Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by wmli on Saturday March 06, 2010 @12:21PM
(#1171780)
Isn't that what mturk is for?
Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by jmtame on Thursday March 04, 2010 @12:33AM
(#1166244)
that was my first reaction, but this article is extremely long. wishing there was a "tl;dr;" section so i could figure out the conclusion in a sentence or two. bookmarked it for now, will come back to it.
Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by washingtondc on Thursday March 04, 2010 @12:44AM
(#1166270)
It's extremely long? Maybe I'm a bit older than most readers here (I'm 38), but has the average readers attention span shrunk that much?
Nuance cannot always come in bite-sized chunks. BTW, I read the article (on a plane - the print edition, no less) - it's worth the time.
Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by rmorrison on Thursday March 04, 2010 @12:56AM
(#1166288)
What's this "print" you mention?
Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by washingtondc on Thursday March 04, 2010 @01:06AM
(#1166298)
The Atlantic
It's a very good magazine.
Re:How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America
by petercooper on Thursday March 04, 2010 @01:08AM
(#1166303)
Yes, it has. When this article first came round I read it all because it was interesting but it's certainly way above the median length of articles that do well here (and above the median of most online content, I'd argue). I'd certainly bill it as being "rather long," though wouldn't go as far as "extremely."
Presumably bad news in the hiring market for new graduates is good news for YC: when the alternative to YC is picking up the phone and having Google and Microsoft getting into a bidding war over you, startups look insane, when the alternative is being a "parasite single" (wonderfully evocative Japanese English coinage for "lives with Mom and Dad"), having your ramen paid for for a few months must look pretty attractive. Granted, the vast majority of people capable of starting startups are probably much more employable than the average college graduate or the average inner-city dropout.
Is there anything the rest of us can do? "10% discount on lifetime wages if you hire during a recession" seems like it would matter if I were hiring, but I'm not. Does anybody have any other clever ideas?
I've got one: I can't offer anybody full-time employment but if somebody could vastly decrease the friction of employment I'd love to have employment available as a service. Something like what the India/Philippines virtual assistant companies perform, except with a more consistent level of quality.
Working for it wouldn't be the most fulfilling existence in the world, but it would pay for rent, food, and loan payments while folks look for more permanent opportunities, and the virtualized nature of it would make it more conducive to that than e.g. trying to get a job in food services. Plus, unlike your local On The Border, I'm not going to ask "So Joe, are you going to be available in 3 months or will you be going back to school?" because I have no particular need for Joe to be personally available in 3 months -- I don't have to train Joe, so it doesn't matter to me if I'm working with a new Joe come fall.
Currently I do a wee bit of this via freelancing, but freelancing requires friction from me -- I need to find freelancers, supervise them, pay them, find replacements when they flake out, file tax documents for them, etc etc. That's a whole lot of grunt work for something which is supposed to save me from doing the grunt work. I want the API to grunt work.