Great lunch today meeting NikolaiFyodorov and seeing kleinbl00 again. Two people far more intelligent and life experienced than I!
It was awesome to meet you! Thank you for listening to me rant about how great Seattle is!
I would have much rather spent the rest of the afternoon with you and kb than having left to go talk about work and DAX and SQL...
Job searching is rough. Looking like I'll be ending up in the SF area. Nothing wants to pay over 80k/yr at best, even with a Masters degree. And nothing that pays enough to survive in the bay area wants a kiddo with an MPH and public health/local government experience but no pharma/industry/research/etc., experience. I've applied to well over 100 jobs in the past week. And I'm pretty confident I'll get ghosted/no from essentially all of them. It's unbelievably demoralizing. I know my skills and my worth, and I know I will be successful in all the jobs I'm applying to. They won't even give me a look though because I don't have exactly what they're looking for and so an algorithm or some HR person pushes me away and I never get through. And everyone I know is East Coast, not West Coast, so I don't have a network to really tap and use to my benefit while I search. I've applied to pharma, federal, consulting, hospital, environmental, startup, and research roles, and none of them will get back to me. I'm so done with it and it hasn't even really started yet.
So check it, dude. The jobs you're responding to were written by people with bachelor's degrees in human resources or social work, who were taking fifteen minutes of the time of the people who will actually supervise those roles. They've shot them full of "must this" and "experience that" which the HR people barely understand and they've dumped them on a dozen sites where tire-kickers from North Dakota apply so they can tell the unemployment office they've sent out resumes. The flacks who read these resumes have already let the algorithms filter out everything that doesn't match their requirements to a T (they don't understand those requirements anyway so it's safer for everyone) and of the stuff that does? They're selecting based on dumb shit like "I hate people from Georgia." I'm a small firm. I can fob off my HR on Indeed and Square. I have another service that does my retirement and my wife runs payroll. I had a fuckton of contempt for HR before I had employees. Now? Hoo boy. Lemme tell you a story from the Golden Age of Employment, back when a top-ten in-state engineering program was $1800 a quarter and starting salary was $60k. I found a gig in the paper. I looked them up on the Internet, which was a new thing. I called up the guy who would actually be my supervisor, we had a good chat, and he said "too bad so sad now you need to talk to my headhunter." Went to the headhunter's office and they tested me on my filing, my typing and my 10-key. Ended up turning down the job because the headhunter was gonna take like 30% of my salary for 9 months. Said headhunter proceeded to offer me receptionist jobs for the next 2 years because apparently my filing, typing and 10-key scores set some kind of record. That's back when things were functional. You're clever, you come across well, you have a fresh'n'shiny degree from a premier program. You need to look at this a different way. Poke around on Twitter, LinkedIn, PRNewswire, wherever. Find shops that do interesting shit, in the bay or elsewhere. Figure out who at those companies is doing the interesting shit, or at least be able to target the department. Then CALL. Do not email, do not text, do not message on LinkedIn. You will be working for people in their 40s and 50s, and we, as a group, are aghast by how fucking incapable the median GenZer is at interacting with their fellow humans. Not all of them, certainly! But the resume pool you get from Indeed or whatever is filled to the gills with barely-functional favored children who prefer to have their parents drive them to their interviews at the age of 24. We've had a couple who have assumed their mothers will sit in the interviews WITH THEM. Be up front, be direct. "I read this thing in X, it looks like you guys are doing interesting stuff. I need a job and I figured I'd ask if you might have room in your organization for me." This will go one of three ways: (1) The organization will be too hidebound and hierarchical to accommodate anything outside the rigid strictures of HR and you will have lost nothing (2) The organization will have no openings (or be too hidebound) and the guy you're talking to will go "hmm I got nuthin' but you should talk to my buddy Louie at Spacely Space Sprockets..." (3) the guy you're talking to will go "hmm let me think about that" and proceed to figure out what his organization looks like with a recent grad (aka bargain) in some new role that frees up a dozen other things. This will also be a lengthy process with a low success rate, but it also puts down a footprint in a small industry. You will be polite, you will follow up after a couple weeks, you will keep your LinkedIn up to date, and you will be honest about where you are willing to relocate to and whether it makes sense to remote. You will have a well-polished resume that fits on a single page (current resume trends are "let it all hang out" because HR employees are the worst humans in the structure, actual supervisors don't have time for that shit) and you will give it freely. Allow me to be perfectly clear: There is absolutely no honor or utility in adapting to a custom so deeply and thoroughly broken as the modern hiring process. You will get a job by going "nice company you have here, I think I'd like a job" until someone says "...yeah okay that works for me." I'll go one further - based on what I've seen and the trends I've observed, it will work this way for the duration of your career. Get used to it, get comfortable with it, and accept that employment is a partnership. You're giving up a big chunk of your life so you should get a big chunk of their money. They aren't doing you a favor, you aren't "lucky to have the job", you have skills, they have money, it works out in their favor, don't ever forget that.
Also piling on to agree and point out that the reason I got my six conversations, were all (except one) because I reached out to specific people in the organizations that I’m interested in with three things: why I’m looking for a job, what I want from the person I’m reaching out to (to help me), and how I think I’ll be valuable (why helping me is a good idea for them). Clearly YMMV but that formula has so far worked pretty swimmingly.
I'm really just reposting this part of your comment because of how strongly I agree with this.Allow me to be perfectly clear: There is absolutely no honor or utility in adapting to a custom so deeply and thoroughly broken as the modern hiring process. You will get a job by going "nice company you have here, I think I'd like a job" until someone says "...yeah okay that works for me." I'll go one further - based on what I've seen and the trends I've observed, it will work this way for the duration of your career. Get used to it, get comfortable with it, and accept that employment is a partnership. You're giving up a big chunk of your life so you should get a big chunk of their money. They aren't doing you a favor, you aren't "lucky to have the job", you have skills, they have money, it works out in their favor, don't ever forget that.
Adding to the train of agreement on this, there’s also no shame in following up with those that you get declined a position from to ask something in the form of: “Can you refer me to a department within the company or otherwise that is in need of someone with my skillset?” Preferably this is over the phone with the hiring manager, but it works just as well with an e-mail (assuming you have the e-mail of someone other than HR).
Piling in to agree with that. While not the exact same scenario, we just finished another round of interviews, and one candidate was awesome but didn't like the sound of any of the roles we initially wanted to interview her for. Many people might accept a job as it's a job, but she was brave and said "This has been great, but they're all very clinical focused roles and I don't know if I want to leap into that." and I said "Cool, appreciate the honesty." and she asked if there was anything more focused in supporting academia. I said I'd check and get back to her. Called a colleague across campus, sure enough they're jonesing for someone bright and capable. Passed on her number and they had a less formal interview the next day. Pretty sure she's hired now. Anyway point being, no harm in asking.
After reading all of this, knowing y'all won't have a tenth of my trouble... I'm so pants-shatteringly fucking glad I don't have to worry about finding work for the next, dunno, 6-ish years. Still, c_hawk, veen, whoever else: you'll do fine. 14 out of 20 potatoes finally grew out of the ground. I was beginning to worry they're too deep or something. Definitely trying to be as hand-off about it as possible, since it's all too easy for me to obsess over shit. A couple weeks ago I began having a pretty shitty realization at therapy, putting certain family events in different order suddenly made a lot more sense. In the "my parents started treating me like shit a long before I realised it and for other reasons" category. Dunno how to go about it, though, since I doubt extended family or their friends would tell even if they knew the details, and my brother was always treated differently (though not necessarily better) enough to have it skewed.
Job hunt starting to pick up steam, with six conversations in five work days (sorry c_!). Even vague work acquaintances are willing to help me out; but I guess that’s in no small part because my corner of the job market is small enough that we’ll run into each other again anyways. The big all hands meeting yesterday had the iciest of vibes; what was most telling is that there were no questions from the audience after they hammered home some more details of the reorganization. And that they didn’t mention the understream of two thirds are considering quitting. No, we got a bunch of band-aids and “y’all be fine! Really! But we will close your office and kill your culture.” It feels like I’ve been going to physical therapy for a long time, but it’s really only been 12 weeks now. I’m doing pretty great; I still have some bad days but most days I can get around pretty easily, and I’m enjoying going back to the gym after years of little to no sports. My weights are low but my spirit is high. Running still kills me (I can’t last more than five minutes) but I did a 30 minute bike ride, a 40lbs deadlift and a bunch of 30lbs squats today pretty easily.
I'm in a bit of groove at this point, not so much a rut, continuing to build my own little climbing community, met a couple more people this past Sunday at one of the crags in the area and climbed with one of them yesterday! Just from talking to people who were nearby and sharing in a little bit of commiseration on Sunday around the fact that there were FOUR FAMILIES who all assembled on two of the walls and put up four ropes and kept them up all day. Which was super uncool. Going to keep doing what I'm doing because I'm enjoying it, it's working for me, and you know what? I don't like it, I love it and I'm not climbing Mount Rainier next weekend and I'm going to find some other stuff to do and people to do them with.
It is lolfukt. We've opened negotiations on a space in Bellevue. We'd like to know the going rate. The city has a population of 140k and in a week of asking, my real estate guy couldn't find a single comp. In other words, not a single lease has been written in the entire city in six months. I have a friend whose business is, coincidentally, in Bellevue. Their current shop is going to be a train station in approximately 18 months so they need to move. They have put an offer in on an abandoned warehouse in the middle of prostitution central that has been vacant (except for squatters) since 2016. The county has written the structure down to $1000, which is government-speak for "this is a teardown, you will never receive an occupancy permit." In kinder times the bank would say "there's no way we're going to finance this you idiots, this isn't a building it's a money pit." In the land of double-digit interest rates? By the time they realize they'll never be in that building the bank has made their money back. Except of course if it's a regional bank, which do something like 40% of the real estate lending in America, they're probably dead. Of the office workers who went remote in 2020, slightly less than half have come back. If you've got a 5-year lease with 5-year extensions you're statistically closer to not renewing than you are to making the best of all the space you've got. I'm discussing office, medical and warehouse space that's surrounded by (A) Microsoft (B) Facebook (C) Google (D) Adobe (E) AmGen and ain't nobody buying or leasing shit. If you look at the national charts, manufacturing is making a comeback... but manufacturing is different zoning than office in most municipalities and it requires different permits. And if you're looking to ruralize you're dealing with a whole new set of challenges. There's a community we'd like to expand to. First problem is there's a 50-year-old viaduct that pretty much dominates all commuting in and out, and there are no plans on the books to augment it or replace it despite the fact that it has been the impediment to commuting for fifteen years or more. Second problem is I can buy an 8ksqft three story medical dental building downtown (with underground parking!) for about a third as much as I can buy a Chipotle out there. There's all sorts of batshit stuff happening in "opportunity zones" because there are lots of unsophisticated investors who have never seen what creeping blight looks like. Who are borrowing money. At ruinous rates. From regional banks. While contracting rates are at an all time high. ______________________________________ Thanks for the soapbox
The Return to the Office Has Stalled As long as unemployment remains low, workers have the leverage to entrench these policies, said Robert Sadow, Scoop’s chief executive and co-founder. “Employees are saying we are going to push really, really hard against being required to be in the office five days a week,” Mr. Sadow said. “Most companies in the current labor market have been reluctant to push [back] that hard.” An anecdote: Once upon a time there was a talent agency called William Morris. They built 116,000 square feet in Beverly Hills, a block away from Rodeo Drive, back in the '80s. William Morris' 250 agents (and 550 non-agents) had an out-sized footprint in that they mostly did deals and entertained rich people. Most people think of "Beverly Hills" as a bunch of luxury retail but that luxury retail was very much supported by luxury dining and luxury hospitality. William Morris merged with Endeavor in 2009. Endeavor did four things: (1) fired 100 William Morris agents (and pretty much all of the support staff) (2) Moved the survivors to Westwood, where Endeavor's own pretentious offices were (3) skeletonize Beverly Hills (4) build up Westwood. Beverly Hills pre-2009 was a place to be seen, where there was a thriving culture of rich assholes. Beverly Hills post-2009 is a place of Russian dentists and expensive watches. It has a thriving jewelry district because if you're going to have a West Coast boutique it's where the Chinese and Russian tourists go. And it has a lot of dentists because "beverly hills dentist" is a thing that the vainglorious of Los Angeles really like. Westwood on the other hand went from having a kind-of spendy mall to having a thunderously spendy mall. The food court went from Sbarro to Spago. All because of 800 employees.The number of companies that require employees to be in the office full time has actually declined to 42%, from 49% three months ago, Scoop said. Employees at companies with hybrid strategies work an average of 2.5 days a week in the office.
Looks like there's a theme here this week! I've applied to a job today, so the hunt is on. I think my resumés are looking good, the cover letter wrote itself today. Feeling hopeful i'll find something cool. I'm in dire need of money after my trip, so the balance between aiming high and finding sure things that will pay bills is gonna be tough. It's my first time going through a more traditional job search process, i've always just made my own companies or been hired through word of mouth before. Fingers crossed this torture won't last too long. Looking to completely change industries and roles so it might be an uphill batte at first. The north star is becoming a PM at a tech company. But that might take some years and also I might change my mind along the way. It feels like a really basic career aspiration honestly, but I want to dial back the weirdness a bit to find more traditional and secure employment for now.