I wanted to comment about David Brooks’s column this morning in which he worries that we don’t have the industry or determination of prior generations of Americans:
If you look at America from this perspective, you do see something akin to the “British disease.†After decades of affluence, the U.S. has drifted away from the hardheaded practical mentality that built the nation’s wealth in the first place.
The shift is evident at all levels of society. First, the elites. America’s brightest minds have been abandoning industry and technical enterprise in favor of more prestigious but less productive fields like law, finance, consulting and nonprofit activism.
We didn’t lose a half million engineering jobs in the United States over the last ten years because of a mental shift. The loss of jobs caused the mental shift. High-paying jobs in science or engineering just weren’t on offer but jobs in finance and law were.
I think that over the last 30 years or so there’s been an enormous miscalculation, a management error of spectacular scale. This has resulted in the loss not merely of jobs (that would be bad enough) but of whole career paths under the tremendously bone-headed misapprehension that career paths aren’t important. You can’t preserve the senior engineering positions while off-shoring the junior ones. Junior engineers become senior engineers. Reducing the number of juniors will eventually reduce the number of seniors as well until nothing is left but the smile.
High-paying jobs in science or engineering just weren’t on offer but jobs in finance and law were. … Reducing the number of juniors will eventually reduce the number of seniors as well until nothing is left but the smile.
I bailed on mathematics in graduate school because I saw that the talented PhD students were happy to get crappy offers that may have eventually led to a decent job. One friend stoppoed with his MA because he was able to secure a $24,000 a year job with a community college in the middle of nowhere. It was a reasonable decision – and a hideous waste of talent and brain-power.
Note how recent Presidents talk up engineering and science jobs – but none of them have encouraged their daughters to take up such careers. (The jury is still out on the Obamas, but come on- do you really think two lawyers want an engineer in the family?)
For me the path went from mathematics graduate student, to junior actuarial analyst, to financial analyst, to permanently unemployed. Personally I never expect I will have a job again. I don’t have the right credentials for the jobs I have experience with, I don’t have the experience for the jobs I have the credentials for (and employers ONLY want experienced people now – those manufactors seeking skilled workers don’t want to actually train anyone, they just want to cannibalize other companies), and I can’t take a “lesser” job because managers won’t hire me for such tasks. (Some have the courtesy to actually tell me that.)
Looking at it now I should have sold my soul and gone to law school. Then I could make my career suing doctors for not being perfect, or take up some other line of legalized perfidy. Perhaps even opinion writer for the New York Times.
But I guess that it’s ultimately my own damned fault for not understanding that I should learn high tech manufacturing skills even though there’s almost no high tech manufacturing jobs within several hours commute. If only I had listened to David Brooks and been born near a major manufactory center….
Let me make my point more clearly, if at length. It’s not really about my employment situation, it’s about the asinine employment standards of corporations. Employers only want perfect employees right now, which means people that already know exactly how to do the job and have a certain amount of proven ability, i.e. experience, but not too much. Entry level positions for anything other than crappy sales jobs barely exist. So if your old career has dried up, you’re humped. You can train for a new job, but you won’t have any experience. If your old career hasn’t dried up, but you’ve lost your particaular job, you’re still humped, because now you have too much experience. And so it goes.
Example – when I lost my last job back in April of 2008 I found a job in a nearby city for which I was almost perfect. A large company was looking for someone with a background in accounting, financial analysis and employee benefits. I had the second and third qualification, so I applied. No one was likely to meet all three qualifications. I got no response.
Two months later I got a call from a head hunter. He had found a position that I was a good match for in a nearby town. It called for someone with experience with accounting, financial analysis and employee benefits. I didn’t have the accounting but I was the best match he had seen …. It was the job I had already applied for. He went ahead and submitted my resume again, as he had a good contact with the HR staff. I was rejected again.
The position remained open for several months. I know this because I kept getting calls from recruiters who had a great opportunity for me. It reached the point that when they said they were recruiters I would say, “If this is about the so-called Benefits Analyst job with XYZ Corp in Lakeland, I’ve already been rejected.” Then I would have to spend some time working around the recruiters inability to state the name of the company or the job (a professional requirement) to convince them that I knew exactly which job they meant, and then I would explain to them what the company wanted. The first recruiter had told me what the problem was after I had been rejected the second time.
You see, what the company wanted was a CPA with five years experience, who had a few years doing detailed financial forecasting as well for several years, and had several years working with employee benefits. And they wanted someone who only had three to five years overall work experience. You will note that after several years of experience in three different fields (though two are somewhat related) one was unlikely to only have only three to five years overall experience. The first recruiter was completely discouraged when he told me this, and admitted that he was giving up looking for someone for that job. Mine had been the only resume he had seen that had even come close to the job description – and I was one CPA too short and a few years too experienced. Thus I didn’t mind telling the other recruiters what he had gleaned, as normally one keeps this kind of thing confidential. But I saw no reason for anyone else to waste their time mucking around in the dark. The job was still open nine months after I first applied, as the company had once again listed it publicly. I haven’t bothered to check since the end of 2008.
Here’s the hell of it, that company is actually pretty well run and is doing okay despite the current economy and industry pressures. But what they wanted was logically inconsistent.
THAT’S the corporate environment that exists in the employment market these days, and from friends I’m hearing similar tales up and down the employment ladder and across several different industries. The employers want a perfectly experienced worker whom they do NOT have to train, and they want them with just enough experience that they won’t have to pay said perfect employee too much. And in this environament they probably won’t be too worried about that employee demanding too much compentsation, either.
So I have no sympathy for companies that can’t find experienced workers if their whole G-d damned industry refuses to hire entry-level people and train them. Most (if not all) of those companies are looking for a free ride at someone else’s expense. There’s the “hardened practical mentality” that exists in today’s economy.
That is a fascinating story, Ice. I wonder if what you have here is “professional” HR people working off fill-in-the-blanks questionnaires that were filled out by managers who didn’t expect their answers to be taken so literally.
I have no idea. I only know the situation was utterly ridiculous and that it dragged on for months without resolution. And as I said, that was at a well run company.
But one sees so many ridiculous things in the employment market these days – it all starts to blur together after a while.
Here’s a story from 2008 that isn’t ridculous, just funny/sad.
A large national company called me in for an interview. One of their local divisions needed someone to help with the financial analysis of several small units scattered about the company. They wanted to interview about 12 people. I wasn’t thrilled with my placement in the process – second to be interviewed. Worse still, they were going to interview six of us, stop for four weeks to cover their year-end reporting crush, then interview the others four to six weeks later. The manager who would have been my boss told me that if I hadn’t heard back in six weeks to call the HR rep who had initially contacted me.
Six weeks pass and no word. I call the HR rep. I get voicemail and leave a message. The next day I call back and get redirected to a receptionist. She tells me that particular HR rep doesn’t work there any more. She puts me on hold while she figures out to whom I should be forwarded. After a while she gets back on the line to tell me that she’ll have someone contact me when she finds the correct person to handle my call.
The next day in the news I see that company has “down-sized” their entire local HR department. I figure that means the receptionist won’t be getting back to me.
About a week later the department I would have been working for also got the collective axe. That was a close call! If I hadn’t been so lucky I would have been their just long enough to sit through all the orientation bullshit and THEN I would have been fired. Having to sit through yet another round of sexual harassment training only to be pink-slipped? The horror… the horror….
(Which reminds me that I should read Heart of Darkness sometime soon. Maybe I’ll just watch Conan the Barbarian instead. John Milius is probably funnier than Conrad.)
I suspect I’ll catch a lot of shit for this……….but I have to be honest.
Icepick, I sit on top of corporations and am involved in many hiring situations. We of course look for technical cred and experience, but we also look for attitude and energy. The proverbial “can do” spirit. Without it you have nothing, what Peter Drucker called “time servers.”
All I’ve seen from you is a defeatist attitude. I wouldn’t hire you if you were the best technician on the planet. I think you need to take a very hard look in the mirror and decide if you are going to suck it up and find a way to make it work out, or stay in your “poor me” mode.
With all my head and heart I hope you choose the former.
Shit. Several hundred words of response just eaten by an incorrect key stroke.
Much shorter version –
Drew, I have no idea what experience you have looking for work in an employment environment like the current one. But unless you’re in your nineties that experience must be ZERO. The long and the short of it is this – there aren’t enough jobs. Or has your vast intellect managed to completely miss that salient fact because of your relentless cheeriness?
Also, there’s a danger in assuming that you know everything about me, or even my attitude, from a few posts a week out of 168 hours in a week.
After all, if I judged you solely by what I have seen online, I would judge you to be a know-it-all prick who only valued those opinions that reinforce that which you already believe. I have never seen you state, “Good point, So-and-so, I may have been wrong about that.” It may have happened, but I haven’t seen it. I can only assume from this experience that you hire nothing but yes men to work for you. No wonder you think they’ve all got such positive attitudes!
…
Or am I judging from too little information?
A couple of final points for Drew. Then I will probably withdraw from the board again, as I’m about to lose my home. (I won’t be out on the street – I’m one of the lucky ones – but my living arrangements will become very bad. But I guess I’m just being a defeatist again. So sorry.)
First, how are potential employers picking up on my defeatism? Through my finely polished resumes and cover letters? That seems unlikely. I haven’t even had a phone interview in over a year and a half. Believe me, I’ve spent a lot of time pouring over my resume (and have revised it as fashions change in HR) and my cover letters. It doesn’t do any damned good. Do you all powerful employers use crystal balls?
Second, how would a cheerful attitude have helped me when one potential employer actually closed up shop completely? How would that have helped, Know-it-all?
“Know it all prick,” here.
Look, Ice Pick, I happen to file my comment under “quasi-tough love,” since I don’t know you. But I sincerely think you need to take a moment, take a deep breath, and read the comments you write on this subject from the perspective of someone else reading it, in particular a prospective employer. (BTW – have you ever done one of those “interview on film exrecises? You might be surprised.)
I’ll try to make this short so as to not bore. Me:
1. Trained as engineer, but realized sr year didn’t want to be engineer, wanted more managerial role. Question: how not to get cast as specialist? Answer: go where metallurgical engineer is integral to the business = steel company. Good strategic decision # 1. BTW – in the teeth of the 1980 – 1981 recession, so you can put that complaint of yours aside.
2. Desired to go to business school. Too much wine, women and song (well, beer, women and rock) in undergrad. Rejected!! Solution: entered one of Chicago’s finest grad engineering programs, while working full time. 4 years of nights and weekends studying later: 4.0 GPA. Apply to bus school. Accepted. One step forward. My cohorts said I was crazy to leave; too risky, too costly, too far afield from engineering. Never make it happen.
3. Graduate from business school. Want to get involved in M&A. Rejected by all I-banks. “Too old. ” “You should be a consultant, that’s what engineers with MBA’s do.” But I didn’t want to be a consultant. I wanted to be an investing principal. Took a shot at the LBO lending unit of a prestigious leveraged lending bank. Rejected!! (The recruiter said: “I know you majored in finance, but you are really an operator; you’ll make someone a great employee, just not us” Sniff.) Frustration.
4. Plan B: find industrial organization that values my background, but has active corporate development program so can cut teeth on transactions. I did that, and then ran a small business unit and made a series of acquisitions as part of it. Getting closer.
5. Later: Well what do you know. LBO unit of bank needs people with industry experience, who know their way around finance to make LBO loans. Heh. And it was that same bank I referenced in point 3. Industrial firm told me I was making big mistake, had great future, too risky etc……..But now I’m in the game.
6. 6 years later, client PE firm has partner defection. And they need someone. After a process, I get the nod. Biggest objection: “how come you took so long to get into the PE business?
It took me to age 33, and a lot of risk taking, hard work and pursuasion to finally get positioned for where I wanted to be. I was 39 before I actually got into the PE business as a principal, and that was 13 years ago. And the last 13 years have been a great, if extremely tough, run.
So my point is that both through personal experience, and as someone who deals with hiring, the people I observe to be successful and/or hire have a certain mindset – I call it attitude and energy. Credentials and experience are important, but only part of the puzzle. Many people just don’t get that.
So I know you will forever consider me a “know it all prick,” but I do in fact know what it means to be looking for work in a bad economy, to be rejected, to feel you will not achieve your objectives, the anger and fear that the recruiter has missed the boat etc. I know all that. But I also know what it means to say to myself, “oh, yeah? – screw this, nothing is going to stop me.” And I think you will find this to not be an uncommon trait with people who realize their goals.
So again, with all good, but direct, intentions I say to you, I hope with all my head and heart that you get off the gloom and doom ride, and figure out a way.
I’m glad to finally get your whole work biography, Drew. Not only does it illustrate the value of persistence but the value of a goal.
While there are many areas of similarity and convergence in our stories, I’ve never had a goal.
A few days later, I have a little time to read again. Drew, your story is wonderful – and totally irrelevant. You do NOT know what it is like to be in an economy where huge numbers of the unemployed have been out of work for at least half a year – nothing like this has happened since the 1930s. I can’t find a job because THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH JOBS. Further, there are not going to be enough jobs any time in the next decade. How many people have analyzed the situation and determined that millions of the jobs lost will never come back? I’ve lost count. Meanwhile millions more college graduates come into the workforce each year.
So I can’t GET that job working off my career track because that job does not exist.
The employers have spoken, and they’ve decided that when they must hire they will only hire those who have maintained their employment through these times. Those of us who lost jobs in 2008? We are unhirable.
So spare me the lousy pep talk – as usual your every word drips with contempt and you STILL refuse to acknowledge that this time it IS different. I can’t go to business school because I don’t have the money. Borrowing more money for MORE school? I’d rather kill myself – there’s no way I can ever pay back my debts now. And how would I pay for that interview on tape anyway?
Which is irrelevant because I’ve actually done that with a couple of agencies – they thought I was a great interview. They still can’t find me a job. Why? Because there aren’t enough jobs, and the employers only want to hire those who already have jobs. So I’m fucked, and no amount of Norman Vincent Peale is going to get me unfucked. BECAUSE THERE AREN’T ENOUGH JOBS. Or do you not believe ALL of the reports that say just that?