# The US job market is a big fat joke **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [March 26, 2019, 5:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570 "2019-03-26T17:18:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2019, 6:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/61 "2019-03-28T18:00:08Z")
> [@Hermitian](#): > > The rest of this board skews older, so I don’t know how much sympathy you are going to get. I am not going to address getting a job part (other than recommending more face tattoos). > > I am a Millennial. My thoughts: > > The 50s through the 70s were a time of dominance of the US economy compared to the rest of world. That meant you could easily get a manufacturing job and be set. As you know, times have changed. > > Here is the problem, people tend to compare themselves with others to determine their happiness. If you live in a super poor country and have two loaves of somewhat moldy bread, and everyone else around you has only one, then your happiness is pretty high. Conversely, they all look at you and think “What a rich asshole.” > > Here is the key, don’t think of baby boomer times as the baseline of what is normal, think of them as an aberration. The baseline is that most of humanity throughout history has struggled to not starve to death. Comparatively, you are doing pretty well. > > Only a few generations back there were people who thought it was normal for multiple siblings to die in childhood and then they went through the Great Depression. > > You have to change the way you think and how you compare yourself to others. That will lead to more happiness. Perspective is everything. > > “I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo. > “So do I,” said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” > > ― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring This post made my day. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2019, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/62 "2019-03-28T18:06:51Z")
> [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > I’d say it was the other way around, at least in my corner of the world. Most employees, even millennials, want to stick around for longer. But compared with 30 years ago, companies are less willing to train and more willing to layoff. When the employer isn’t willing to train, won’t give raises, and will layoff employees at the drop of a hat, employees pick up on that and reciprocate. Finding jobs is hard enough. It’s not like people hop around companies for the fun of it. > > Conversely, the companies that make the extra effort seem to hold onto their employees longer. Even if companies don’t necessarily lay off employees at the drop of a hat, the lack of training and the failure to maintain a healthy, professional office culture leads a lot of employees to become disillusioned about their roles in the organization. I actually do believe that some people are better at adapting to ambiguous work situations, but it would be better if people weren’t put in that predicament to begin with. In an ideal world, I reckon. I think the key to survival is building good professional and social networks, and I admittedly suck at it. I’m not complaining or anything - life is okay for now. But I do wonder how later life, my later career is going to treat me. I have anxieties about that all the time. ---
**Author:** ![ElderSign](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eldersign/32/8263_2.png) [@ElderSign](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ElderSign)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2019, 6:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/63 "2019-03-28T18:39:42Z")
We have 1. More educated people today. (More competition) 2. High population. (More competition) 3. Globalization (More overseas jobs than ever before) 4. Corporate hiring bureaucracy (5% respond rate on Indeed, less face to face, no more just “walk in and get hired on the spot”) 5. Worthless university degrees 6. Automation take over by robots/AI [https://www.indeed.com/forum/gen/Career-Advice/Is-it-me-is-it-super-hard-get-job-these-days/t499890](https://www.indeed.com/forum/gen/Career-Advice/Is-it-me-is-it-super-hard-get-job-these-days/t499890) ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2019, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/64 "2019-03-28T21:40:06Z")
> [@monstro](#): > > **msmith537** , sorry to hear about the unemployment. Thank you. We are fortunate that my wife has a high paying job and we have been good with finances over the past few years. But to be honest, I can’t imagine how stressful being unemployed would be for someone who lives paycheck to paycheck. > [@bump](#): > > Something is definitely awry, if on one hand, we hear about all the millenials and Gen-Z types who can’t find jobs other than rinky-dink hourly jobs after college (even the STEM ones), and how they’re drowning in student loan debt, and on the other, we hear about this serious STEM job shortage where companies literally can’t find candidates of even marginal qualification. > > Something’s fishy- either the entry level college grads are expecting too much, or the companies are looking for purple squirrels/unicorns or bargain-basement rock stars. I don’t know which, but my suspicion is that the companies are probably where the problem lies. I’ve seen way too much hiring bullshit and shenanigans in my 20 year career to believe that this anything but rank stupidity on the part of the companies, or a really cynical attempt to hire more cut-rate foreigners. It’s a little bit of both, IMHO. Entry level college grads, particularly those from elite schools, are being fed all sorts of bullshit about landing Silicon Valley or Wall Street jobs that pays six figures at graduation and have the potential to pay millions. Particularly in STEM or finance. But really it’s the companies that are driving the salaries. They want to pay as little as possible, but still maintain the same quality and level of seniority. They don’t want to invest in training or growth, but they want people to start “on the ground running” and immediately make an impact. > [@bump](#): > > My thinking there is that at six employers over that period, only two of them actually hired entry level, essentially untrained recent college grads. And one of those was my first employer out of college in 1997, and the other was a mid-level consulting firm whose business model relied on hiring new grads and working them like rented mules. The rest all stuck to hiring experienced people with the expectation of slotting them into a role straightaway with minimal adjustment and training. I graduated college about the same time you did. I miss the days when we had 22 year old analysts who worked like rented mules instead of having companies of nothing but salespeople and engagement managers holding conference calls while the work all gets done overseas. > [@bump](#): > > It’s basically a symptom of a larger problem- companies seem to have moved to a more… disposable(?) employee concept where they refer to people as “resources” and then think/treat them as something much the same as a copier or other fungible object. There’s not the culture where they hire a set of promising young people, train them, and promote them if they pan out, under the thinking that at worst, you’ll end up with decent lower-level people. Instead, it’s more of a mindset that if your software development manager quits, you go hire another one, rather than promoting a promising development team member. > > It’s almost as if once you’re in a job category (developer, BA/PM, management, etc…) then you’re stuck there- you can move laterally between companies, but getting that hop to the next category up is the most difficult thing. It’s a mindset of “lean”, “agile” and “continuous improvement”. Companies want to assemble teams to solve specific problems and then have them go away. It seems like few roles are designed to be long term and any role that someone could do long term for years is probably ripe to be automated with software. > [@Hermitian](#): > > I think this “hop to a new company” every 2-3 years mentality has hurt job seekers overall. I think it hurts companies too. it becomes less about hiring good, long term talent they can develop and more about risk mitigation. I can’t get a full time job at a company, but they would be willing to pay $2000 a day to have me come in as a consultant for whatever firm I’m working for, even if I have no idea what I’m doing. The reason for that is because the dumb manager whose been there 15 years doing the same thing can say “I had no idea that guy didn’t know our industry. He was sent over by Deloitte/Accenture/IBM/wherever and seemed really polished”. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [March 28, 2019, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/65 "2019-03-28T22:39:51Z")
> [@Hermitian](#): > > I think this “hop to a new company” every 2-3 years mentality has hurt job seekers overall. > [@msmith537](#): > > I think it hurts companies too. I worked for the same company for 15 years. It was still pretty new when I started there, and one of the inducements was four weeks of vacation after eight years. They felt pretty comfortable doing this because, as my boss later told me, the average lob length in that industry was 22 months. After a few years the company realized that if we hadn’t left in the first two years, we probably weren’t going anywhere. And there were a bunch of employees who had 5-7 years with the company and were looking forward to their extended vacations. Very quietly the line about four weeks of vacation disappeared from the employee manual. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 5:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/66 "2019-03-29T05:13:51Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > I worked for the same company for 15 years. It was still pretty new when I started there, and one of the inducements was four weeks of vacation after eight years. They felt pretty comfortable doing this because, as my boss later told me, the average lob length in that industry was 22 months. > > After a few years the company realized that if we hadn’t left in the first two years, we probably weren’t going anywhere. And there were a bunch of employees who had 5-7 years with the company and were looking forward to their extended vacations. Very quietly the line about four weeks of vacation disappeared from the employee manual. :mad: That would really piss me off. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 6:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/67 "2019-03-29T06:02:28Z")
My son is a Millennial, and has been striving for months to get a job after he graduates in May. He’ll be graduating from our state’s flagship public university with a B.S. in Civil Engineering (which is my engineering field as well, more or less). When trying to decide what branch of engineering to go into, one factor was my telling him that there is a lot of work out there for civil engineers, what with our [deteriorating infrastructure](https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/) (i.e. roads, bridges, water, sewer, dams, levees, etc.). Civil engineers don’t tend to make as much money as other engineers do, but they almost always tend to get work. In any event, my son got several internships over the summer breaks at local engineering consulting firms and a public agency, so he has a bit of experience on his resume. He started looking for a post-graduation job last fall, and quickly scored two interviews with companies he met at the Fall engineering career fair. Unfortunately, neither gave him a job offer, which was disappointing. One was a company at which he had interned (and done well at, he thought), which was doubly disappointing. (My own thought was that it was so far out from graduation at that point that companies were under no pressure to hire.) He spent January and February sending out many more job applications with no responses. Finally he made it a priority to meet as many companies as he could at both Spring career fairs, and his efforts finally seemed to pay off. He got seven job interviews over the next two weeks, and four job offers. 🙂 Interestingly, he got a very low response rate from the dozens of jobs he applied to online. He got almost all of his interviews from meeting companies at university career fairs. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/68 "2019-03-29T06:03:58Z")
> [@kunilou](#): > > Very quietly the line about four weeks of vacation disappeared from the employee manual. Errm, it wasn’t in the employee contracts? Then it was vapourvac. ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/69 "2019-03-29T06:12:22Z")
> [@robby](#): > > Interestingly, he got a very low response rate from the dozens of jobs he applied to online. He got almost all of his interviews from meeting companies at university career fairs. P.S. I had the same experience when I graduated from grad school nearly 20 years ago and was looking for work. I got such a positive response from university career fairs that I actually went to career fairs at several other universities in the region as well (which may or may not have been allowable, but the companies didn’t seem to care). ---
**Author:** ![robby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robby/32/11048_2.png) [@robby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/robby)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 6:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/70 "2019-03-29T06:16:08Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Errm, it wasn’t in the employee contracts? Then it was vapourvac. The vast majority of non-union employees in the U.S. don’t have employment contracts. Instead, you only have a company HR Manual (that typically includes vacation policies), which can be changed at any time by the employer. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 7:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/71 "2019-03-29T07:34:26Z")
> [@robby](#): > > The vast majority of non-union employees in the U.S. don’t have employment contracts. Instead, you only have a company HR Manual (that typically includes vacation policies), which can be changed at any time by the employer. Jesus. That would be so completely fucking illegal here (or any other developed country, I would hope). ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 8:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/72 "2019-03-29T08:23:58Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > Errm, it wasn’t in the employee contracts? Then it was vapourvac. Are you from outside the US? In the US it’s rare for anyone but upper management and professional sports teams to have an “employee contract”. ---
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 11:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/73 "2019-03-29T11:37:44Z")
Today’s job market produces (net) 2.5M jobs each year, not to mention replacements for the 10k boomers retiring each day. If that’s a joke, I wonder when we’ve had a serious job market and what that looked like. ---
**Author:** ![asahi](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/asahi/32/8693_2.png) [@asahi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/asahi)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 12:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/74 "2019-03-29T12:01:41Z")
> [@robby](#): > > Interestingly, he got a very low response rate from the dozens of jobs he applied to online. He got almost all of his interviews from meeting companies at university career fairs. This is anecdotal, but career fairs IME are often quite productive because recruiters are sent there with a specific objective, which is to get young talent. Sending in resumes online is probably among the least effective ways to score interviews and offers, because it’s hard to know what kind of recruit they’re looking for and job advertisements are notoriously inaccurate about the job description. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 1:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/75 "2019-03-29T13:34:56Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > Are you from outside the US? In the US it’s rare for anyone but upper management and professional sports teams to have an “employee contract”. So everyone’s just employed on a handshake? How do you prove employment to e.g. banks? The developers my (US-based, now) company employs in Houston have contracts of employment. ---
**Author:** ![TriPolar](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tripolar/32/3008_2.png) [@TriPolar](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TriPolar)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/76 "2019-03-29T13:41:37Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > So everyone’s just employed on a handshake? How do you prove employment to e.g. banks? > > The developers my (US-based, now) company employs in Houston have contracts of employment. Yes, it is just a handshake, but once a company gives you a paycheck they are subject to a lot of regulation. If you’re looking for a loan they’ll contact your employer but really they’d want to see some tax forms to prove what your actual income has been and for how long. Even if a company acknowledges your employment the banks know that could end tomorrow. And an employer’s handbook or published set of rules is binding. They can be changed but not necessarily in an ex post facto manner. The developers you employ may be contractors, not employees per se, and I’m sure their contracts have plenty of options for cancellation also. I’m sure you’ve noticed other ways we don’t things the way everyone else does. ---
**Author:** ![Great\_Antibob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e47c2d/32.png) [@Great\_Antibob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Great_Antibob)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 2:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/77 "2019-03-29T14:00:36Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > The developers my (US-based, now) company employs in Houston have contracts of employment. Contractors in the US are different from full time employees and there’s some fairly complicated regulation about who can or can’t count as a contractor, because they don’t enjoy the same employment protections a full time employee does. For example, an actual full time employee can expect (and on some of these the employer is required to provide) health insurance, retirement benefits, paid vacation time, sick leave, anti-discriminatory protections, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc. Contractors generally don’t get any of those. Some people prefer contract positions because they can offer more flexibility and often pay better (even after taking insurance and benefits into account). And with independent contracts, they generally aren’t tied to a single employer. But there’s also common abuse of that system to designate some people contractors when they are really more properly full time employees. For example, the people sent out to homes by cable companies are mostly considered contractors. For years, FedEx improperly labeled many of their ground drivers as independent contractors. ETA: If your company is using contractors in Houston, they are likely only signed on for a specific length of time or for a specific project. Or your company has hired a contracting agency to provide X people and can cancel that contract essentially at any time - there’s generally no requirement to provide any advanced notice that a contractor will be let go, i.e. they can lose that job at any point. ---
**Author:** ![wguy123](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wguy123/32/3161_2.png) [@wguy123](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wguy123)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/78 "2019-03-29T14:10:08Z")
> [@robby](#): > > My son is a Millennial, and has been striving for months to get a job after he graduates in May. He’ll be graduating from our state’s flagship public university with a B.S. in Civil Engineering (which is my engineering field as well, more or less). When trying to decide what branch of engineering to go into, one factor was my telling him that there is a lot of work out there for civil engineers, what with our [deteriorating infrastructure](https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/) (i.e. roads, bridges, water, sewer, dams, levees, etc.). Civil engineers don’t tend to make as much money as other engineers do, but they almost always tend to get work. > > In any event, my son got several internships over the summer breaks at local engineering consulting firms and a public agency, so he has a bit of experience on his resume. > > He started looking for a post-graduation job last fall, and quickly scored two interviews with companies he met at the Fall engineering career fair. Unfortunately, neither gave him a job offer, which was disappointing. One was a company at which he had interned (and done well at, he thought), which was doubly disappointing. (My own thought was that it was so far out from graduation at that point that companies were under no pressure to hire.) > > He spent January and February sending out many more job applications with no responses. Finally he made it a priority to meet as many companies as he could at both Spring career fairs, and his efforts finally seemed to pay off. He got seven job interviews over the next two weeks, and four job offers. 🙂 > > Interestingly, he got a very low response rate from the dozens of jobs he applied to online. He got almost all of his interviews from meeting companies at university career fairs. From my perspective, the catch-22 talked about in this thread is not new. I received a civil engineering degree in the early 90’s. I passed the EIT. The jobs at the engineering companies (the CH2M Hills) required 5 years experience or a masters. I didn’t meet those so I started applying for entry city engineering jobs. I interviewed for a bunch and only got an offer for a very low-level traffic “engineering” job (you know those hoses you drive over occasionally - this job was in charge of installing those and collecting the data). That was the only job offer after at least 6 months of applying. I did work a while for a construction company and could’ve gone the construction management route, but that field was not for me. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/79 "2019-03-29T14:17:01Z")
> [@TriPolar](#): > > The developers you employ may be contractors, not employees per se, > [@Great\_Antibob](#): > > Contractors in the US are different from full time employees and there’s some fairly complicated regulation about who can or can’t count as a contractor, because they don’t enjoy the same employment protections a full time employee does. For example, an actual full time employee can expect (and on some of these the employer is required to provide) health insurance, retirement benefits, paid vacation time, sick leave, anti-discriminatory protections, workers compensation, unemployment insurance, etc. Contractors generally don’t get any of those. No, they’re definitely full-time employees, with benefits, in the exact same way I am in South Africa (contract workers are not unknown here, we have at least 2 on staff right now). But they have paperwork that says what they’re paid & what their benefits are. This might be because even though the current company is American-based and in origin, the _umbrella_ corporation is neither, and _very_ European. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2019, 2:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570/80 "2019-03-29T14:18:28Z")
> [@wguy123](#): > > From my perspective, the catch-22 talked about in this thread is not new. I received a civil engineering degree in the early 90’s. I passed the EIT. The jobs at the engineering companies (the CH2M Hills) required 5 years experience or a masters. I didn’t meet those so I started applying for entry city engineering jobs. I interviewed for a bunch and only got an offer for a very low-level traffic “engineering” job (you know those hoses you drive over occasionally - this job was in charge of installing those and collecting the data). That was the only job offer after at least 6 months of applying. I did work a while for a construction company and could’ve gone the construction management route, but that field was not for me. What happened after that? Did you eventually get a better engineering job? [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/the-us-job-market-is-a-big-fat-joke/831570.md?page=5)