Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job

Re:Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job by georgieporgie on Saturday August 13, 2011 @04:26PM (#2881912)

Regarding apprenticeship-type programs, my father works for the Corps of Engineers, and my uncle is a life-long electrician. Both are work with training programs these days. Each of them has said that it's extremely hard to find someone who is both reasonably intelligent (or able to put down his/her smartphone long enough to appear so) and able to stick with a program through completion.

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Re:Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job by sudont on Saturday August 13, 2011 @05:30PM (#2882053)

One of the reasons I could never do manual labor for the rest of my life (after working on farms and road crews) was the sheer intellectual loneliness of it. No matter how strong I was, or how fast I worked (I'm still pretty good with a pick-axe), I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.

The fact is, computers and large-scale engineering projects are really fucking interesting and siphoning off talent from other areas. The dreaded brain drain. Meanwhile, our grid is crumbling and we're playing it conservatively--minor fixes, if anything. If there was some serious thought and excitement put back into it, to not just modernize, but futurize our utilities--we'd see a lot more people start to join.

NIMBY is a problem: no micro-wind farms, no upgraded rail projects, no weird bio-tech projects, nothing new or innovative. If anyone's intellectually curious, why the hell would they want to join something as boring as a public works project?

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Re:Homeless Man Has Three Degrees and Can't Find a Job by georgieporgie on Sunday August 14, 2011 @04:12AM (#2883104)

I was still the loser who didn't go out and blow money at the bar. Worse yet, the area was like 70% male and I couldn't get a date as a laborer to save my life.

That sounds almost exactly like my last programming job. Except it was more like 90% male. :-)

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