We all hear the depressing news about the economy and how ‘bad it is’ out there. The biggest problem is that the ‘mob mentality’ sets in and everyone starts believing it and they act accordingly (cut backs, reservedness in habits, talk about it) . Let’s say we rate a problem on 1-100 (one being the best, 100 being the worst). The current problem is somewhere around 60 in reality. When people start seeing it, they react and then the ‘perceived problem’ starts to look like a 90. So what happens? Well, since belief precedes reality, that 60 starts to actually become a 90 just because people believe it, then act accordingly. Talk about the ultimate self-fulfilling prophecy eh?
So what does this have to do with me and my blog? Tons. See, I subscribe to the age old axiom ‘believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.’ While this certainly puts me in, what I call, the enlightened few, this does not mean I am not affected when I go out and apply to jobs.
A little background on me. I’ve been playing with technology since ’79. Anyone recall the Pong consoles? Yes, I said that….Pong Consoles. Basically the size of a keyboard with two knobs (paddles for moving the little bars up and down) and two switches (one was power, the other was for level of difficulty (1,2, or 3) I think…) . My parents got one for Christmas and since I was into ‘taking things apart’ (being the curious guy that I am, I even took apart a Mickey Mouse watch…never got it back together….), rebuilding 10-speed bikes, making go-karts and the like, they asked me to hook it up. Ok, no problem. I unscrewed the two screws for the UHF antenna (heh, let’s see how many kiddies understand that! Geeze…kinda sad when I’m proud of that actually….), hook up the two leads and tighten up the screws. Turn on Channel 3 and turn on the game. Voila! Instant baby-sitter for the parents!
Well, my tech ‘training’ grew from there. Commodore Vic=20 (with a tape drive! Yup, “Load 8,1,*”), C=64, then onto PCs…286/386/486/586/6×86….) and so forth. Eventually I decided to get into the IT World, and got serious about my career. Suffice to say, I’ve got a lot of experience and quite an interesting perspective on troubleshooting. makes me damn good at what I do.
So, back to the modern economic world. I’ve already ranted about the poor hiring process that many companies are using (“Tell me about a time when…”). We’ve all heard about ‘how bad it is out there’. So how does this all relate?
To sum up my recent job hunting excursion:
- Time spent hunting for a full-time jobs in earnest: 2 months
- Number of jobs applies to: 30+
- Number of interviews granted: 2
- Number of follow-up interviews hinted at during one of the above: 3
- Number of internal sighs during above interview: 20
- Number of repeated questions at same interview: 1
- Number of ‘inside connections’ (aka the ‘hidden job market’) used: 6
- Number of places where the above was used: 3
- Number of job offers: 1 (accepted)
For comparison, last year at this time I was able to apply to 5-6 jobs, get 2-3 interviews and get offered 1-2 jobs. This was a constant pattern I’ve had in the last 3-4 years. This year was different. I mean seriously….3 interviews for a tech support job? Talk about going wayyyyy past cautious and into ‘waste of company resources’ swing!
The upside of all this? I got a job that does better in a ‘down economy’ than an up one!
Now that’s out of the way, I can get back to my thing here.
Enjoy!
Tags: economy, interviews, jaded tech, jobs, pong
Jaded Tech 
June 9, 2009 at 12:43 am |
Sure, mob mentality can make a situation worse than it actually is but by the same token, the mob has spent years making a situation ‘better’ than it actually is, at least temporarily. The widespread belief that real estate can only go up led to the real estate bubble where people entered the market for speculative purposes. The increased demand raised prices beyond their real value. The steady GDP growth of the past several years was helped by rapid inflation of house prices. A house built once is counted in GDP (gross domestic product) many times – as many times as it changes hands even though it amounted to little actual work, just a shuffling of papers and legal costs. That helps to offset the steady loss of decent paying jobs in the manufacturing sector to starvation-wage labour countries like China and India. People here have been going deeper and deeper into debt on the lies that our economy was getting stronger because our GDP kept rising. In a trend copied among all OECD countries the ratio of debt to disposable income has been rising for several years.
It should remove all doubt from anyone that the mainstream news media is a propaganda machine for the elites when they say things like “the economy is showing signs of recovery” because the number of jobs lost is less than some ‘experts’ predicted. That’s the same as if you went on a month-long binge of junk food and at the end of the month you weighed yourself expecting to have gained 10 pounds but you find out you only gained five so you say you’re getting thinner. So now they’re playing calculus with the stats and say that the ‘rate’ of job loss is slowing down. Yippee! That’s the first derivative but there are more they can use if it doesn’t fit. If the rate increased they could say that it didn’t increase by as much as it did previously – second derivative. Or, if it did increase more than previously, they could say that the rate of increase in the rate of joblessness is decelerating – third derivative. I could go on with inflection points on the jobless curve or offer interpretations for concave up or concave down but rest assured that my economics degree has furnished me with an almost inexhaustible supply of tools with which I could torture any set of economic stats to make them say whatever I wanted. The reality is that the economic picture is worse than they are saying. We lost 42K in May but that doesn’t tell the whole picture. We lost more than that many good paying manufacturing jobs but it was offset by low-paying service sector jobs somewhat but can you support a family on a McDonalds wage? Can you afford a new car, a house and to keep up the afluent consumption that drives the economy? No. Doom. Doom! DOOM!
June 22, 2009 at 12:15 pm |
Maybe people will realize that our current money system is all bogus any ways. Crashes and bankruptcy are all built into it. Kinda like Windows 😛
June 22, 2009 at 11:55 am |
Enjoy!