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Expect the Unexpected

 
 


Posted by Drew458    United States   on 07/10/2011 at 07:24 AM   
 
  1. And those numbers do NOT include my husband - who according to the credit reports - hasn’t worked since 2006 - his co-op jobs during college aren’t registering [but then again, when we’re paying on time, our car payments and once (house in KY) a house payment never appeared on our credit report either - so like all things financial in the US - it’s distorted and missing key pieces] - so he isn’t eligible for unemployment nor is on unemployment - so he isn’t registering. At all.

    Same for my daughter - graduated college without having a ‘real’ job at all, so the ability to get unemployment is tied up in a lot of paperwork (how do you prove a negative, there isn’t a paper trail for NOT working) and thus she has just been accepted back into college to get licensure to teach - in a couple years, if she is lucky. Not registering at all.

    So 3 adults here - who because of their situations aren’t on any tracking list - and can’t get onto unemployment at this time.

    Thus - these numbers do not show the real unemployment rate at all.

    Just like in 1998 - I worked for a month for the Census - and remained on the Women with children under 18 employed outside the home list - for an entire year. (Yes, I got nifty little brochures on how to ‘cope’ with the horrors of being employed with young children). So for a long, long time - DC has been distorting, twisting and spinning the numbers to say whatever they damn well please them to say.

    And meanwhile - a lot of Americans are unemployed and on the brink. But hey, let’s raise spending just as much as we raise taxes, just as much as we raise the debt ceiling - and every thing will work out - as we planned.

    Posted by wardmama4    United States   07/10/2011  at  09:46 AM  

  2. The term I don’t get is “given up looking for work”.  Are these the people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, and, on the basis of not getting a job after 26 or 52 or 99 weeks, just...quit?

    Having fairly recently playing the unemployment game, I can definitely say that finding a real full-time job was not very pleasant.  There are a lot of people who are I.T. qualified; some are even good at it.  The company that let me go 2 years ago lost a good number of clients who decided that I was a better tech than the ones who went in my place.  They found me and I still enjoy a good working relationship with them.  Bummer for the old company...they never had a non-compete clause.  Those folks kept food on my table.  And now that I have a regular job, those folks are perfectly happy to have me out on evenings and weekends.

    The point of this whole thing is that I don’t buy that “given up” crap.  Just because it took 15 months for me to find a full-time job didn’t mean I gave up.  The competition was incredibly tough.  As it turned out, a friend told me about the place he was working for and that they were considering another person.  His boss was interested in talking to me, and 2 weeks later I started.  Lucky?  Maybe, but it proves that people who exhaust their benefits are still looking for something.  And the fact that I had marketable skills that I used while unemployed didn’t hurt me at all.

    Posted by John C    United States   07/10/2011  at  04:50 PM  

  3. Well lucky you.

    Giving up is not crap. Had you been out of work for 38 months instead of 15, and not had those contacts, you might have understood. The longer you are out of work the worse your chances are in the job market. After a while, when the bills start to pile up, you take that day labor job painting fences just to have some cash coming in.

    Personally I’m glad to be out of IT. Because nobody who has stuck out a long term project has “marketable skills”. The industry changes too fast; by the time you really master one language or paradigm you have become a dinosaur. And frankly, going back to school and relearning everything all over every few years sucks. I used to know dozens of crackerjack COBOL folks, and mainframe operators. Gone. I used to know loads of C programmers. Gone. And so forth. Ooh, got web, got Java, got Script? Oh, too bad, we want XML and php. You’re the master of test cases run on Silk? Gosh, no thanks, we only want WinRunner folks. Went back to school for WinRunner? Sorry, you’re skills are only scholastic. We only want people with N+1 years of experience, regardless of how big your personal N is.

    The only stable job in the whole damn industry is the LAN man, the network ‘engineer’, and it takes about 3 of them to run an office building with 1000+ corporate drones. And if the switch came tomorrow to go from Banyan Vines or Ethernet to something Cisco, half of them would be out of work with no marketable skills and some punk kid fresh from school in India with a forged Cisco certificate would have the job. For half the salary.

    To my utter amazement, everyone else in every other career path does NOT have to go back to school and relearn their trade from the very beginning every 2 years. Accountants graduate college, and then go to work. Forever. Sorbannes-Oxley kind of things only happen about once a generation. Sure, most skilled careers get some training on a regular, on going basis. But they don’t reinvent the wheel the way the IT world does. Granted my view of the IT world was very narrowly focused: programmers, database designers, and network people. Everyone else - database clerks, spreadsheet gurus, print room jockeys, graphic artists, presentation managers, etc - were just users. Suits, with pocket protectors.

    And honestly? You can make more as a plumber. LOTS more. Or as an electrician. Or as the guy who owns the local BugRun’r franchise and has 6 spray guys working for him. Hell, you can make more driving a bread truck than you can as a programmer.

    Posted by Drew458    United States   07/10/2011  at  06:05 PM  

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