These are words of wisdom. I’m not Mr. Gregarious, but I got myself involved in technical activities in my field, and I never got laid of and never had much trouble finding a job when I moved.
I had to hire new CS and Computer Engineering PhDs, which was tough since my company was not one of the super hot ones everyone wanted to work for - though it was still top tier. I hired through a network of relationships with professors working in my area who let me recruit their top students.
Lots of people are looking for volunteers, and that gives you a lot of references and a lot of contacts who know you are reliable.
Beats the hell out of LinkedIn.
I don’t know… I think HR just tends to get in the way a lot these days. I haven’t figured out whether it’s really an arm of the corporate attorney’s office, meant to protect the company from employee-related liability, or whether it’s a spectacularly ineffective organization/discipline meant to help streamline hiring, firing and make the workplace and employee/worker relations (i.e. benefits) better.
Few HR departments seem to do the hiring/firing/employee relations stuff well at all- HR departments seem to be notoriously useless when it comes to benefits stuff, and they seem to complicate stuff when it comes to hiring and firing, to no discernible advantage.
I predict that in the near future, someone’s going to apply this deep learning stuff to the problem of resume/employee picking (i.e. identifying good candidates), and make a huge bundle selling that service to employers. All they’d really need would be a large supply of resumes/applications, and which ones were successful, and they could probably teach the algorithm to identify likely candidates.
It would sure beat today’s bullshit with buzzwords and all the arbitrariness.
Already happening, but getting good training data is hard.
There’s already a story about using the existing pool of ‘good’ employees as a training set and finding algorithms discriminate against women. Likewise, machine learning algorithms elsewhere have picked up latent racism due to training data that reflects the limited available data and hidden biases in the development team.
Bit of a chicken and egg problem. There’s probably already built-in bias in the pool of employees, much less the ‘good’ ones, so machine learning is going to pick up on that. Garbage-in, garbage-out. You can get around that by feeding the algorithm better data but that requires somebody (or somebodies) to figure out how to generate that clean data without introducing their own biases. After all, the program figures out what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ based on human evaluation. The idea of a computer doing a better job is predicated on the notion of a pre-existing and truly objective evaluation of employee merit and potential, which doesn’t actually exist no matter what HR professionals tell us.
And that’ll be hard to deal with. Any algorithm that does end up discriminating consistently will do so in a way that’s fundamentally built in and open up companies to legal action for that discrimination.
This is important for your future. The most important part of this is helping others out in their career changes. Every time you hear of a job opening let people know, give them recommendations. And you have to get to know your co-workers. I know it’s not easy to do for a lot of people, but it’s as simple as saying ‘Hi’ to people when you pass them in the hallway at work.
Despite all that’s said here about skills, education, and experience, a personal connection makes a huge difference in hiring. And frankly, you don’t want to work at places where it doesn’t.
Not to be too flip, but that’s legal nitpickery. Of course it’s a contract of sorts, but it’s not what most people mean- the only recourse is for one side or the other to terminate the agreement. There’s no notion that you agreed to specific benefits, and if they’re not provided, you have recourse beyond quitting and going somewhere better.
Which is something of a problem; the fiction inherent to this sort of thing is that both parties are equal, or at least that their interests are equal. Which is untrue; in almost every case, the company can do without your labor more than you can do without a job. So you end up with people getting screwed in some fashion by their company in terms of work hours, decreased benefits, inability to take vacation time, etc… but unwilling to bail, because they have to make ends meet. Meanwhile, the moment it becomes profitable for the company to shit-can you to save a dime, they will do so without compunction, because they can hire someone just like you in all likelihood for the same amount of money.
When I used to hire people (1980-2008), I would put a lot of emphasis on whether I thought they would get along with co-workers and clients and if I thought they could take instructions. Sadly, many couldn’t. I would get applicants who had lots of experience, but who thought they could operate in our business world as if they were sitting in their parents’ basement playing games on-line. Our clients had to like and trust us. We needed to make them look good to THEIR supervisors. If we could do that, we made lots of $$$. If not, somebody else would.
I could teach people everything they needed to know to finish projects, but I couldn’t change them into good consultants and project managers if they chose not to change.
I have a reasonably lengthy employment contract. Multiple pages. It specifies lots of benefits and requirements on both sides. But it doesn’t require either of us to jump through hoops to end the agreement. I don’t think that it’s nitpickery to say that there are a range of employment contracts, and that a specific provision requiring a specific process to end it isn’t the fundamental thing that makes something a “contract”.
This is definitely true, and it’s why it’s really important to
Save money
Learn valuable skills.
I’m not worried about losing my job. Because I have lived below my means and I don’t have to have a job to pay for food next week or the mortgage next month. And because I have valuable skills. If my company doesn’t want them, I think another will. Not living paycheck to paycheck gives me much better bargaining power.
Now, if technological change renders my general skill set obsolete or the entire industry shrinks, that will be a major problem. But as I said above, I’m not convinced it’s a problem that unions can really solve.
I know that. What I’m saying is that what you have is what people talk about- a document specifying the requirements on both sides, and that probably has some commentary about mediation or other recourse to breaches in there somewhere.
The rest of us get a “letter of intent” kind of thing that basically states for the record what the conditions are when we start, and with no legal boilerplate for anything else- if our employer decides to get rid of vacation time, we’re up shit creek with no real recourse other than to give him the finger and bail. That’s not the case in your contract.
So legally it’s a contract, but only in a legal, lawyerly way.
I’m not sure exactly what my contract specifies (It’s been years since I read it), but I’m fairly sure that since the contract can be terminated by either me or my employer, the thing that keeps them from cutting my vacation is that I’d quit and go find a job that gave me vacation.
Otherwise they could just terminate the contract, offer me a new one without vacation, and I can either take it or go look for a new job.
And I imagine morale would go to shit if they started taking people’s vacation away.
Whatever my contract specifies, I don’t believe that it protects me against the case where my company doesn’t want to employ me any more, or thinks they can get away with paying me less and that I can’t find something else.
I used to feel that way. Some years ago, I got laid off from the startup where I was working. I found a year-long contract job about a month later (and had an offer to go back to a firm that fired me a decade earlier). Actually ended up being one of my favorite places to work. When that contract ended, I had a month’s notice and found a new job in about 2-3 months. I didn’t really pound the pavement on that either. I applied to a company on Indeed and they hired me after a few weeks. A couple of years later, I was laid off when that company was acquired. It took about 4 months to find my last job where I stayed for the past 4 years.
For some reason, my job hunt now is taking much longer (6 months at this point) and feels a lot more stressful.
Not to get too much into the legality of this, but just because one is in an at-will state does not mean that the employer can fire an employee willy-nilly. There are a lot of factors in play. Having a letter of intent or any sort of in writing offer of employment creates a contract. Having a disclaimer of at-will is only effective if that is the way the company does business and only if there is precedent set in the state (assuming both parties are in the same state). Additionally, there can be an implied employment contract. I had to deal with this issue with my new found subordinates. This is why companies have HR departments (a necessary evil) and employment practices and handbooks, etc. If the company has a certain way of firing people or firing people en masse (i.e. see WARN Act), then if said company doesn’t follow that process then there is cause for concern and path to a lawsuit. The threat of lawsuit is not worth the time and trouble to litigate which is why companies settle. Changing employment status is of concern the same way as a change in benefits or change in employment duties. There must be a documented process. The chance of a lawsuit increases if the affected employee is in a protected class.
This is true, but the other side of it is that it’s absurdly difficult to get meaningful employment again after you’ve sued a former employer, so you better settle for a lot.
When the recession hit I knew of big companies that rescinded written offers. You’d want to check for weasel wording in any “contract” for benefits or employment. I would bet the lawyers put in an escape clause protecting the employer.
Not to mention that someone winning such a suit and getting hired would never get a raise and never get a job worth doing. And good luck finding a lawyer, working on contingency, who is going up against a big company for some percentage of almost nothing.
Looks like mean duration of unemployment is still high by historical standards, but at ~22 weeks it’s the lowest since it topped out in 2011 at over 40 weeks.
The median is lower, ~10 weeks, which means there are some very long-duration unemployed skewing the distribution.
My gf’s nephew (not sure what that makes him to me) got a job by creating a job that previously didn’t exist. He graduated college with a degree in journalism and a love of sports. He sent out resumes, but remained jobless.
He approached a sports team and was enough of a nuisance to get a sit-down over lunch with someone in their PR department. He asked who was maintaining their Facebook page and Twitter account. He had noticed that their social media presence was lacking and he predicted Facebook/Twitter were going to get big. He was told that nobody officially did social media, but whoever in the office had a few minutes free would dabble with it.
He proposed they hire him, initially at minimum wage on a three month contract. He was certain they’d appreciate what he had in mind. When the three months were up, they created a social media department, named him Director of Social Media, gave him a big raise and his own office (he initially shared a desk with another guy).
He still hasn’t achieved his dream (sportscasting) but he is getting there.
It’s frustrating for me because every 1-4 years the job I’m at goes to shit and I need to find a new one. And I don’t mean just normal stuff like my boss is a jerk or layoffs after a restructuring or acquisition (although that happens as well). I mean random crazy shit like my office getting blown up on 9/11 the day after I started, or Hurricane Sandy flooding our Downtown office a month after I start. Or taking a job with a major financial services company right before the 2008 financial crisis hits. Or my company’s sales pipeline dries up after our top salesman gets fired for punching the CEO in the balls at the holiday party.
Update: After accepting a job offer at his top choice (a well-regarded engineering consulting firm), my son finally heard back from a state agency telling him he was a finalist for a position he had interviewed for. Unlike the private firms which got back to him very quickly, the state agency was much slower and took several weeks to get back to him.
He really liked the people he met at the consulting firm he chose, and he didn’t particularly like the people or the working environment for the state job, so it was a no-brainer for him.* He very politely thanked the state for their consideration (so as not to burn any bridges) and told them he had already accepted another job.
And yet…I wonder if he really considered all the pros and cons. The state job is a trainee position, so he would have been guaranteed to get training. It has job security, a union contract, a pension, and a guaranteed 40-hour work week. (However, none of that means much to someone in their 20s. ) On the other hand, engineers who start off working for a public agency often don’t get the design experience they need to get their Professional Engineering (P.E.) license, or even if they do overcome this hurdle, aren’t as well-regarded in the engineering community. One reason for this perception is because engineers in consulting have to work their tails off and do well in their jobs…or they are shown the door, whereas public agencies have a reputation for not getting rid of poor performers.
In any event, he’s made his decision (and of course it’s his decision to make, not mine)…so I hope it all works out for him.
*Though I wonder if he considered the fact that consultants have to be nice to everyone they meet, or they and their company won’t get work. Employees at a public agency don’t necessarily care about being nice.
That’s true, but I was talking more in the context of a company changing aspects of your employment, like say benefits out from under what you agreed to when you began work isn’t something most workers have any recourse to in terms of their “contract”, unlike actual contract workers, who have that sort of thing written into the contract, with penalties, etc…
In other words, a contract employee may have something in there to the effect that they get X amount of vacation per year, to increase in Y amount every Z years. That’s ironclad, rock-solid, and no changes of HR policy can change that without the employee having a legitimate reason to claim whatever penalties are involved, or go to mediation or whatever. But for most workers, if the company decides that they want to restructure the vacation system, and fucks someone in that process, they don’t have that written into the “contract”, and are pretty much limited to saying “You suck” and finding another job. Or pay cuts, or no raises, or whatever.
I think that since your son is in his 20s, he should be looking more for the “well-regarded, work your butt off, learn client-facing skills” job over the “guaranteed 40-hour week union pension state job”. I’m sure it won’t be the last job he has in his career.