A whole lot of my personality comes from spending my first 8 years of workforce age being “not economically viable”.
Fortunately, another world is possible and within reach once you meet enough comrades.
Me.
Porky makes it loud and clear. He has sooooo many applicants he doesn’t need to hire “entry level” just pick a few senior levels and not hire anyone else.
So uhhhh…what am I supposed to do in the meantime while waiting for a job? Can I go back to college and do a master’s or maybe a PhD if that will get porky’s attention? Nope. Can’t afford it.
I’m dismissed as a worthless loser because I’m not the best of the best of the best in a STEM field right out of the gate, yet I am constantly being told I have to put off my life and wait. I am so fucking tired of being forced to have patience for a world that has zero patience for me.
So uhhhh…what am I supposed to do in the meantime while waiting for a job?
Real talk, this is a bit of a crapshoot but it can work, it’s worked a couple times for me.
Go hard on personal projects.
Make what you want to make, rewrite it when you’re done and realize how stupidly you wrote it the first time. expand it, connect it to other projects, put it all on github, put a decent readme of the whys and hows of this project, it doesn’t matter if you’re the only one who uses it, that’s called internal tooling.
When you run into an issue with a library you’re using, learn to contribute to open source, file a pull request, get a feel for it.
Put your github at the top of your resume. Prune your top repos so people see what you want them to see first.
This wont be a silver bullet but if you apply to smaller shops that like/support open source, it makes the nerds interviewing you like you more. I’ve skipped programming challenges completely because I was able to talk in depth to the designs of my personal projects, so they knew I actually wrote it because I understood it. So if they wanted to see how I wrote code, they could trust I wrote what they’re seeing.
The benefit to this approach is you also get a lot of experience. You’re forced to learn to architect your stuff from first principles, you’re forced to learn from all your mistakes.
This market sucks, these projects will feel like a full time job, but it can pay off, and its a better bet than waiting. Nerds like working with other nerds. People on projects like working with others who can break down problems and figure things out, even if they don’t know the solution immediately.
There is hope.
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my labor could be exploited for a wage but the people screening workers want me to starve to death
Yes. On top of not being able to find a job in the last year, I’m a biology major with a focus on ecology and they’ve slashed a bunch of science jobs.
I’m entirely economically viable, it’s just the jobs they’ll pay me to do are actively harmful, and the things I do that benefit society and actually produce things don’t pay/are flooded fields/would require years of leeching off my partner while I get settled. So here I am, pouring sand into the gears, which somehow still makes me above average in productivity because employers really, really like hackable KPIs.
im disabled so
solidarity, friend
Normally I am unemployed and unemployable but right now I’m just underemployed
thanks for reminding me of this subtle scene. i was a little kid when i first saw it and didn’t understand its weight until i got older, but it stayed with me anyway. the orderliness of an oppressive political economy, the way passersby purposely look away or ignore it not wanting to be “pulled in” by their empathy. heavy shit.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I’ve done everything from mining work to field work to factory jobs to office jobs. Technically, anyone can do the job i do now, but i work in and live in areas where no one else wants to, so it’s hard to be replaced.
Not economically viable in the UK here, I expect Wes Streeting will have me reduced to nutrient paste by 2030
I’m supposed to be working on my honours project right now (mature student) but even though it’s a subject I find genuinely fascinating and an interesting and potentially novel project, I haven’t been able to put in more than about ten minutes in a day for a week or so. It’s maddening and ever fiber of my being wants to tell me it’s because I’m lazy rather than, y’know, diagnosed with ADHD.
So yeah I can’t see myself being very “economically viable” any time soon. Part of me thinks I’m gonna end up working the fast food job I kinda hate for the rest of my life rather than ever getting a job in my field and it’s staggeringly depressing, especially after the last year of my BSc which was a slog and a half.
Fuck, are you me? Hang in there, I believe in you.
yeah I’m disabled and got kicked off welfare last year. haven’t worked in almost 3 years after crashing out of an awful “career” job into the psych ward so idk how i would even go about getting work.
and got kicked off welfare last year.
why? that’s fucked
basically i never managed to qualify for actual disability payments (in my country it is extremely difficult if you’re a young person), but I did qualify for a bridge payment while my application was pending. they kicked me off that because I went to see my gfs family in the US and i guess they just make you reapply if you miss a couple of payments, i was never informed of that. they make you go in person to the post office to get paid as a kind of capitalist humiliation ritual so i was unable to get them. i figured then that i would be denied reapplication because my gf had been sending me money during that time (all welfare is aggressively means tested and you’re not allowed take a holiday basically). since I’ve been able to survive without the bridge payment for the last few months they will just use that as an excuse to not give me disability anyway so i just gave up.
I hope not. Fuck the economy
Cries in artist on the AI-ridden internet
