Harry Reid: “Today is a big day in America. Only 36,000 people lost their jobs today, which is really good.” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Unemployment
A Good Hire
As my son and I were driving past South Coast Plaza, we saw a woman holding a cardboard sign that read “UNEMPLOYED AND DESTITUTE. Any Help is Appreciated.” “She’s got a good vocabulary,” I said to the boy. “Someone should hire her.” Read more →
Silicon Valley Jobless Quit Tech
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Jobless workers in Silicon Valley are giving up on the region’s dominant technology industry and trying to switch to other fields, as the area’s unemployment rate spikes above the national and state average. Silicon Valley’s unemployment rate — which was below California’s average and largely tracked the national average last year — has soared, surpassing the state average in May. By June, the area’s unadjusted unemployment rate was 11.8%, worse than California’s 11.6% and the national rate of 9.7%, according to the latest figures from California’s Employment Development Department. Many of the jobless techies are targeting new gigs in the clean-energy or health-care industries . . . Some are shifting even further afield, looking for jobs in teaching or financial consulting. People are leaving tech as “more tech companies are offshoring and some are shrinking, plus people are burned out and tired from having been there and… Read more →
Could Not Be More Serious
The situation could not be more serious. It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay or politics as usual while millions of Americans are being put out of work. — Barack Obama LOOK, IT’S BRAD PITT! OMG!!! — Nancy Pelosi Read more →
What Am I Thankful For?
I’m thankful that I have a job! A lot of people don’t! I lost my last job a few months ago, along with 9,499 other people in the Orange County real estate/finance industry over the past year. We all got to compete against each other to find another one. The Orange County Register ran a story yesterday on how some of these folks are doing . . . Delia DeYulia, a grandmother, was recently forced to take her first retail job. For the holiday shopping season, DeYulia, 53, is working part-time at Kohl’s, placing clothes on racks and cleaning dressing rooms. She resorted to taking the temporary work after not finding other employment. After 15 years with Fremont Investment and Loan, she lost her mortgage job in Anaheim Hills in March. “I’m used to sitting in an office,” said DeYulia, who audited loans at Fremont, a firm from which she… Read more →
Job Posting
My days of unemployment may be over: No, wait . . . I just read the rest of the story and it turns out not to be a job advertisement . . . Read more →
Be Prepared, but Don’t Overdo It
Since I’m currently unemployed, my friend GL asked me to write something about the job interview process. The problem is, there’s already so much written about the job interview process, it’s hard to think of anything to add. Which brings me to my point: It’s easy to overprepare for interviews. For example, we have a book here that my wife bought called Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions. Two problems: Who has time to prepare answers for 201 interview questions? What if the interviewer asks a question that’s not on the list? Where is your God now? But wait! It gets worse! If you go to Amazon and look up this book, you’ll find a list of similar titles like More Best Answers to the 201 Most Frequently Asked Interview Questions The 250 Job Interview Questions You’ll Most Likely Be Asked 301 Smart Answers to Tough… Read more →
Advertisement for Myself
I was laid off recently by a mortgage bank here in Southern California. Times are tough in the mortgage business, as you may have heard. First, some tips on how not to do a layoff: Call the layoff a “rightsizing,” which suggests that there was something “wrong” with the people who were let go. (Actually, the company I worked for has already announced another “rightsizing” in which 1,000 more people will be laid off over the next few months. They just can’t get these “rightsizings” right.) Overnight a layoff information packet, including a 20-page severance agreement, to the home of laid-off employees, asking them to sign and return it via the enclosed UPS envelope. Don’t enclose the UPS envelope. The next day, overnight a second packet to employees’ homes, containing the UPS envelope and a letter correcting phone numbers, email addresses and other misinformation in the previous day’s packet. Include… Read more →
A Waste of a Morning
The California Employment Development Department — aka the unemployment office — scheduled a meeting for me this morning at the Orange County One-Stop job center. I thought it was going to be a one-on-one meeting to discuss appropriate employment opportunities for someone with my outstanding qualifications as a technologist. Instead, I found myself placed in a room full of misfits and losers, none in professional attire, and many of them dressed for a day at the beach — shorts, sandals, Hooters T-shirts — while we listened to a presentation on how to make $50,000 a year selling cars. (“Sounds pretty good,” my son says, and for someone with a junior high school education like him, it probably is.) In the course of the meeting, three people asked to borrow my pen because they didn’t think to bring one. Of course, I was wearing a shirt and tie, so I could… Read more →
Laid Off
I guess I should have seen this coming when they eliminated free bagels on Fridays. Or when we stopped printing things on plotter paper because the paper vendor stopped coming around shortly after we stopped paying him. The retention list was heavily weighted toward young women with big tits and the managers’ poker buddies. Two of the laid-off developers had to be hired back within 30 minutes of being let go, when someone in authority belatedly realized they were working on the company’s only billable project. None of us will be retiring on our severance package, since there wasn’t one. We’re now faced with the one thing we all feared enough to stay with this company so long in the first place: trying to find another job in the worst tech market in 20 years. Thus spoke The Programmer. Read more →
Rent Hikes Cause Homelessness?
I read a story in Time magazine about a family in Columbus, OH, evicted from their apartment and living in a homeless shelter because they couldn’t afford a rent hike on the apartment. The husband was unemployed at the time; the wife was a pizza delivery driver. Both are high-school dropouts and they have three kids. The lesson here, according to Time: All it takes sometimes is a sudden rent hike to push a working family into a shelter. Read more →
How’s Business?
People often ask me: How’s the computer business? One thing I can tell them is that a significant number of my Merry Christmas emails from former colleagues end with something like this: P.S. Please let me know if you hear of any job leads as I am currently unemployed. Read more →