Unemployment

You there, in your cubicle, the company is pleased to inform you that you are now an Operational Cost that the company intends to save. Be out of here by the end of the week.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/A_Marriage_Made_Elsewhere_Than_In_Heaven

xp There's a whole school of 'Ya gotta be smart – ring the guy! Work for free! Get networking!' job-seeking advice which basically assumes a lot of things about the jobseeker in terms of how much money they have, what their options are, how they were brought up, etc, etc

Like I was thinking about how much I've raised the game of this local newsletter that I volunteer to do, and that is by a VERY LARGE AMOUNT. It could go a lot further and we need to increase our reach and get people STUCK IN as readers and members, and this is my organizational mission for 2014...but even if I work miracles, if for inst it ever became a paying position (which it won't but), they would be pretty justified in thinking, well we got her for FREE, imagine what we can get with an actual salary! (This is also complicated by the fact that I'm kind of a placeholder until there's a non-white person who wants the job, I mean I'm appointed for this calendar year but I wouldn't blame them for wanting to appoint a young aspiring Black journalist possibly who's from the neighborhood, in fact I think they should do that in fact--but if this were the job world, it would suck for me.)

(The way I got into Data Analysis was: get caught hacking the database you've been doing data entry in. For real. n.b. this was like 20 years ago now.)

Brushing up on a few stats texts and a language like R would be a good start imo gukbe (just started a new role in data analysis and these are the things i'll be spending my evenings/weekends at for the next few months)

And previous qualifications?

I'm sort of drifting into it every so often after having 'dabbled' with it, by which I mean understanding how to use Excel when no-one else did, and learning some basics every now and then. I've always had jobs that are data/programming-adjacent and I am often the person going between the user who doesn't know how to articulate what they want and the coding ppl who can't get out of the 'user' what the real issues are.

If yr asking me for mine gukbe, not much more than confidence with excel, tho im currently studying comp science in the evenings- nb i moved internally in a big org so sorry for non-helpful comparison maybe

xp otm

ha I've always felt a bit of a fraud that 90% of what I know about coding is from trying to use Excel as a shortcut, or my ZX Spectrum, but then one of our coder guys explained it as 'basically excel formulae' to a bunch of colleagues who wanted to know what coding was so I don't feel too bad now. I have learned basics of various languages in the past and a fair amount of SQL and still agree with him (and twice today taught one of our senior coders some Excel 'tricks')

I did some actual coding/programming stuff about 12 years ago (C++ mostly) for about 5 years but have since drifted through life as a student and then odd jobs like retail and restaurants with the occasional stint in data entry and aforementioned document scanning. I was hoping there'd be a few classes I could take or something to bolster the old CV.

someone just sent me a message that was word-for-word the bottom scam on this page (with a different name):

http://jobsearch.about.com/u/ua/jobsearchscams/jobscams.03.htm

republicans are starting to (pretend?) to feel the heat about extended unemployment compensation?

http://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/jobless-benefits-unemployment-insurance-gop-republicans-103651.html?hp=t1

job title:

'scrum master'

Scrum Master J, the DJ of hip-hop group Run-XML.

are you the schedule-keeper, i am the scrum master

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnJvsBbELvk

i am now part of the interviewing process at work, and man it is depressing as fuc. because of both the desperation of the applicants and my own nitpicky responses to them.

the position is part-time/involves weekends and late nights, but the employer has a certain cachet that makes ppl think 'if i can just get my foot in the door . . .' and the supply of ppl who think that is endless and cheap. one dude kind of slumped and said 'i've interned everywhere' and it was more or less true.

and any of them could probably do the job just fine -- it's not terribly demanding and several applicants are technically way overqualified -- but now i'm supposed to judge them like i'm some fucking frat dude interviewing pledges. am i really factoring in the fact that one person wore jeans and another wore a three-piece suit + homburg? i mean, yeah, the latter is pretty wack but he's not some hipster -- he's been out of work for six months. ugh

who says you have to judge them like that?

btw among the other jobs i have applied for in the past year i keep throwing in applications for low-level library jobs that do NOT require library degrees (hs diplomas is all), and every single time i get rejected with something like 'we chose from the people who had relevant experience'. now probably they know some people and are hiring from within, but if not then that shit is intolerable for a duly executed duly applied-for job search. like there is relevant experience for these jobs that couldn't be picked up in a week or two. if you've got way overqualified people willing to do your job just cut one of them a break and don't bullshit the unfortunate ones!

this could be hella 'basic' as they say but despite receiving unemployment benefits more than once (and researching it anxiously etc as one does) this is the best thing i've ever read about how it works

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1466

Huh that's helpful. My parents absolutely INSIST that rather than being a mandatory tax per employee, that when my dad laid someone off 15-20 years ago he had to pay the guy's UI, like, DIRECTLY. Which he's still bitter about bc apparently dude was going on vacation, not looking for work, etc (as one is entitled to do because fuck it).

Maybe there's some kind of different thing for very small corporations? Or maybe my dad is a batshit conservative, that's always an option too.

(inspired by the onion 'finally i have achieved pay equity with men while on unemployment' gag, which is funny but i think probably not true anyway, even then, since benefits depend on prior pay, work history, etc. though the capping of taxable contribution levels might have an equalizing effect?)

apparently dude was going on vacation, not looking for work, etc (as one is entitled to do because fuck it)

as soon as the sev sum comes in, i will be fucking it