What they usually mean is "they can't find an employee in the location they want, with the credentials they want, with the skills they want, at the salary they want, who's been trained by someone else."
This is a highly overconstrained search. If/when employers loosen one or more of these constraints, candidates show right up.
Like everyone, I prefer to get exactly what I want.
...but it doesn't always play out that way.
When I've needed staff and my dream candidate isn't there, I've hired imperfect people that I had to train, raise the rate I was willing to pay, put together attractive relocation packages, etc., and I've never had a problem hiring in 20 years as a manager.
(Both parties in an employment relationship may not have equal bargaining power, but I take issue with the implication that employers have no agency and workers no power.)
EDIT: A point I wanted to include or imply, but couldn't really shoehorn into this inversion, is that just as employers set bounds on what they offer employees, workers set bounds on what offers they accept. Sometimes it's rational to hold out for the right role through an extended period of unemployment (while focusing instead on finding the right role and acquiring or sharpening marketable skills) than to take underemployment that leaves you with no time for improving your position.
Supply and demand curves _ALWAYS_ meet. It's just that the point where they meet tells you what the market-clearing price is.
Sometimes this information makes one sad.
Managers who "can't hire good people" are sad because good people cost more than they want to pay.
Employees who "can't find a job" are sad because jobs that match their skills and other requirements pay less than they want to receive.
Nifty little device to make a an important point.
I'm an attorney specializing in compliance and privacy, so most all of my work is 'consulting'. But I run into companies every day who enjoy being constantly understaffed. It's the fashion in IT atm. A company without dozens of open positions isnt considered 'lean' and so they keep many open just so they can say they are there. (Some hr depts probably also think open positions are a headge against downsizing. They arent.)
How exactly? The author has not provided (and neither have you) any examples of how age discrimination has affected him except through vague feelings.
On the other hand, in the story alone, it's already been demonstrated that he's not really resilient in the face of adversity. Just because he gets rejected from an interview, he stops looking for a job for a few weeks? That sort of attitude will get you nowhere, no matter where you are.
"There have been times where I’ve wondered if I should just get a temporary service or manual labor job...I would be too humiliated... It would be exceptionally difficult to work eight hours a day hoping with all my might that a neighbor or friend wouldn’t swing by to see me working the cash register or pumping gas."
This is a definitive example of the prideful worker effect. It's kind of crazy how our modern culture substitutes "can't" for "won't".
Meanwhile, this guy says he doesn't have skills with modern technologies and he spends 4 hours/day ("a quick glance at Twitter to see what’s going on in the world, and then I look up and it’s 1:15") procrastinating rather than learning those technologies. Hardly a surprise that no one wants to hire him, I certainly never would.
I have construction skills, so I worked doing demolition and then framing an addition for a friend at $10/hr.
To quote Pulp Fiction
"The night of the fight, you may feel a slight sting. That's pride fucking with you. Fuck pride. Pride only hurts, it never helps."
Over a couple of weeks I made a few thousand dollars, paid the mortgage, and got some exercise.
...and, besides, there's nothing embarrassing about using your hands and your back.
I rarely got to see my friends who were more successful starting their own careers. But what I did have is money to pay my rent and free time to continue learning and honing my skills.
Yeah it really sucked working in that warehouse and it was embarrassing a little bit. I used that as motivation. Fuck pride indeed.
This. I worked overnight stocking shelves in a grocery store for awhile. It sucked, but I did a good job while I looked for different work. Then I waited tables for awhile after that. All the jobs I have had have taught me various things, but the main one was motivation to not have to do those jobs.
It seems to me that pride really was your motivation... and there's nothing wrong with it.
Personally, I agree with your point of view. There is, however, something to be said for people that never settle and by force of will reshape the world around them to conform to their expectations.
Steve Jobs is great an inspiring, because he did X and Y and Z and never compromised his standards.
You know what? You happen to know of Steve Jobs because everything worked out well for him.
There may very well be 20,000 other people who refused to compromise their standards...and perhaps that strategy really sucks and the other 20,000 of them went bankrupt and are working at used car lots now.
"Never settling" sounds great.
I'm not 100% convinced that it is.
But... you have to be careful to stay in reality. Otherwise you end up tilting at the mills.
If by force of will I wanted to work at Google for example, I would take steps to improve my chances of making that happen. This story is not about force of will at all, but someone with low self discipline and possibly depressed (clinical depression could be a factor here and he should look into it).
He complains about lack of something to do. There is plenty to do starting with making a schedule listing things to learn for the day that will improve his chances getting the job he wants. I'm sure potential employers are looking at him asking the same questions people here are asking. You've been unemployed for 2 years and have learned what?
Two years of unemployment should be enough to indicate that force of will sometimes isn't enough.
If you refuse to try a strategy for 2 years, that's not evidence the strategy won't work.
What he should be trying is a new strategy, not pouring more force of will into this one.
Six years and three failed university degrees later, I started in night shifts myself in customer support because I had no other option and some guy from a mailing list had a heart for someone broke and desperate.
Fast forward another seven years and I'm not just CTO of a profitable company, but also pretty thankful of all my experience in customer support, if only for a good chunk of humility. It's really hard to overcome your initial feelings about such a "downgrade" in socioeconomic status for a chance on a new beginning/industry though, don't know if I would have dared that after 40.
I was lucky to avoid having to work in the service industry - aside from occasionally having to work the floor at a retailer when we finished unloading/loading a truck early - but my wife worked as a server for a good long while, and we both agree that we will absolutely encourage our children to work jobs like those - aside from earning money, it teaches empathy and how to deal with difficult situations.
That's an inspiring story.
I've got no doubt that it would be really difficult to take a low-pay, low-skill job after working on the other end of the spectrum for decades. But after two years of no employment, it seems like the appropriate action. Two years of working as a cashier or a janitor or just about anything else looks better on a resume than two years of no employment.
But I'm also aware of the fact that I'm fortunate to have an extremely good job and I would spend a lot of time looking for a similar job before showing up at Papa John's with my resume.
My point is, that you're absolutely right. It may not be the job you want right now, but it is probably the job you need right now. You can either take it and work on our next move or sit there pontificating if the perfect job will arrive next.
Also I would look into some hobbies that could potentially bring in money(twitter analyst?)
If he was doing some sort of software support for obsolete programs there is a dwindling demand for such skills in US. (ahem outs...)
On the other hand being underemployed in the wrong kind of job that saps all the energy could actually be counterproductive in the longer term.
According to the article the author is applying to jobs, getting a mininum wage job would not really change that nor drastically improve family finances in SV.
Disclaimer: I speak as someone who earns roughly the US minimum wage at my official job.
He said he had to shut down his business - couldn't find anyone willing to learn the trade.
He said no one wants to get their hands dirty anymore.
He said it's a shame, they could basically charge as much as they like - write their own tickets.
I'd add basic mechanics to this list -- things like changing my own oil and replacing my own battery have saved me a TON of money and there's a satisfaction that comes from being able to fix your own stuff.
As an aside, my wife and I do home improvement projects 'for fun'. Our largest so far was updating a bathroom. Youtube is amazing for learning, and worst case you end up hiring someone to fix what you broke :)
But I had watched what they did, and nothing seemed that complicated. Ever since, I just do the plumbing repairs myself for a couple bucks instead of several hundred.
Probably for very similar reasons.
Yes and no. It can speak to structural inefficiencies in the economy. For instance, I am a Computational Scientist with a decade of experience in scientific research, publications, etc. It would be a massive waste of my training to be working in an unrelated field, for instance.
Underemployment is a very real thing, and it hurts the entire economy. We as a society have a vested interest in ensuring that highly productive roles (data science, medicine, etc.) are filled, because thelse positions are more productive and boost the aggregate economy. To say nothing of the likely higher salary and job satisfaction that comes with a 'good fit'.
And on the academic side, I'm not a fan of the idea that everything should be focused on the career side. A world without the humanities might get university graduates earning more money, but it'd feel poorer in some sense at the same time.
This is an example of what I'm talking about.
What's more of a waste of your training? To be work in a career field only 60% overlapping with your training, or to be unemployed (with 0% overlap) ?
:(
If you want to read more on this look up "search costs"
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.1976....
Would be interesting to count one as being only 60% employed, in the example you give. So if you had 100 million people all employed at 60% fit, that's an 'effective' employment of 60 million. Of course, I have no idea how one might measure that.
But I am not an economist, there may be similar (or superior) measures for underemployment.
It's like planning on the NBA or acting as a career: a high-risk proposition that requires total dedication in exchange for an uncertain chance of success. There are some people who are OK with that.
I think the conclusion is that only very dedicated students should go into these fields, which would simultaneously reduce the supply of people trying to go into them, and reduce the number of unemployed people with these degrees. I have little sympathy for someone who chose a high-risk degree like biology and then complains it didn't work out (at least the author of the article didn't make THAT mistake). People who think they are guaranteed a job in any given field simply because they have a degree, or that all careers have equal odds of finding steady employment, are completely out of touch with reality.
I was mostly talking for people my age (20s) that went to school for bullshit degrees only to come out 80k in debt and have no hopes of finding a job because they didn't do research into the market before they went to school.
Moralizing about how they're all too lazy and prideful to get a job is itself lazy. At least take the step to identify why you think the number of the prideful lazy has increased.
Also: you said you've been in the workforce for 25 years. Have you considered that not everyone shares your particular history of entering into the workforce right before an extended boom time? That's a huge difference from people who entered in 2008, only found a paying job in 2010, and as a consequence of timing are behind people who graduated a year or two later than them.
15 minutes walk and I was able to find 8 retails job offers. It was 4G upload speed that was slowing me down adding new posts...
Jobs are everywhere and I couldn't agree more: "they can't find a job in the area they want, in the industry they want, doing the kind of work they want, at the salary they want, working for someone else."
Ditto.
I remember being out of work for quite a bit of time. It was right out of MBA school (after working ~10 years as a software developer), I graduated into the Great Recession. Could not find anything--programming or otherwise. I started burning through savings, and was very tempted to just take any gas station job I could in order to make ends meet. It's like a game of chicken where you wait as long as you can before jumping out of the way of the truck.
Through a great miraculous fortune, at the last possible moment, I found a mid level software job and took it with zero negotiation, being about 1 month away from insolvency. It was totally beneath me in terms of qualifications but when the alternative is going broke, you take it. I was pretty close to walking into McDonalds at that point asking if they needed a janitor.
Doesn't sound like the guy in the article has tried, but he may find his situation is a lot worse when it gets to that level of desperation.
The reason is of course that if you're running a McDonalds or supermarket, you don't want a guy who you know is actively searching for something else and will leave immediately when he finds it. There's a cost to finding and training people, even if it's a lot less than finding a dev.
Are you a vegetarian? Then doubtful. If you've ever had a factory egg before, they shove the male chicks into a woodchipper.
> operating the gas chambers in Auschwitz?
And we're at Nazi already!
What they usually mean is "they can't find a job in the area they want, in the industry they want, doing the kind of work they want, at the salary they want, working for someone else."
This is a highly overconstrained search. If / when people loosen one or more of these constraints, they're opportunities open right up.
Like everyone, I prefer to get exactly what I want.
...but it doesn't always play out that way.
When I've needed work and my dream job isn't there, I've worked in garbage industries, on crappy projects, at places that are long commutes, etc., and I've been swamped with work for 25 years.