library resource list such as an encyclopedia of associations index, and find a wealth of web sites under his specialty.
hope this helps
Oh, yeah, that helps a lot. (*grunt*)
First, the response is titled with the arrogant declaration, “get a job.” Even if it wasn’t meant that way, that’s how it looks at first glance. It leads off the response with a negative tone. Bad form.
The meat of the post is perhaps helpful information - to an 11-year-old. Adults looking for jobs in New York have probably heard of the concepts of “internet search engines” and “headhunters” already. When you’re in an unemployment hole, it’s very frustrating to see someone offer help like this - it just assumes the person seeking help has no common sense. (by the way, “such a site” in the context above would be Dice.com)
The advice regarding the library search is also unfortunately useless, and it reflects the general level of ignorance in the response. But this has more to do with the IT industry than with job searching in general. Without going on a long rant about the computer industry, let’s just say that anything relating to computers in a library - including industry information - is 90% useless and obsolete. This is even truer for IT careers considering the industry crash that happened earlier this decade - a crash from which the industry still hasn’t fully recovered. Now, not everyone (especially on a media BB) should know everything about any industry out there, but the tech crash was a very public news story. Yet people think it must still be a great industry to work in. It’s amazing how many people are STILL oblivious to trends and facts about the computer industry. (They also think that all doctors and lawyers are lucky people, too.)
The other thing about telling people “get thee to a library†is that it’s a covert way of saying “Wow, you must be too lazy to do any research on your own, eh?” I think every American adult knows that his or her local library is a potential source of helpful information on almost any topic. If you have spare time, they’re always worth a visit to see if they do have publications or resources to help you in your goal. But libraries are very big, and have lots of books! Without more specific info about subject areas, authors, titles, or even keywords, this is ultimately advice too vague to be useful. It’s like saying, “go to a bookstore and buy a career-help book.” Yeah, ass, I’m sure the boyfriend thought of that already.
In the end, the response to the original poster provides advice fit for a child, and none of it is specific enough to provide any real assist to the boyfriend’s job search.
I point this out to you all because it’s typical of the advice I’ve gotten over the past 2 years. Many working professionals consider it unthinkable to be unemployed. To most of them, it’s paired in their minds with homelessness; they ponder judgmentally, “How could you just let yourself live on the street?” And there’s the same attitude toward people lacking meaningful employment, including freelance, part-time, and underemployed full-time workers; you must be some sort of loser if you can’t get a real job like the rest of the world. (My own parents have told me as much) I would love to rail against all the bourgeoisie hypercritical assholes out there, but instead I’ll offer this; all these attitudes are symptoms of a weak and suffering support community in our society. With many of these types of problems, people tend to look away from problems facing their own kind. It’s a sad consequence of the rat race - people think, “Well, I have my own problems to worry about… these people need to learn to take care of themselves.” This is inconsiderate of the circumstances that people go through in today’s society. And it has to change.