Unfortunately, tailoring your resume and cover letter to the job increases your chances of a response quite a bit, and that can easily take you two hours to research the position, the company, write a cover letter (or email), and adjust certain parts of your resume.

And if they insist on you manually entering your resume into their Taleo (or similar) software, that can easily take an hour.

And if they want code samples, finding (or making) something appropriate and cleaning it up could easily take 2-3 hours (or more).

And meanwhile, if you're lucky, recruiters could be calling to interrupt you at any time of day to have the 'getting to know you' conversation or pitch some new company they want to throw your resume at and probably not secure an interview for you.

And then at some point you need to actually find the series of jobs to apply to, and if you have any filter at all that can take a good solid 2-3 hours of browsing various job sites.

After doing 2, maybe 3 of those a day, I always got pretty drained and sick of doing it instead of going outside and enjoying the day, something you don't usually get to do when you're employed and working all day, so it's a rare opportunity to take advantage of it. Plus, job searching all day every day just drains the life force out of you (well, me at least).

I had four different resumes I sent out last time, each highlighting a different type of experience (I'm somewhat of a generalist, so I've got experience in many industries and with different tech), and I still made company-specific tweaks on top of that.

The full interview funnel is long in software, but the first step is something like "upload your resume to some sites". Decent low-education jobs, meanwhile, require proprietary sites and lengthy applications. It's not uncommon to be asked for 5-10 years of past residences and credit information. Verizon (for a floor job) put me through a 2 hour personality test (as an initial application), then never contacted me again.

I can't speak to people coming out of trade school, but the only no-degree jobs that you manage 5-10 applications per day for are the really crappy ones like fast food. Anything better than that has a swarm of applicants, so they're free to be as demanding and time-wasting as they want.

I can't really imagine doing 10 applications per day for the sort of job where many companies demand several hours work and none of it transfers to the next place.

I had no intention of going to college so I took my GED and quit school.

At 17 I was still living at home and, at that, age it was not odd or stressful to myself or my parents. I also didn't need much money so making minimum wage was not an issue. I didn't even own a car at first. I rode my bike everywhere and got rides with co-workers when the weather was really bad.

By the time I needed more money I had experience and was making more because of it. I was also attending community college at night because 2.5 years of working in a trade made me realize that college might be a good idea.

Another trick is to not waste too much time on school if you don't intend to go to college.

Then they get on Hacker News later that day and complain about how hard it is to find people and how hot the job market is right now.

I've certainly seen 'perks' for in-person interviews or acceptances, but I'd be shocked if people are opening with gifts before they get something in return.

If so, how normal is it to go through an interview process for contracting? I got friends who told me they had to interview like for a regular position even though they're contracting, but I should say that those I've heard it from are contracting exclusively full-time for a single company. So how normal is it for 3 or 6 months contracting?

A. I'm a great fit for your after hours drinking club. B. The headcount still (or ever existed) for my fte position in 6 months.

The market is very tough for those trying to enter in the first time in general.

How are you going to apply to a job if there aren't any to apply to ?

  - 0-30 minute commute and remote for stable companies
  - 30-60 minute commute and remote for promising start-ups
  - less than 2 hour commute and remote for anybody
  - moving to a previously white-listed US metropolitan area
  - moving anywhere at all within the continental US
  - freelancing gigs
  - live on the government dole
  - emigrate to a Commonwealth country
  - emigrate to another Anglophone country
  - emigrate to a completely foreign culture
  - turn to a life of white-collar crime
  - "out, damned spot"
  - wage bloody revolution against the corporation whores
  - sell humanity out to the lizard people

I can see people not wanting to if they are "settled" in an area - either by property or family - but I would think doing something productive in another country would be better than doing nothing.

Sure, your unemployed nephew could hustle hard enough to find a decent job, but that's not true for everyone's unemployed nephew all at once. Criticizing people for not finding jobs or starting companies doesn't fix structural issues - it's not going to solve Spain's 25% unemployment.

This isn't true, people with degrees definitely make a lot more on average.

I'm not pro-degree, since I don't think it's good for even half of the college grads, and the debt is an awful burden for many.

But the numbers are there regarding the salary. On average, it is worth it.

There's a drastic difference between earnings for unfinished and finished college degree and in general this effect is dubbed as sheepskin effect.

Here's a Wikipedia starter on the effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Spence_...

Is that really signalling, or is it that the reasons for not finishing a degree (not willing to put in the hard work, for instance) bleed into the workplace? The degree may play no part at all.

Interestingly, a GED does not statistically elevate ones earning position like a traditionally acquired high school diploma. It has been suggested by researchers that the reasons for not completing high school the traditional way are what lead to lower earnings, and receiving certification does not remove those existing traits. Why would college be different?

Additionally, the biggest statistical gains come from post-graduate studies. 49% of the top 1% of Americans have a post-graduate degrees. Further, there are more people with high school or less in the top 1% than there are with bachelor degree-only. This suggests to me that the gains from having a degree are skewed by supply managed professions (for example: doctors), where incomes are artificially high because the law prevents unconstrained competition. There, again, may be no advantage outside of those protected industries, and certainly not if you plan to stop at the bachelor level.

As such, degree holders may simply earn more because they are overly represented in supply managed industries with artificial incomes, like the aforementioned doctor.

The second sentence flips the causality you describe around. Employees who are already productive buy education to certify their productivity. The education does not necessarily lead to higher productivity. The employer wants productive employees, not certified employees. Certified employees are just a proxy for productive employees. Another proxy, such as aptitude tests or GitHub repositories, could function just as well. These "cost/benefit structures" may very well be more appropriate than formal education because they are less costly in time and money.

Part of the key is that degrees pay off over long periods of time in promotions and other career opportunities, so the advantage is not always apparent at age 17.

For example, someone who has innate determination to receive a degree might also be determined to finish projects in the workplace, leading to better job opportunities over someone who is less innately determined. While someone with high determination and no degree may do just as well as any college graduate, since they are lumped into the group of people with low determination, we pass them off as outliers instead of looking at the most important features.

The correlation is clear, but that does not mean there is causation.