anon50118810

People who are forced to receive worse medical care, for example because they can't afford necessary medicine anymore, are tangibly worse off than they were before. It's not a sign of an unhealthy relationship with work if someone is upset at not being able to buy medicine. Framing it that way is unhelpful.

I'm referring to class as a person's conception of themselves, and others' conception of them, as someone who can live the life they're living and can expect to continue living that life. Losing this doesn't just mean the loss of some sort of social authority, of having an impressive job title at parties, but also and more importantly it can mean almost everything in that person's life changing for the worse, indefinitely: worse neighborhood, worse housing, worse medical care, worse food, worse schools and college funds, worse retirement, worse jobs, worse hobbies, worse transportation, worse life expectancy. That would devastate anyone, and it's not so much about how a person self-identifies but about how much they can afford.

Maybe you picked being gay as a hypothetical out of a hat but it's a terrible example. Unless we're talking about extremely repressive societies where there are literally no professional options available for LGBT people, almost no LGBT person would recommend going back into the closet to find work with a bigoted employer. LGBT people regularly run away from home as teenagers and become homeless to avoid bigotry, that's how serious it can be for LGBT people to live authentically. A key part of the emotional growth involved, what a lot of it goes back to is, as I said, having confidence in yourself and being willing to enforce boundaries.

Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.

If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.

While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. These will come from the recruiter, the manager and your future peers. These are both technical and social questions. Refusing to answer any of these questions would be very weird socially, and even very restrictive NDAs should allow you to at least speak generally about what you're doing.

What I'm really talking about when I'm talking about the threat of extended unemployment is the threat of losing socioeconomic class. So much depends on class: where you live, what you eat, where you worship if anywhere, where your kids go to school, who your friends are. Almost everything. It's very difficult to diversify your social and professional network outside of your class.

In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.

All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.

It's a good idea to practice if you're trying to get up the nerve to make the jump to a better job. But during a job search, you'll either get so many rejections that you'll get back up to speed quickly enough without needing to also obsess about it while you're employed, or you're hireable enough that you didn't need to worry about it either way.

We may be talking past each other. I'm talking about applications for unremarkable positions at large corporations where the application forms are either branded by the company or done through something like iCIMS, Taleo or Workday. You create an account and then you're faced with several steps asking for who knows what. The experience question might be "List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.

These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.

You can judge for yourself whether I'm serious or desperate or not. If your standard is 500 applications within a few days, then no. I can't even comprehend that. Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?

I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.

That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.

I'm not sure it's a good trade-off to interview constantly even when you have a job just to remove a bit of the learning curve if you lose your job unexpectedly.

Yes, remote only if at all possible. I'm surprised that non-tech companies care about looking busy, since tech is a cost center for them and I would guess they're hiring grudgingly at best.

I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.

Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?

Being unemployed, I can't support this. Keeping an offer on hold blocks the company from making the offer to someone else who actively needs it. Maybe you meant something else, like a handshake agreement with a manager friend who works there that they'll try to make room for you if you ever want to join.