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June 18, 2010

Unemployment Issues

Silly companies, has no one told you that we are in a deprerecession? When you hire an H1(b) for a US job, you hamper the recovery. When you refuse to consider an unemployed applicant, you shoot yourself in the face.

... firms that hire unemployed job seekers could also benefit from a recently-passed tax break that essentially exempts them from paying the 6.2% of the new hire's wages in Social Security taxes for the rest of this year. - Out-of-work job applicants told unemployed need not apply
Yes, people, you are losing out on a tax break if you pass over the unemployed.

Oh, by the way, lifting and carrying are not IT skills. They really aren't. They are just excuses not to hire women, older people, and/or the disabled. I don't care how you try to spin it, how you try to justify it, but it's just discrimination. All you'll end up with if you want your expensive systems people to lift and haul stuff is geeks with bad backs and expensive workman's comp bills. Get carts or hire cheap people for the grunt labor, don't risk your expensive equipment on some geek trying to be macho. Flat screen monitors don't weight 5 pounds.

Lose the bias against older folks, seriously. I don't know how many times I have had to clean up after the young cowboy or reinvent the wheel type because the company only wanted "new, fresh" recent college grads (read that as "people under 3"). Don't expect a really experienced person to answer trivia questions on a phone screen, either. The petty details and file names? We look those up, because they change over the years, and move from distro/variant to distro/variant. I don't keep the syntax for every type of config file that I've ever touched in my head. Even standards like Apache, or Kickstart, have changed over the last 8 years. That may seem like slow change, but to an experienced person, that rate of change is a ridiculous amount of memorization for the purpose of passing phone screens every three years. Cut it out.

I realize that there are so many fakers out there that you actually have to ask "What is a man page?" I laughed when one interviewer told me that. (I didn't get the job because they *assumed* I couldn't lift 5 pounds - I can, but shouldn't need to.) If you're going to fake knowing about Unix/Linux, do your frigging homework. Know what RTFM means. But interviewers need to realize that those of us that do RTFM don't need to memorize - that's why we RTFM.

Oh, and for those of you who say "just get a job, any job" - go screw yourselves. Most sensible employers will not hire overqualified people because they will leave for their regular career as soon as they can. This means that not only can I not be considered for an entry level NOC job (which I would gladly take at this point, just to beef up the networking side of my resume), I will never be considered for a clerk, waitress, fast food, warehouse or even clerical job again, except maybe as a temp - and then only for a one or two day "day labor" gig, not a real job. So no, I really can't go work at MacDonalds or WalMart. Stop suggesting that I apply.

Posted by ljl at June 18, 2010 2:37 AM

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