Acute Unemployment Syndrome

Recruiters gone wild

2009-09-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

For those of you keeping score at home, I have now been on 10 job interviews in the last 9 months. 10 at bats, and 10 strike outs. What's bothering me, though, is what I've observed on my last 3 interviews, all of which have occurred in the last month.

Recruiters seem to be playing some kind of weird head game where they don't ask any questions and force me, the interviewee, to ask all the questions. So the interview goes something like this:

Recruiter: (Leans back in his chair, takes a sip of coffee, and picks up a short stack of papers from the table) Ok, let me take a look at your resume. (He scans the piece of paper and hums the "Pina Colada" song. He puts the papers on the table after a moment and again leans back in his chair, smugly.) So, do you have any questions for me?
Me: (Our hero looks slightly startled. She looks down at her her pink boucle jacket with the black trim, hoping to find the answer somewhere in the fabric.) Oh, ok. (She hastily looks down at the list of 4 questions she prepared for the END of the interview.) Well, what are the challenges facing your company today, and how would I, as a product manager, work to confront those challenges?
Recruiter: Blah blah, canned corporate crap, blah, yada yada. What else?
Me: Uhhh, can you tell me more about the new XYZ product line? I saw that you mentioned it on Twitter. (Crosses fingers that her intrepid investigatory skills will be rewarded.)
Recruiter: (Does not appear impressed that our hero obviously spent 3 hours this morning preparing for this 15 minute chat). It's a new product we're working on for our younger customers. We think it's going to be huge. What else?

This bullcrap will go on for the next 10 minutes - I ask questions about the position, he gives me curt answers, and I get increasingly uncomfortable while he gets increasingly hostile. One interviewer actually told me at the beginning of an interview, in a confrontational tone of voice, that I obviously wasn't qualified for the job, and that it was a waste of time to speak to me. Uh, ok, so why did you bring me in???? I don't recall holding a gun to anyone's head just to get an interview (though maybe that's something to keep in mind for the future).

Why are recruiters playing head games with me? I feel like everyone's in on some kind of joke, and I'm the only one who doesn't get the punchline. Empirical evidence and common sense say that the best way to interview a candidate is to ask what they would do in a given scenario. Or to find out what they have done in the past, given a set of circumstances. How can you find out what kind of worker I am if you never ask me to define what kind of worker I am? And what is the purpose of bringing in a candidate, only to be hostile and unpleasant to them? What will you learn from that?

I think recruiters are mostly people who couldn't get real jobs doing valuable stuff like marketing, financing, and waxing stripper poles. So they're destined to make a lot of poor choices. And given the current glut of job candidates, recruiters are drunk with power and are abusing their positions. Well I have only one thing to say to that: Do you think they would give me a job if I promised to wash their car for a year?

On Second Chances (and Third and Fourth, and Fifth...)

2009-09-06T10:50:00.000-07:00

I watched the Syracuse game yesterday morning. The new quarterback, Greg Paulus, was a high school football star, then a point guard for Duke for 4 years, and has now landed as the captain of the Orange football team at the age of 23. His debut performance, though phenomenal considering he has not played football in 4 years, was marred by a foolish interception during overtime which cost Syracuse a win they otherwise deserved. His one poor pass notwithstanding however, it was considered an auspicious day for Paulus. Football seasons, like life, are full of second chances. Even if you screw up one crucial play, another opportunity will present itself.

Just look at Michael Milken, the junk-bond felon turned philanthropist, who was lauded in 2004 by Fortune magazine as "The Man Who Changed Medicine" for his contributions to medical research. How quickly we forget that this guy ruined tens of thousands of lives, destroyed untold millions of dollars of wealth, and made Gordon Gecko look like Mother Theresa.

But for this post I want to focus on another football player, one who also has a Syracuse connection. Todd Marinovich (pictured in his heyday and in his most recent mugshot), older brother of Syracuse Defensive End Mikhail Marinovich, is a poster boy for wasted talent and squandered youth. I read this article yesterday from Esquire which painstakingly detailed his 20 year long slide from stardom, to rehab, to homelessness, to irrelevance and obscurity. To give you an idea of how good Marinovich was, he was drafted ahead of Brett Favre in 1991. Nicknamed "Robo Quarterback", he was an outstanding talent when he played for USC and he would likely have been one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time had it not been for his addiction to drugs.

The article detailed how Marinovich would repeatedly screw up, get another chance, and screw up again. While at USC he was busted for drug possession (marijuana and coke). He was kicked off the team, but was allowed to enter the NFL draft instead. He signed a 3 year deal for $2.25 million plus a $1 million signing bonus. As the team's third-string quarterback he saw little on-field action, and so started taking speed before games. He showed up to games and played while drunk, hungover, and on drugs. He was sent to rehab repeatedly, but could not pass the requisite drug tests, and in 1993 he was let go.

After several years spent surfing and using, he landed in the Canadian Football League as a backup quarterback. In Canada he resumed his heavy drug use, picked up a heroin habit, and began growing pot. He shot up heroin during games, played while on drugs (again), and was a generally terrible employee. Despite all this, he was offered an extension of his contract with the CFL - an offer he turned down because he could no longer deal with the easy availability of drugs in Vancouver.

So to sum the story up, this is a man who utterly failed as a football player, failed at being a responsible adult, and failed at staying clean for any stretch of time. And yet, after nine arrests, five felonies, and one year in jail, Todd Marinovich is still not down for the count. What I found fascinating about this article was the part which detailed what he is doing now: besides several menial jobs, he is a budding artist with plans for a gallery showing and a website for direct buying, and he is becoming known as a "quarterback whisperer" working with promising talents of all ages and levels of achievement.

What I want to know is, how many chances do we as a society give someone, even someone who's really good at sports? And what value would Marinovich have as a quarterback whisperer given that he attained relatively little professional success and frequently chose to take drugs instead of improve his game? If experience is the name given to one's mistakes, then Marinovich would have a tremendous amount of wisdom to impart, but if he keeps screwing up (including a February 2009 drug bust), then the mistakes must not be worth much in the way of learning opportunities. I think our society likes to reward the troubled and the tortured by giving their art (in whatever form) more weight and gravitas, but I'm not sure what correlation there is between propensity for mistakes and great art.

Bernie Madoff will not live long enough to see if society forgives him for his transgressions, but Michael Vick will. I'm interested to see what his legacy will be.

Internet use linked to increased douchebaggery, loneliness

2009-08-22T12:39:00.000-07:00

I just read this article from Cracked about why the 21st Century is making people miserable. The author claims that the proliferation of technology has allowed people to build up a wall around themselves, thus allowing us to lose the sense of community that used to be so vital for survival in the past. The Economist ran a brilliant special report on this in their April 2008 issue (I can't link to the full articles, as they are premium content). Highlighted in this report were the findings that 1) interaction between strangers has decreased while interactions among existing friends and family members has increased 2) but these increased interactions among family and friends had degenerated from meaningful connections (long conversations about feelings, goings-on, etc.) to more insignificant "pings", often sent through text messages (im in frnt of physics bldg - wher u at??).

The impact of this is that we draw closer to our existing friends and family, but we simultaneously push out the possibility of finding new friends. I'm not the only one to notice this - "I Love You Man" was about a successful, normal guy who couldn't find friends and had to go on "man dates" to find someone to hang out with.

People are getting sadder and lonelier too - and they are getting more dependent on their spouse for friendship and companionship than ever before. A study from 2006 suggests that Americans are becoming increasingly isolated from one another and are losing close friendships and confidants. If you couple the loss of a sense of community with the anonymity of the internet, you get a lot of people who feel disconnected, isolated, sad, and free to do as they choose once they're online.

This ties in to the job search because job seekers are getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of common courtesy they're being shown throughout their interactions with companies. Job seekers report that the biggest frustration during the job search is not the lack of available jobs, but the lack of response from companies that are hiring. Companies are literally pummeled with resumes all day and sometimes must sift through 500 per day for one position. This makes that task of interacting with each applicant very difficult, but not impossible. And what companies like to forget is that these job seekers that they so happily shovel off into a trash pile will one day have jobs and may be potential clients or customers. It pays to treat everyone with respect, regardless of how worthless you initially deem them to be.

This b**** is crazy (but her website is pretty sweet)

2009-08-09T13:03:00.000-07:00

I've been looking through a lot of so-called career resource sites lately and I came across this one called Brazen Careerist. This site is meant to be a place where Gen Y workers can read about job advice, blog about their own experiences, and explore companies who are Gen Y-friendly. It's an impressive site if only for its expansive and ever-changing blog posts on such topics as "5 networking tips for shy or introverted people", "The power of resourcefulness: A guide to peeing in the shower", and "Paula Abdul and workplace inequality" (lol, I know I hate it when I come to work zonked on oxycontin and my co-workers make fun of me).

Brazen Careerist is based on the work of self-styled millenial guru, Penelope Trunk, and her book of the same name. I've been reading her blog for a little while, and that lady is seriously crazy. Her site is good, she's probably smart and knows stuff about marketing and entrepreneurship, but some of her stories are plain bonkers. In her most recent post she says she has never worked for a man for more than 3 months without developing a huge crush on him. Her next topic in the same post is how to tell if a business meeting is actually a date.

Now I'm certainly no Gloria Steinem, drum-beating feminist, but I don't think that, at a time when women still make on average $.78 to every dollar earned by men, it's good for male managers to think their female employees are a bunch of empty-headed giggling school girls only interested in flirting and unable to focus on doing real work. If Penelope Trunk is one of the foremost experts on careers, millenials in the workplace, and job advice for women (specifically young women), then I seriously have to doubt the quality of her advice if it appears that she's so hormonally charged (and maybe unhinged).

Scroll through her blog posts and you'll find out that she's had 2 abortions, both for the sake of her career, she was a first-hand witness to the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11, and she spent time in a mental asylum for an eating disorder in college. She may be one of the most interesting women in the world, but I'm really not sure she should be dispensing advice. And at a time when young people, and especially young women, are vulnerable due to a poor economy and sucky job prospects, I think we all need to be wary of whose career advice we take.

More heroes of a litigious society

2009-08-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

According to this BBC article, a woman in the Bronx is suing Monroe College because after getting a bachelor's degree in IT, she can't get a job and she blames the college's deficient career services department for her unemployment.

A) Cry me a f***ing river. B) Why didn't I think of that? C) This girl is my hero.

Colleges lure students in with promises about jobs, and connections, and blah blah blah, but they can rarely deliver on their sales pitches. Let's take a look at a quote from the University of Iowa's placement rates page: "100 percent of the College of Nursing's graduates are typically employed within six months of graduation." I'm not sure how to interpret this sentence. Does it mean that most graduates TYPICALLY get employed within six months of graduation, or does it mean that 100% of graduates ARE employed six months after graduation? You see the number 100% and think, wow, what a great school, but the word "typically" is sufficiently vague such that the real placement rate could be just about anything.

I'm curious to know more about this specific case with Monroe College: Was she a good student? Did she put in a tremendous amount of effort to get a job? Exactly what was promised by career services? And was the career services office at Monroe lazy and incompetent, or were they malicious and counterproductive? My own experiences with career services offices have been extremely unfavorable, so I wouldn't be surprised if the people at Monroe told her politely to go eff off once her tuition check cleared.

So will she win the case? Probably not. Is she justified in suing? My gut says yes. Colleges have become de facto trade schools, and most students are only there for the job training and alumni connections (and the beer pong, natch). Colleges do nothing to dispel this image, so they need to be more accountable when their graduates can't get jobs. If career services does not exist to get jobs for students, they should change the name of the department to "Office that organizes a bunch of garbage seminars you're forced to go to but which yield no benefits other than free stale bagels".

The myth of Etsy

2009-07-26T11:59:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for not posting in a while - I had a wicked case of writer's block/not giving a crap)

I went to the Renegade Craft Fair last week and was astounded by how talented and creative the crafters were. This wasn't one of those hideous craft fairs where the average exhibitor is 65 and makes her living carving and painting "Gone Fishin" signs. The people at this fair were all pretty much in their 20s and 30s, and were uniformly witty, trendy, and unbelievably talented. My crappy crocheted hats I have at home seemed laughable in contrast to the screen-printed cashmere sweaters, quirky t-bone steak earrings, and cupcakes adorned with handlebar mustaches.

Being at the fair reminded me of this article on double X about Etsy, the online boutique for crafters and independent artisans to sell their stuff. The article explains how Etsy seems like a great way for crafters to make money, but how most people don't make even remotely enough to earn a living. This doesn't surprise me, as I originally learned how to crochet and knit with the intention of making things and selling them. The problem with this idea however, is that your hourly wage ends up being miniscule. If I make a good looking hat, which can take, at my speediest, 4 hours, I need to sell that hat for about $30 to even make minimum wage. The unfortunate reality however, is that a hand-crocheted hat probably won't sell for $30 - it'll probably sell for $15 or $20. And who wants to make minimum wage anyway? With my masters degree, my opportunity costs are very high if I pursue crocheting as a career.

The other thrust of the double X article is that Etsy was founded by three men (who no doubt make a nice living off all those hard-working crafters), but the site is by and large used by women. The article asks, "If the site is such a great way for anyone to market handmade goods online, then why is it such a female ghetto?" The author goes on to say that men are likely immune to the allure of combining meaningful work with parenting, and are better able to evaluate the site in terms of its economic merit. I find this claim slightly offensive, since it would only take a woman 3 seconds of basic arithmetic to figure out that you can't live off of crocheting wages, so to say that men can grasp this concept and women can't is troubling. But maybe it's true and women are deluding themselves en masse. I'm sure Etsy is making bank through this recession though, as more women are laid off and try crafting as a way to earn income.

My solution is that all these talented women need to form a collective, rent out brick and mortar stores, and start a national chain of hand-made stuff. Then they'd benefit from economies of scale, a unified brand, and face-to-face exposure to customers. The problem of wages would still persist, and would maybe cause some crafters to outsource production, but I see this as the only way to make any real money off of crafts.

Career Advice Fail

2009-06-18T18:52:00.001-07:00

I read an interesting article today on Careerealism that says you must proactively brand yourself to show up favorably in Google searches, or risk looking like...shudder...yourself. Apparently 4 out of 5 recruiters are using Google to snoop at potential candidates, and if they don't like what they see in the first few hits, you're SOL for your job search.

What about this is fair? Nothing. The article suggests that you put up a nice photo of yourself for your Facebook profile (not just one where you're sober, but avoid looking sleepy, sloppy, interesting, unique...). The article also recommends that you blog, comment, and create an online personality that would appeal to recruiters - this advice fails on many levels: a) most people don't have anything interesting to say, present company included, b) it's guaranteed that commenting on marketing blogs won't actually get you a job unless you want a job commenting on marketing blogs, and c) I think it's a sad day when the unemployed are not allowed to be as apathetic and self-centered as they want to be. And to force people to feign interest in something in their spare time, just to get a soul-crushing desk job, is cruel and unusual torture.

The article caps it all off with an anecdote about an Iraq War veteran who was profiled in an article about his experiences. This article, available online, caught the eye of a recruiter who Googled him, and propelled him tot he top of the resume stack. Soooooo...the takaway message of this anecdote is....get a newspaper to write an article about you, and then pray like hell that a recruiter sees it? I was featured in my college newspaper for barfing on the chancellor - does that count?

This kind of ridiculous advice springs from two places: 1) the current recession has spawned a vast industry of "job search gurus" who need to say stuff all day long to stay relevant, even if their advice is garbage, and 2) recruiters think they're gods ever since the economy dried up. I'd be really interested to find out how many recruiters have begun demanding bribes to advance job seekers through to companies. Do you think cupcakes and scotch would do the trick?

California - Joni Mitchell

2009-06-15T21:16:00.000-07:00

Since I live in California now, this song has more significance for me. It's funny how California is the land of dreams in the US, even now.

Riiiiight...and monkeys might fly out of my butt

2009-06-15T21:00:00.000-07:00

A new website called Notchup.com is aimed at the uber-employee who is so freakin' awesome that companies are not only lined up around the block to hire him, but they will PAY for a chance to hear golden words trickle like honey from his golden lips. Riiiiight. I know this website is a hoax because I have not yet been contacted to be their first payee. I am pretty much the best thing to happen to the workforce since "Wacky Tie Day." I must remember to turn the ringer up on my cell phone so I'm sure to hear their call while I'm watching "16 and Pregnant."

6 Lies HotJobs Wants You To Believe

2009-06-08T19:54:00.000-07:00

Today I read an article on Yahoo! HotJobs entitled 6 Myths About Job-Hunting in a Recession. This article is intended to bust open widely held beliefs about the job search and give hope to job seekers. Total. Bollocks. As. Usual.

Myth 1 - No one is hiring. The article says that lots of companies are hiring, especially in the health care industry. And they say that if you're an environmental engineer with 5 years of experience, you could earn over $60,ooo! For one thing, if you don't have health care training and experience, you won't get hired. They don't just let bums off the street into hospitals and let them run around poking people with syringes (though that sounds like a good set-up for a Rob Schneider film). And for another, telling me that someone with experience and specialized training can get a good job doesn't do me any good.

Myth 2 - The Internet is the best place to find a job. The article makes this assertion and then contradicts it by telling readers to use the internet to apply for a position and use the internet to find people within the company to network with. Apparently the ability to form rational, cogent thoughts is not a prerequisite for writing articles for Yahoo.

Myth 3 - Searching companies in hiring freezes is a waste of time. No, it's actually a tremendous waste of time, especially if you're gunning for a lower-level position. I spoke with an executive at a major west coast bank in the middle of a hiring freeze, and he assured me that hiring freeze literally means "we are not hiring right now." The chances of you, the reader, being the kind of spectacular son-of-a-gun that can make millions for a company in distress are about as slim as Lindsay Lohan's chances of making it through a party without having sex in a bathroom stall.

Myth 4 - Expect a salary cut. Again, the chances of the readers of this article being worth tremendous amounts of money are not great. Companies cannot cut salaries fast enough right now. And this practice will extend to universities as well - departments that can just scrape by on 20 faculty members during the recession should not expect to gain more faculty once the recession is over.

Myth 5 - Companies are not interested in people over 55. This myth doesn't apply to me so I won't address it. I will say, however, that 99% of old people are bloody useless in front of a computer, so if that keeps them out of jobs, then so be it.

Myth 6 - Experience and advanced degrees guarantee a job. Ha! I don't know if anyone actually believed this, so I wouldn't really call this a myth. Pretty much everyone I know with an advanced degree is either unemployed or doing something really beneath them. Everyone knows the only way to guarantee employment is to be born into a dynastic family like the Bushes, or the Kennedys, or the Lohans (I've got Lindsey on the brain today!).

Has It Really Come To This?

2009-06-08T15:00:00.003-07:00

I was sent a link today for a company called Work Your Career where job seekers can bid...BID MONEY...for an in-person interview with a company that may or may not hire them. It's a sad day when the downtrodden job seeker will shell out his last remaining dollars, foregoing that bottle of Colt 45, to get a 15 minute spot in front of an HR rep. What's next? Will we soon see workers trading sexual favors for a second interview? And what would you have to do to actually get hired?

This reminds me of the part in "The Grapes of Wrath" when the Joad family gets to California and they learn that fruit-picking wages are far below what the fliers promised. It's the brutal and inevitable outcome when you have a glut of workers and a scarcity of work - someone will always work for less. This is the same kind of thing, but instead of underbidding for work, you must overbid for the opportunity to maybe work. Seriously messed up.

Is it time for Plan B? (Or C or D....)

2009-06-03T14:23:00.000-07:00

I've noticed a curious thing in books and articles on the job search - they never address when you're supposed to give up and move on. I know it's not in the American spirit to quit (even if you're Spencer and Heidi), but I wonder if there's a point when you should throw in the towel and go to Plan B?

For people like me and 'Bones' who possess a rational and logical mind, it feels wrong to perform the same task over and over, under the same conditions - receive the same outcome every time - and expect that one day the outcome will be different. In pursuit of a scientific structure to my job search, I've tried tweaking certain variables to see if my results are different (adding an objective, deleting an objective, saying I understand Sarbanes-Oxley, using humor, finding an "in" at the company, etc.). But the results are always the same - no job. I actually told Craigslist that if they hired me to work in accounts payable, that "all their wildest dreams would come true." It's shocking I didn't get an interview.

I'd like to do an experiment where I leave everything in my resume the same, but say that I have a Harvard MBA instead of my actual school - I've been too lazy to do the work (retyping over one word) to actually test this theory, but I'm also a little afraid that I'll actually get an interview.

So when is it time to quit and move on? And how should one move on? Do you put on some orange tights and interview at Hooters? Do you enroll in clown college? Do you move to Canada for free healthcare? Do you sell your plasma? Do you pull a 'Weeds' and start slinging ganja? Do you form a Foreigner cover band and try to win Battle of the Bands? And how long until you have to start taking your clothes off for money? <--These are the questions that never get answers in "What Color is Your Parachute?".

After the recession blows over, it'll be interesting to hear about what people did for money during hard times. For me, I'm hoping the answer doesn't involve drug testing, drug muling, or singing backup for Spencer Pratt.

Pondering life's important questions

2009-05-31T17:25:00.000-07:00

When you suffer from AUS, you have a lot of time to think. Thinking can be good and productive if you're Plato or Confucious or even Jessica Simpson. Thinking can be bad for society however, if you're Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, or Sarah Palin.

I've been thinking a lot about life's important questions lately. Like, could God microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself couldn't eat it? Or, if you can be overwhelmed and underwhelmed, why can't you just be whelmed? And why do drive-through ATMs have braille buttons? Here's a list of some more things that have been on my mind lately:

1) Is 27 too old to have a belly-button ring? I'm pretty sure 27 is too old to GET a belly-button ring, but is it too old to HAVE a belly-button ring? If you don't have kids, can you keep your belly-button ring in forever? It seems silly to have a ring in when you're 40 even if you have rock-hard abs, but if 27 is ok and 40 is too old, then what's the cut-off date? Also, what other piercings do you have to drop as you age? I think multiple ear holes are ok, but nipple rings seem like they definitely are over past age 25.

2) Why don't vampires live in Alaska? If vampires have to avoid sun, and Alaska has a crap-ton of darkness during the winter, why don't vampires live up there? It seems like vampires in movies always live in New Orleans or L.A. - two places that probably get, on average, more sun than most of America. So now if you're a vampire that has to work, you're severely limited in what kind of employment you can pursue. Also, can a vampire go out on a cloudy day? How much sun exposure can he sustain before his flesh melts? If so, Seattle would be a great choice too.

3) Are you gay if you're a man who falls in love with a woman, but she's dressed as a man and you think she's a man? This is the Yentl problem. Yentl is a woman who wants to study at the yeshiva but can't because she's a girl. She dresses up like a man, falls in love with her male roommate, and at this point I stopped watching, but I assume the roommate falls in love with her too. So is he gay? I can't answer this - he thinks she's a man, so when he falls in love with her he thinks he loves a man...so he's gay. But she's actually a woman, and you could assume he's only falling for her because she's actually a woman...so he's straight. So confusing.

If you have answers to these questions please let me know. Or if you have questions you'd like to pose to me, I can try to answer them (though chances are my answer will be either 42 or grizzly bear).

Atlantic writer pwns Edmund Andrews

2009-05-26T12:43:00.000-07:00

Thanks to "I Am Not Star Jones" I was led to this article by Megan McArdle which exposes how the NYT's Edmund Andrews felt he did not need to disclose his wife's prior two bankruptcies in his whiny piece about his own subprime mortgage crisis (to which I responded with my own whiny piece decrying broke idiots).

Then Megan McArdle followed up with another article rebutting the response by Andrews in defense of his wife. Basically Andrews sees no connection between filing for bankruptcy twice within a few years and being bad with money. Andrews' article and his forthcoming book paint him and his wife as hapless victims of predatory lending gone berserk, but it's pretty obvious that the two of them just have unbelievably poor judgement. The fact that they want sympathy is an affront to all the people who were actually tricked into bad mortgages by predatory lenders. Sickening.

Crap economy a boon for drug trade

2009-05-26T09:50:00.000-07:00

"Cash Rules Everything Around Me" (C.R.E.A.M.) is the title of Wu-Tang Clan's best song ever. It's about drug dealing and drug use, poverty, escapism, and a lack of viable employment options for inner city black youths.

Drug dealing has been on my mind lately since finishing "The Wire" a few months ago and since I started sorta watching "Breaking Bad". "The Wire" was about cops using wire tapping to bust an elaborate drug syndicate in Baltimore, but the genius of the show was that it explored the tangled web of drugs, politics, schools, business, prostitution, and the media that all fed on one another. "Breaking Bad" is primarily about desperation: the main character has lung cancer, and to pay for his treatments, he uses his superior knowledge of chemistry to make the best crystal meth the world has ever seen.

Right now we're in a pretty wretched economic climate, and I'm confident the current mix of unemployment and housing foreclosures will produce a swell in drug entrepreneurs. I predict the drug trade will expand rapidly for the next few years as more people are laid off and more consumers start using. The effect of this on health care costs will be really bad since more OD patients and meth lab burn victims will clog up emergency rooms and not be able to pay for their care. We'll see more crack babies, more abortions, and it's a guarantee that street crime will increase.

One way to ameliorate this situation is to legalize marijuana. If pot is legalized, society reaps all kinds of benefits:

1) police officers are free to pursue more dangerous elements

2) the government can tax the crap out of weed and make a ridiculous amount of money

3) legal pot will be safer to use and users will face no risk of exposure to PCP or any other foreign chemicals

4) if the government runs the pot trade, you've effectively put a whole lot of Mexican and Columbian cartels out of business - something the War on Drugs has never been able to do

5) I believe if you are free to use pot, there's less of an incentive to move on to harder drugs

6) and I also think that legalizing pot may ultimately decrease its use since it's no longer clandestine, and people love doing things that are sneaky and bad

I heard recently that Berkeley's own W.R. Hearst is largely responsible for the anti-marijuana movement in America (ironic since pot is de facto legal in Berkeley). The story goes that he didn't want hemp to succeed since it would hurt his business interests and so he campaigned against pot and created a whole bunch of hysteria that has persisted to today. If this is true, I think it's high time (hehe, get it?) to reexamine our country's policy on marijuana and start thinking about the two harsh realities that exist in our world: 1) life is hard and pot makes people happy, and 2) the U.S. government is not in a position to ignore enormous pockets of revenue right now. According to the SF Chronicle, we are borrowing 50 cents of every dollar we spend. That kind of gaping deficit should be scary enough to motivate Washington into bold action.

It's Hard All Over

2009-05-21T14:00:00.000-07:00

Even the 1L's at Harvard are having a tough go of it in their search for summer internships. My first inclination is to say something catty, but I'm honestly too bummed out to think of anything funny.

The article also mentions that Harvard 1L's are even being turned away from non-profit volunteer positions out here in San Francisco, so I guess I don't have leprosy after all.

Against odds, some grads find Wall Street jobs

2009-05-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

Against odds, some grads find Wall Street jobs - This was the title of an article on CNN's homepage today. I have quite a few bones to pick with this article, and the basic thing that I hope to prove is that LUCK is the only thing that gets people jobs.

Ok, so the article starts with an anecdote about a young man from Emory who has landed a "stellar" job as an investment banker at Royal Bank of Canada. The reporter goes on to say, "...those who have succeeded in getting Wall Street job offers voice almost unflappable optimism in the face of the bleak economic picture." Oh really? Those people who got 6 figure jobs right out of grad school are optimistic? That's amazing, Mr. Reporter. Please, tell me more.

The article later quotes a senior economist at Moody's (*rolls eyes*) who says, "'I'm sure there is a huge disappointment' among recent [MBA] graduates." Holy crap, that is an understatement. Huge disappointment doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. Most graduate schools are money-making scams that funnel people in with promises of money and connections and knowledge, and then slam the door on their students as soon as the graduation ceremony ends. Let me put it this way: I don't think it would be very hard for me to assemble a pitch-fork wielding mob to go storm the dean's office at the local university like villagers trying to kill the Frankenstein monster. The way grad students have been screwed by this recession, it's a wonder there isn't rioting in the streets. Thank God for rampant apathy and drug use.

Then the article quotes some dumbass C.E.O. of an outplacement consulting firm. This guy hedges worse than your average used car salesman. I'll highlight all his qualifying words just to show you how he's saying words, but not really forming a cohesive thought. He says, "...'some [graduating business students] are optimistic maybe because they're new and naive...and that's not all bad, because some of those people may be the ones who will find jobs.'" So what he's saying is, being optimistic may help some people maybe find jobs some of the time...maybe. By that logic, wearing a tea cozy on your head could also maybe prevent alien abduction in some people some of the time.

Finally, the article quotes Mr. Frank Albus, a recent graduate of the MBA program at University of Chicago and one of the few students with a job offer. Albus says, "'There are jobs. It's just a matter of just going out and making it happen." This advice is so super awesome because it sounds really easy to do (and thus makes anyone who hasn't just "made it happen" feel really pathetic), and it also tells you nothing about what you actually have to do to make anything happen. Also, I love getting told by someone who went to one of the top schools in the world and got a kick-ass job right out of school, how there are jobs out there, I just have to try harder to get one.

And now I come to my point: Luck is the only force that matters for success, and unfortunately we can't do diddly squat about what luck does to us. We just have to be happy for the good things we have and we have to not get swelled heads about what we have achieved - it could very easily have happened to someone else.

For whatever reason, when someone achieves success, they usually want to give themselves a lot or all of the credit for what they have achieved. When Mr. Albus says that there are jobs out there and they just have to be pursued, he makes the assumption that he got his job because of something he did. I don't know this guy or his circumstances, but I can assure you that when I get a job (geez, or IF I get a job) it will only be because of luck. It will not be because I applied for 500 positions or e-mailed hundreds of contacts or went to all the pink slip mixers in California - it will literally be because I happened to catch a recruiter on a good day, or because I ran into someone I went to college with, or because Jupiter was in Mercury's retrograde...whatever. The obstacles standing in the way of me getting a job are things I can't control: the economy, labor supply and demand, industry downsizing <-- it's just bad luck that they all coalesced at the precise moment I graduated and went on the job market. Therefore I cannot logically take credit when I get a job - if I blame bad luck for unemployment, I must give good luck props for getting me a job. There's a good analogy in poker - which is no doubt a skill game - but if the cards are garbage hand after hand, you just can't win. All you can do is take solace that statistically, you shouldn't lose forever....yay?

Finally!

2009-05-18T15:49:00.000-07:00

Holy moly, finally there is someone in a position of power who is not a useless, lazy, slag. This guy is my freakin' hero!

I can't even give it away

2009-05-18T11:34:00.001-07:00

Apparently, even though the country is in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, companies are so flush with cash that they don't need any volunteer help.

I have volunteered to work - for free - for 1) a new hedge fund with only one employee, 2) a small wealth management firm who is not faring well recently, 3) a private equity firm with about 8 employees, and 4) a non-profit who just rejected me for a job. And they all said thanks but no thanks! Am I on glue, or am I mistaken in thinking a company would love to have an MBA work for them, gratis? I must be seriously retarded and/or naive, because I believed that companies would jump at the chance to get free help.

Maybe here's what's happening:

- They think that if I'm free, there must be something wrong with me, so they don't want to take a chance on someone who's no good? Ok, but maybe they could try me out for a week and see if I am mentally defective before making that decision.

- They don't want to have to spend a lot of time training someone. Ok, again, I see the point, but the company would still save money as long as I volunteered for as long as it took to train me. Internships work like this all the time - I don't see how this is different.

- If I'm a volunteer, I'm less committed to the company than if I was an employee, and thus I may just not show up one day and let everyone down. To this I say, why not try me out for a while and see what happens before deciding I'm not worth the risk. Besides, a volunteer is there because they want to be and an employee is there because they have to be - now you tell me who sounds like they're more committed to the company?

This is such utter BS I can't even stand it. I don't know how anyone can justify turning away volunteers, but somehow companies (and non-profits) in the Bay Area have succeeded in doing it. So since these places are so cash-rich that they don't need free assistance, I guess we can all stop donating money to charity since it's obvious it isn't needed. We should all go here instead.

Seriously, we need to get rid of the HR Department...Seriously

2009-05-17T19:57:00.001-07:00

What I dislike about HR departments could fill several volumes, but 2 things have made me angry in the past week that I will now share:

1) Companies apparently have so many willing applicants now that they can act like total a-holes and no one can do anything about it. I had a phone interview scheduled with a company (we'll just call them Initech - the evil corporation from Office Space) for last Monday morning at 8 a.m. I had to wake up all early, drink my coffee, do research on the company, yada yada...8 rolls around and no one calls. Several hours later I get an e-mail saying that they would like to reschedule for the next day - this time at 8:30 a.m. Ok, whatever, I can't really say anything, so I guess that's ok. Next day rolls around, I wait, and no one calls! I called them at 9:15, no answer. Finally, again, several hours later I get an e-mail - at least this time they apologized. Their e-mail was down...and this apparently also prevented the phones from working? So we reschedule a third phone interview - this one actually happens (yay!), and at the end, the recruiter says I should hear from her at the end of the day. That was Wednesday. Today is Sunday. Not a word. <------ EPIC EPIC USELESS SODDING FAIL!

2) I applied to do part-time accounts receivable work for a national coffee chain (we'll call them Initech and Tea Leaf). They e-mailed me the next day and wanted me to "prove" that I really wanted to do the job by sending them my phone number and address - this despite the fact that all that info was on the resume I already sent them. I thought this was hinky, so I googled the company name and "scam", "fraud", "douchebaggery", etc. - nothing came up, so I figured it was ire. I sent them my address and phone number, and got a whole bunch of other weird e-mails from the company, so I got fed up and called corporate. "Oh yeah, we know there's a scammer using our name. Put out a press release? On the internet? That's a great idea!"

Oy vey - one day I hope I'm stupid enough to get a job in human resources! I'll just keep banging my head against the wall until I dislodge my frontal lobe...and then recruiter position here I come!

NYT Trivializes People With Real Problems Yet Again

2009-05-17T19:34:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has done it again - they have managed to publish yet another puff piece on "victims" of the credit crunch that actually only makes the editors at the NYT look like pompous douchebags who have no idea what's going on out in the world.

The author of this most recent embarrassment is a so-called expert on economics - he's covered economics for the Times for many years and is the author of a forthcoming book on the mortgage crisis, seen from an insider's point of view. He's an insider because, even though he's trained to see and report on economics and stupid consumer behavior, he nonetheless took out a jumbo loan on a house he couldn't afford, racked up over $50,000 in credit card debt in a matter of months, and is currently more than 8 months behind on his house payment!! That he still has a roof over his vacuous head is only due to the fact that his bank is too busy to kick him out.

He knowingly signed up for a loan he couldn't afford, he didn't have the balls to tell his wife to stop spending thousands at J. Crew (Omg, if you're gonna break the bank, at least do it at Bloomie's - not J. Crew!), and now he has the gall to gripe about how he couldn't make it all work on a $120,000 salary. And as I mentioned before, this epic pinhead has a new book coming out where he can, no doubt, cry some more about the plight of the secretly broke upper middle class.

I may not be a fancy New York Times economics reporter, but I did go to kindergarten - and we pretty much learned that if you have $3, and you want something that costs $5, you can't have it. You are still short $2. I don't understand why consumers and morons don't understand simple arithmetic. If expenses exceed revenues you are only going to get one outcome, and unfortunately, that outcome doesn't involve debtor's prison. Maybe if the punishment for maxing out your credit cards involved forced relocation to Australia, we'd have a higher national savings rate.

Employment Disparities Piss Me Off

2009-05-13T09:30:00.000-07:00

Business Week reported last week that there are currently 3 million available jobs in the U.S., and not all of them are cruddy. There are jobs open in healthcare, construction, finance (grinds teeth), and these positions are open all over the country.

Why then, is the unemployment rate so high? In California it's about 12% - more than double what it should be in a healthy economy. It seems logical that jobs and people would be able to find each other more easily, especially given how easily information can travel over the internet. The companies interviewed in the article complain about a lack of qualified workers, which I think is rubbish. The workers are there - you just can't see them.

I fix a lot of blame on human resources departments - I think they are largely staffed by morons who cannot distinguish between a horrible candidate and a great one. They also must work within arbitrary confines that dictate, for instance, that they cannot hire someone with 4 years and 11 months of experience in a field, and must hold out for someone with 5 years of experience.

Another problem is the resume system - a human being and their accomplishments, strengths, and weaknesses cannot possibly be summed up on a sheet of paper. Given all the advances made in psychology, organizational behavior, and genetics, can't we invent a better system for summarizing people than a pre-formatted fluff piece littered with buzz words?

And the whole job interview system that stems from pre-fab resumes is basically a mating dance, where the interviewer asks a canned question (Tell me about a time you experienced conflict) and expects a canned answer in the proper format (Situation or Task, Action you took, Results you achieved). We don't reduce dating to acronyms and action verbs, so why would we reduce the job search to such an ill-fitting format?

Here's my suggestion for how to deal with both unemployment and a perceived lack of qualified workers: instead of screening job applicants for relevant experience, why not administer a basic skills and intelligence test? Those who pass are obviously capable of learning new skills. Then take those applicants and train them to do jobs you need filled. This would work perfectly for a job like a lab technician. I have never read pap smear results, but I certainly think I could do it if I had the training. In exchange for a month or so of training, my employer could make me sign a 2 year contract (ensuring their training money wasn't wasted). Everyone wins in this scenario: the hospital gets a body to do a job that needs to be done, and I get a guaranteed job for 2 years, plus a valuable new skill.

It seems so obvious to me...I don't know why companies aren't doing this.

Miss Suzie Sunshine

2009-05-12T08:46:00.001-07:00

I have been known, occasionally, to be sarcastic and maybe...just maybe...a little cynical. Being sarcastic frequently makes people laugh, laughter is good, and it deflects attention from the sad fact that most sarcastic people believe the things they are saying and don't want to own up to them.

Making cynical remarks is a lot like the parents in ancient China who used to berate their children openly in order to fool the evil gods into not killing them (the logic, of course, being that the gods would rather take a valuable, handsome child than a stupid, useless one). Making cynical remarks is a form of superstition where you put a bad thought into the universe in the hopes that you have preempted the evil gods, and now they will have to think of something else to torture you with.

Negativity however, breeds negativity. Whether you call this karma, bad energy, or just being a douchebag, bad things tend to happen to people who bring bad things upon them (I'm still waiting for a polar bear to attack Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag).

I have recently had the tremendous misfortune of spending time with the most miserable, hate-filled, mean-spirited, insufferable woman on the face of the earth (and I'm not talking about Rachel Ray for once!). This woman has such contempt for all living people that she cannot make it through a sentence without having this hatred poison every word. Her life is pretty miserable, partly because of bad luck, but largely because she chooses to make everyone around her completely miserable. She makes Debbie Downer look like Miss Suzie Sunshine.

This woman's toxic and sadistic personality has made me realize that: a) you get more flies with honey than vinegar - duh, and 2) no one wants to be around miserable people, so it's important to put up a positive front even if you want to be gloomy and doomy. Eventually your positive attitude will be rewarded - if only with a hug from a homeless guy.

On Frugality Again - I'm not the only one who thinks the "New Frugality" is retarded

2009-05-11T12:06:00.000-07:00

Troy Patterson on Slate wrote a funny article the other day about stupid and condescending TV shows that have popped up to cash in on the recession. Just imagining Martha Stewart or Rachel Ray advising me on how to stretch my dollar further makes me want to barf up my Cheerios into my Birkin bag.

If you want to hear my other thoughts on the media's portrayal of what has been dubbed the "New Frugality" you can read them here.

I quit! (or Take this non-job and shove it!)

2009-05-06T13:11:00.000-07:00

Today as I was doing my 10 a.m. job search and apply, I happened to notice that today's date is 5-6-09. Not that that means anything, but my job search has now entered its 5th month. I started exactly on January 1st...and now I'm into May. This was really depressing to me because I'm a planner, and a 5 month job search has basically derailed my life plans for the next 40 years.

My life was supposed to go as follows: I get a job by April 2009, I work and save for a few months, and buy a house in San Francisco in July. The rest of 2009 would be spent working and volunteering for one of the candidates for governor of California (power play that will come in handy at a later date, fingers crossed!). In the summer of 2010, I go to the World Cup in South Africa and wear a really annoying American flag jacket everywhere. At the World Cup I get as drunk and rowdy as I want, because once I get back to the states in August, it's BABY TIME! If I get pregnant in August of 2010, I deliver in May when both my mother and my mother-in-law get out of school, and then everyone is free to help me out.

Somewhere in the 2014 to 2020 range I become the head of a private equity firm and make millions of dollars. Then when I turn 45 I run for mayor of San Francisco, I complete 2 super successful terms (crime rate goes down, marijuana is legalized, and the Tenderloin stops being a crap-hole), but when everyone says I simply must run for governor, I say thanks but no thanks. Then I buy a bar out in the woods, dedicate it to the best TV show ever, and run it until that gets boring. Finally, when I'm 65, I retire to Europe and write my memoir.

But all this has been totally derailed because I've missed my job search goal by a month. If I don't get a job, I don't save money, no money=no house, etc. etc. until I'm 65, living in a cardboard box in front of City Hall, with only my pet rats to keep me company (seriously, all the homeless people in SF have pet rats - I have never seen this in any other city).

The solution? I quit my job search and forge my own destiny. I am going to start my own business (or religion, whichever has the higher likelihood of getting funding). I will never get back the last fruitless four months of my life, but I can't keep spending day after day sending my resume out into the ether waiting for something that will never come. It's seriously enough.

Sooooo....job ideas? I have a few. Only one requires smut peddling. Another requires that Americans stay fat for the foreseeable future. And one may entangle me with the mob. But it would be nice to feel as though I have some control over what happens to me. Don't ya think?

Pink Slip Mixers

2009-05-04T13:46:00.000-07:00

This might be worth a look-see if there's one in your area.

Worst case scenario: It doesn't turn into a job, but you can still drink in public like a normal person instead of downing a bottle of Nyquil while watching Reno 911 on DVD. Not that I've ever done that...

Heroes of a Litigious Society

2009-05-04T13:25:00.000-07:00

Ron Grassi is mad (and broke) as Hell and he's not going to take it anymore! According to this story from Bloomberg News, Grassi is one of many investors taking credit rating agencies to court because they lost their life savings.

This seems perfectly reasonable to me. If a USDA inspector green-lit rotten meat that killed a bunch of people, you can bet your bottom dollar the USDA would have a whole bunch of lawsuits to contend with. I don't see how this is any different.

What I want to know is, did rating agencies give high marks to garbage investments out of incompetence (lack of due diligence) or out of premeditated deceit? I will be patiently waiting for this stuff to come out in court/Congressional testimony.

Ratings Agencies - Aarrgh!

2009-05-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

Has anyone else in the finance industry noticed this: when you speak to people that know nothing about finance, they can very quickly point out large gaping inconsistencies, flaws in logic, and conflicts of interest that happen all the time in the financial industry? One such conflict of interest is the way ratings agencies are paid to rate bonds and other investment vehicles. The current system has agencies (i.e., S&P) getting paid to rate investments by the investment banks that underwrite new offerings. Obviously this doesn't work since the i-bank gets paid only if the offering is successful...and the successful offering hinges on those ratings being positive. A third grader could see that this would lead to good ratings being given to junk investments.

In a previous post I stated that the SEC has sure taken its sweet-ass time in making credit analysts pay the piper for their incompetence and/or misconduct. I heard an interview this morning with William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards, where he discussed the role of ratings agencies in the subprime scandal. Mr. Cohen echoed my point that agencies like S&P, Moody's, and Fitch are largely to blame for the tremendous losses experienced by pension funds and individual investors who foolishly believed that when an agency says something is a good investment....that thing is actually a good investment. He also wrote a very good article for Fortune where he tells the story of McGraw-Hill's headaches over its subsidiary S&P - the conduct of which was explained as "a bone-chilling definition of corruption."

It's obvious that ratings agencies should no longer be incentivized to rubber stamp dog shit investments. What isn't obvious is 1) what should be done to punish those analysts that produced bogus ratings, and 2) who should, in the future, pay analysts to rate investments. It obviously doesn't work to have the underwriters pay for ratings. It also obviously doesn't work to have companies pay for ratings. Investors already pay for ratings reports, so I'm not sure it makes sense to have them pay more. That leads me to think maybe the SEC should pay for ratings, since, as a regulatory agency, it's their job to ensure investments are correctly rated, and it would be in everyone's best interest to have investments priced properly (proper pricing is a topic for another day - I have a bone to pick with Black and Scholes and Brownian motion, for that matter).

Bottom line: when you're thinking of investing, take a hint from the X Files and Trust No One.

Tell Me Something I Don't Know

2009-04-29T18:12:00.001-07:00

A peculiar thing about being unemployed is that everyone suddenly starts offering you unsolicited advice. Even your friend Dave, who still works at Starbucks despite having earned his M.A. in French Lit, will knowingly tell you all about how important it is to tailor your resume to each position.

And no matter how deep you get in the job search process, people will continue to give you advice as though a) you're mentally retarded, b) you have been living in a frozen block of ice for 50 years, and c) you just started looking for a job yesterday. After 4 months of looking for a job, I still get advice like, "Have you tried Craigslist?" "You should get a LinkedIn profile." "Are you including a customized cover letter with your resume?" "Make sure to mention your consulting experience on your resume." "Have you looked for a job at McKinsey - I hear they're pretty good."

Oh my God, next you're gonna tell me there's this thing called a "search engine" where you can find information online! Thank you so much, random unsolicited advice givers...without you I would literally be sitting at my Macbook, drooling, pressing "Tab" and waiting for my soda to appear!

I did get one good piece of advice in the last 3 months which I will share with you: once you find 2 or 3 jobs you really want, call the company and try to find out who your boss would be. Then get his fax number from his secretary and fax him your resume. When it comes in, it will hopefully get placed in the middle of his desk (because it's a fax) instead of off to the corner with the other resumes. I haven't tried this yet because I can't think of 2 or 3 jobs badass enough to withstand my awesomeness, but if I try it I'll tell you how it goes.

So if one of your loved ones suffers from AUS, please do them a favor and don't give them bonehead advice like "Make sure to put power words in your resume - like synergy - that's a good one!" Just buy them a beer and try not to rub in the fact that you can afford food and shelter.

Ha!

2009-04-28T11:36:00.000-07:00

This is a funny post from Business Pundit. Read the comments too - there's a good one about the speed of light that could really piss off an HR interviewer.

Job Search = Playing the Slots

2009-04-28T10:23:00.001-07:00

The two most useless pieces of advice you can give someone who is unemployed are: 1) stay positive, and 2) just keep trying - something will come up.

This advice is pointless because you can't control the outcome of a job search, and telling someone to stay positive and keep at it only underscores how a job search is less like going after a goal and more like playing the slot machines.

If a job search could be approached through a typical project management framework, you would have an end date by which your project would be completed, you would have deliverables, milestones, timeframes and all that. A job search is nothing like that however.

A job search is exactly like playing slots: everyday you send your resume out into the world (you put your quarter in the machine and pull the crank), and wait for a favorable outcome. You do this over and over again, all the while hoping for that $100,000 jackpot, but knowing that the odds are way stacked against you. And the real rub is this: what do you do if you get a $500 payout? Do you keep it and quit, knowing that the machine may never pay out what you want? Or do you plow the $500 back into the machine, knowing that you will probably not see a return on that money?

The futility of it all is enough to make you want to hang it up and audition for Bad Girls Club 4. And knowing that it's all pointless is what makes it impossible to both a) stay positive and b) keep at it. Would you tell a gambling addict to stay positive and keep at it because one day you'll hit that jackpot? Hell no, unless you were the worst addiction counselor ever. So why would you tell a job searcher the same thing?

Better advice would be this: 1) Try not to form new addictions during your long periods of down time (addictions to Tetris, Twitter, and talking back to the anchors at Fox News are among the most common), and 2) Use your destructive instincts for good instead of evil - remodel your bathroom instead of throwing plates at the wall, or invite friends over for a barbeque instead of setting your house on fire.

Wow - I feel better already! :)

No Shit - Now Just Tell Every University in America **

2009-04-27T14:33:00.000-07:00

** Except Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Rutgers, Cornell, or Chicago

From the New York Times, a piece entitled "End The University As We Know It" offers prescriptions for improving the dismal (and I mean being-a-Somali-pirate-would-be-a-better-career-option-than-that-graduate-degree dismal) state of graduate students in America. One vital piece of advice:

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

The corollary to this, of course, is that businesses and non-profits must be open to hiring people from the humanities. It has been my experience during two long job searches that hiring managers would rather hire a chimp in a diaper than a person with a B.A. in Art History. (you'd be surprised how many job descriptions call for someone with 7+ years of experience flinging poop!)

On Frugality

2009-04-27T13:10:00.000-07:00

Since the country plunged into "the worst economic crisis since the 1930s" (a claim which could not possibly be validated until we have the benefit of historical perspective...but news organizations have never shied away from hyperbole) there has been a lot of attention on frugality and a return to Depression-era living.

Frugality has taken on a new garish hipster quality in a "Stuff White People Like" sorta way. The New York Times loves to write pieces on what they've dubbed "The New Frugality" and ways its readers can save money (hmm, not living in Chelsea seems an obvious place to start). Style.com even has a trend report on Depression-chic runway looks from the spring RTW collections -- I hate to be a Grumpy Gus, but I'm not actually sure that women wore hand-beaded Alberta Ferretti cocktail gowns as they were fleeing Dust Bowl-ravaged Oklahoma in search of food and employment. And I'm not trying to be a Populist, but isn't it a little absurd for the NYT to write a glowing article about how the pampered wife of a plastic surgeon "loves" growing her own vegetables and getting movies from the library instead of Blockbuster because it's a way to connect with her parents' values? I'm the last person to frame a situation as "Joe Sixpack versus those New York Elites" but I find it condescending and tragically silly to fritter away column space on articles about people who have never and will never need to scrimp and pinch. Something about this smacks of fiddling while Rome burns.

There are people in America who have full-time jobs and have to sleep in their cars because they cannot afford housing. Waitresses and housekeepers often fall into this category - see Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickel and Dimed for more information. These people have had to be frugal for their entire lives, not because it's quaint or fun, but because they have to make a $50 per week paycheck cover all living expenses in a country whose standard of living becomes increasingly more expensive and out of reach for the bottom third of the population.

When a venerable news organization as the NYT does a puff piece on gold diggers who had to suffer the indignity of trading the Bentley for a Merc, their credibility as a mirror of our times is diminished. And wondering if frugality is a trend or a permanent fixture is stupid - for some people frugality is necessary, and for some people it's a cheap way to assuage their rich people's guilt that they will skate through the recession with only a small dent in their net worth.

Now since this is a comedy blog and this piece was kind of a downer, here's a joke from Artie Lang:

"Hugs are great, but -- better than drugs? Come on. Let me put it to you this way: I never drove to Harlem at 4 a.m. to get somebody to hug me."

Make a list!

2009-04-26T14:27:00.000-07:00

Here's another time killer: making lists. Not a boring to-do list or "Things I'm grateful for" list, but a fun, thought-provoking list that could lead to self-discovery and distraction for about 8 minutes. Here are some list ideas to get you started:

List of bitches you want to punch in the face before you get your third strike (Lacey from "Rock of Love" - I'm looking right at you)
List of bars you want to throw up in before you have kids (You can't exactly hurl off the balcony at Ghost Bar and then head back to your room at the Palms to tuck in Bobby and Suzie)
List of cartoon characters you would make out with (Brian from "Family Guy", Duffman, the Esurance lady)
List of places that suck worse than Secaucus, New Jersey (hmmmmm....)
List of songs you want to learn the lyrics to, to impress your friends at karaoke (99 Luftballoons in German, Rock Me Amadeus, It's The End of The World)
Things you would rather do than go to a Jonas Brothers concert (get dental surgery, get kidnapped by Somali pirates, catch swine flu...this list could really go on forever)
List of stupid lists you could write in lieu of doing anything productive

On Networking

2009-04-26T11:41:00.000-07:00

Can an activity be both fruitless and necessary?

Like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill only to have it roll down and repeat the process ad infinitum, networking is a process that generates no benefits, and yet must be conducted over and over again in the hope that one day the gods will put an end to the misery.

Networking is an enormous waste of time, and has the really annoying quality of wasting not only your time, but the time of people you one day hope will help you out. Here's how it typically goes: Someone your brother-in-law works with has given you the e-mail address of his college roommate...no instruction on what to say or what makes the guy tick...just an e-mail address and a job title (Associate Vice President of Knowledge and Information Security for the Eastern West Region). Now you have to e-mail a total stranger with whom you have nothing in common and hope like Hell he can pass your resume to someone who matters.

So you e-mail Mr. AVP and say something vague like, "John put me in touch with you. If you have the time I'd love to ask you some questions about your job in order to gain some insight for my own career search." Translated into actual English this means, "I don't know you or John, but I don't want you to think I'm a stalker, so I'll throw this name in here. I have to pretend that I'm not begging for a job, so I'll say that I'm interested in what you do...even though you don't really do what I want to do, and you don't even work in the Finance department which is where I'm aiming for. If after a five minute phone conversation you decide I'm not a drooling imbecile, please send my resume to someone who makes interviewing decisions (i.e., someone who matters....not you). Thank you for your time, and please forgive me for asking a favor of a total stranger."

Repeat this process 10 times a week for 16 weeks and you get to where I am...the end of April, an inbox full of e-mails, and nowhere closer to getting a job than I was January 1st. They say that only 4% of people find a job by blindly applying to internet job posts, but networking doesn't appear to be working either. I'm this close to xeroxing 1000 copies of my resume and dropping them on the seats of all the BART trains in SF. I think that desperation may come across as persistence in a recession. I wonder how much it costs to get a billboard ad on the 101.....

Diversions

2009-04-23T21:29:00.000-07:00

Here's a Personality Test that can kill about 6 minutes. Results are sufficiently vague.

I am an ENTJ, and if you're an MBA and DON'T get ENTJ, you picked the wrong masters degree...EPIC FAIL!

"Why Is This Happening To Me?"

2009-04-22T20:35:00.000-07:00

Juking the Stats

2009-04-22T18:12:00.001-07:00

Juking the stats, a term frequently used on "The Wire", means that someone has fiddled with data in order to reach a more favorable conclusion - for instance, if I'm on a diet and am counting calories, I might not count liquid calories and still maintain that I had 1200 calories that day (of course, when you add 10 Malibu and Cokes your actual numbers are a little bit higher).

I think grad schools are often guilty of juking their stats on post-graduation employment, and if they aren't now, they will be after the class of '09 graduates. After a cursory examination of the graduate business schools listed in Business Week and U.S. News & World Report, it seems that an average of 94% of MBA graduates were employed within 3 months of graduation. To me, this number is suspicious.

For one thing, based on my own anecdotal evidence, and based on conversations I have had with graduates from 6 different MBA programs (one of which is a top 3 school), NO ONE is able to get a job right now. There are the odd exceptions here and there, but from what I can see and hear, 94% will be unattainable this year for the vast majority of B-schools.

Secondly, as with all statistics, it is important to note what is not stated in the summary of the numbers. 94% represents the number of graduates employed, but there is no mention of where graduates are employed, what they are doing, or whether they are full-time or part-time. So all those day-shift strippers holding Mizzou MBAs are still counted as employed even though they are not technically in the traditional career path of a Missouri alum (or are they...?).

Finally, the 94% figure is based on employment 3 months after graduation. If the median salary of MBA grads is something like $65,000, this would imply about a 6.5 month-long job search (according to the rule of thumb featured in "What Color Is Your Parachute?"). So if the spring '09 graduates have not yet started their job search and want to get placed within 3 months of graduation, they should be sweating.

From my own experience, I am about to hit month 5 and have had no success whatsoever (who wouldn't want to hire a person with such a lovely f***ing vocabulary as me?!?). Is it likely I am in that sad 6%? I guess. But I think it's more likely that that 6% will grow to about 10% or 15% for the classes of 2008 and 2009.

Why The Government Should Forgive My Student Loans

2009-04-20T14:07:00.000-07:00

1) I took out my student loans so I could go to school and get a better job, and one day create new jobs. This was a totally altruistic *wink wink* aim, and had nothing to do with wanting to go to private school to "find myself." Anyways, the home loans which the government has since voided were taken out because the home buyers were greedy and/or stupid. College students are just trying to be competitive, thus the government should reward this self-improvement with loan forgiveness.

2) MBAs and entrepreneurs pretty much control job creation, but they can only be free to do this if they are not tethered by $500/mo loan payments. If you eliminate the loans, you free up a lot of personal capital that can go toward handbags (operating expenses!), and you also allow people the freedom to work for non-profits, or start small businesses, join a cult...whatever.

3) Why not me? If everyone else is getting their piece, I say students should get theirs too. This isn't a very good reason, and as a Libertarian I'm sickened by my rabid lust for taxpayer money, but I stand by it. AIG's bailout subsidized millions in bonuses for people that aren't very good at their jobs. So I feel like, as long as these a-holes get to keep the Bentley and the townhouse in the East 60s, I should get a little money so I don't have to drink to block out my sense of impending doom as my loans come due.

Please, President Obama, save me from a life of eating Cheerios and beer (beerios! yay!) - forgive my student loans!

The War For Talent is Bollocks, Part 1

2009-04-17T11:07:00.000-07:00

I am so sick and tired of hearing about how companies are constantly competing for the top MBAs - the business media has dubbed it the "War For Talent". Supposedly, even during the recession, the War For Talent is still raging. I'm telling you, as a soldier in the trenches of this "war" that it is utter bollocks and rubbish. The war doesn't exist, and companies wouldn't know talent if it walked naked through their front door wearing a neon sign and crashing two cymbals together.

For one thing, many companies are still laboring under the antiquated and patently false assumption that people from the Ivies are better than people from the rest of the world. I refuse, REFUSE, to believe that because I happened to live in Kansas at the time when I went back to school, that I have less potential to perform than someone who happened to get into Harvard.

First, most studies agree that the only reliable predictor of future job performance is previous experience...not school, not grades, not GMAT score, not leadership positions held...just relevant job experience. And maybe emotional intelligence if HBR is correct...but they're probably not. The point: companies are chasing down applicants based on misconceptions and outright bullshit, and missing out on a whole world of other talented people.

Second, just because someone went to an Ivy League school doesn't mean that they will be a great performer. It would even be accurate to say that, given that the current financial crisis was conceived and perpetrated by Ivy alums, maybe companies would do better to steer clear from "elite" MBAs since they may be more prone to spectacular failures and evildoing. And this really pisses me off: after churning out thousands of graduates who were either architects of financial wrongdoing or complicit in greedy profiteering, Harvard now has the gall to defend their curriculum in the face of mounting criticism that their graduates are awful, and preach to the rest of us about how business ethics should be emphasized more in MBA programs.

To give you an idea of why I find this attitude so offensive, here are some distinguished Ivy alums: Jeff Skilling (Harvard, MBA, top 5% of his class), dot-com schemer Frank Quattrone, who's lucky to not be in jail right now (Wharton, graduated with honors), Franklin Raines, former head of Fannie Mae who made millions doing shady deals at below-market rates (Harvard, Rhodes Scholar), and Rick Wagoner (Harvard MBA), the distinguished CEO of GM who pretty much ran the company into the ground and was canned by President Obama.

It's time that companies started evaluating applicants based on things that actually exist, like practical experience, instead of chasing fantasies about how a Harvard MBA can come in and make everything all better again. Between grade inflation and nepotism, I don't even understand how companies could seriously think that they're getting what they're paying for in an Ivy MBA.

So if companies really want to win the battle for talent, it's time they pulled their heads out of the dark ages and realized that talent can come in all kinds of packages...not just those marked "Harvard Approved".

It's About Time

2009-04-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

Seeking Alpha posted this today:

"SEC takes aim at ratings firms. SEC's Mary Schapiro said the agency has 'more to do' in regulating credit-rating firms and that the performance of rating firms in connection to mortgage-backed securities has 'shaken investor confidence to its core.' The SEC held a roundtable on the topic yesterday, focusing on ways to minimize potential conflicts of interest. Suggestions included switching ratings firms to an investor-paid model from an issuer-paid model, or for fees be paid out of the rated bonds' interest payments. Schapiro had previously suggested the possibility of creating an independent oversight body to set standards for the ratings firms."

Duh, really SEC? It's about freaking time. You mean someone finally realized it's completely backwards to have companies pay ratings agencies to give them ratings...wait for it...because the companies could then demand that the ratings they receive be favorable?!? It's too much to hope for that the SEC and the ratings agencies actually implement a new payment model, but it's good to see that people are finally learning the lessons of the dot com bust - just 7 years too effing late!

Apparently the NYT thinks we're a bunch of whiners

2009-04-15T11:07:00.000-07:00

Harvard Economics Professor Ed Glaeser said in the New York Times that government unemployment resources should be focused, as ever, on those citizens without a college education or who work in sectors like agriculture that have been hardest hit by the recession.

I disagree that the government should focus on aiding these groups of people. For one, people without a college education will always have employment problems - this recession IS remarkable precisely BECAUSE it has hit educated, white collar professionals. For another thing, college grads have student loan debt (the average amount being $20,000), and need to get jobs if only to avoid defaulting on their obligations. And I would venture to guess that unemployment assistance to MBAs would have to be provided for a shorter amount of time than for farm workers, given the larger skill set of your average MBA (actually, maybe it's presumptuous to think your average MBA has more skills than a farm worker...but whatev).

And I also don't want to hear from a tenured Harvard economics professor that "...reversals of fortune among educated elites have a nice counterintuitive ring to them...and well-educated readers find stories about people like themselves far more interesting than more tales of suffering migrant farm workers." Yes, I suppose up in Cambridge it must be quite droll to read about Johnny Finance putting on a suit and taking the train into Wall Street everyday because he can't bear to tell his wife he lost his job. This pompous blowhard needs to realize that no one is advocating that the poor are not adversely affected by the recession, but throwing money at high school dropouts is not going to encourage innovation, investment, or growth.

Is Betting on Greyhounds Better Than Investing in the Stock Market?

2009-04-15T10:22:00.000-07:00

Seriously, can someone quantify the return on a month of Saturday night betting at the dog track versus the S&P over the same time period? It seems like betting on one dog at a time, you've got a 1 in 8 chance of picking the winner. And you can do better than 1 in 8 because you've got a book full of odds, history, handicaps, etc. Or you can rely on my dad's trick for dog picking, which is to see which dog voids himself just prior to the race, and pick that one because "he's lighter".

I know nothing about betting on dogs, and have done pretty well every time I go to the track. Since we all know stock picking doesn't work (according to the author of A Random Walk Down Wall Street, a study was conducted where chimps were given copies of the WSJ and darts, and their picks performed as well or better than those selected by "experts"), a comparative investment would have to be the S&P, which historically (over the last 100 years) returns about 12%. I'm pretty sure I could beat 12% over a month of bets.

You could never make this claim with casino games like roulette or craps, but I think a skilled player could beat a 12% return in poker as well as dog or horse betting. Thoughts??

Things to do in Limbo When You're Bored

2009-04-15T10:17:00.001-07:00

Here are a few things I've been doing to kill the boredom and distract me from the fact that my phone never rings and I think Gmail is broken because no one ever gets back to me.

1) Write a screenplay: Movies are pretty formulaic, so if you think of even a half-ass concept, you can probably stretch it into a 3 act format. Here's an example: A girl moves to Nashville to be a country singer, but to make bread she moonlights as a dominatrix. Her worlds collide at the end of the second act when she realizes that her client with the latex fetish and the cute talent scout she's been trying to meet are one and the same person. They fall in love, and perform a rocking duet ("You Poured Hot Wax on My Achy Breaky Heart") in the final scene.

2) Volunteer: If only for selfish reasons like bulking up the "Involvement" section of your resume, volunteering is a great time killer. Plus, if you're single, I think it would be pretty easy to parlay an interest in human rights into an invite back to someone's apartment to "discuss the situation in Africa".

3) Watch "The Wire": Yeah, it's totally the best TV show ever. Period. And then when your friends are talking about someone named Omar Little like he's a real guy, you can join in the discussion and say, "He gots to get got."

Job ad writers are nuts! (or jobs to which I actually applied and was rejected)

2009-04-13T12:08:00.000-07:00

Here's what drives me nuts about the job search process: Job ads.

Either they are so vague that anyone could conceivably possess the qualifications the job ad lists (must be organized, must have experience with MS Office, must have opposable thumbs...), or they say you have to have 15 years + of experience in some really random job function such that, if you really had 15 years + you'd probably already have a job or enough connections to not have to troll Craigslist for new opportunities.

Here are a couple of apparently very complicated jobs for which I did not qualify:

Product Analyst Internship - Required "Strong reading and comprehension skills" (so I guess completing a Masters degree doesn't necessarily guarantee that one has strong reading skills, but for crying out loud, what kind of drooling neanderthals have applied to this company in the past that necessitated that they specify reading skills in their ad??)

Distribution Analyst at a major clothing retailer - Requires a 2 year college degree and 1 year of retail experience. After making me sit through a 40 minute quiz where I was asked what belt went with what khakis and I had to ascertain that I do not find stealing morally acceptable, I received a very polite form e-mail (Dear Valued Applicant...) telling me that the company had decided to select other candidates. Really? 6+ years working in retail, plus an IQ of 145 and you're not sure I could demonstrate "Facility with personal computers"?

Some other job ad bugaboos:

-Requiring experience at the company that's hiring (why the hell are you advertising on Monster if it's an internal hire?)

-Applications that ask for demographic information but also say that the info won't be used to make a hiring decision (Don't get my hopes up about being an affirmative action beneficiary and then dash them all to pieces!)

5 degrees that are better than an MBA

2009-04-12T14:18:00.001-07:00

A degree that's better than an MBA?!? Surely no such thing could exist.

But if by "better" one means a program that 1) teaches skills that could be applied to a job-type situation, 2) transitions directly to a job that pays actual money, and 3) doesn't sink the student into a quagmire of debt so deep that offing your rich Uncle Monty seems like a viable repayment plan....if that's what is meant by "better", perhaps there are some other options out there.

1) Athletic Training/Exercise Science To call it what it is, this is a degree in P.E. Who knew that you could major in dodgeball? Do you think they offer classes in "dressing out" or "advanced mat-stacking techniques"? Anywho, as comical as it is to think of your 8th grade basketball coach as an "exercise scientist", this degree could certainly lead a paying career, thus making it better than my MBA degree. Graduates of the Athletic Training program at Alfred University have gone on to hold jobs at such prestigious places as Alfred State College and "High Schools".

2) Criminal Justice Degree from ITT Tech The jury is still out on whether ITT Tech is the great equalizer or a giant scam, but studying criminal justice can't possibly be a bigger waste of time than some of the classes I had to endure (Organizational Behavior - AKA lots of random videos, and International Business - AKA the US and the IMF are awful and you Capitalist pigs should be ashamed).

3) Hotel Administration At Harrah Hotel College at UNLV a student can major in any of the typical hospitality disciplines - food and beverage management, culinary arts, etc. - but you can also major in gaming management (including classes in thuggery, loan sharking, and stripper tipping, I'm sure), and PGA Professional Golf Management Program, where students are trained to be leaders in the golf industry. How does that not sound like the funnest major ever?? What the eff was I thinking picking art history?

4) Viticulture Even though you'd no doubt have to sit through a bunch of boring science garbage about fermentation and temperature yada yada, making wine for school would kick ass absolutely. The only drawback to this degree would be that you'd have to study with a bunch of oenophile douches like Milo from "Sideways". How many weepy viticulture majors have tried Milo's "I'm delicate just like a pinot grape" speech on drunk chicks when they're trying to score?

5) Just about every other professional degree This includes MAccs, JDs, MDs, and maybe even MPAs. MBAs contribute so little actual added value that even boneheaded corporations realize this (but only during a downturn) and thus people like me can't get a job.

AUS - What is it? Do I have it? Is it transmitted by holding hands?

2009-04-12T12:38:00.000-07:00

Acute Unemployment Syndrome, or AUS, is a disease which currently affects 13.2 million Americans. Some experts even predict as many as 1 in 10 Americans could be afflicted with AUS in the coming months. While this disease affects Americans of all creeds, it is felt most acutely by MBAs, as MBA graduates often feel the most entitled to jobs, and yet simultaneously often lack skills necessary to be a productive member of society.

What is this disease? It is the state of not only being jobless, but also bored, desperate, despondent, doubtful, and pissed off, with these emotions often being directed both internally (Why the hell did I get a history degree??) and externally (How in hell is Jimmy Fallon employed and I can't get a job??).

What are the warning signs? AUS happens in stages. Stage 1 is marked by a period of optimism, naivete, and a general joie de vivre brought about by an ignorance of what is to come. During Stage 1, AUS victims often look forward to a vacation between school and work during which they can spend hours doing nothing before having to settle into a job. Stage 1 AUS patients also suffer delusions of grandeur, fantasizing about hiring bonuses, free Blackberrys, and health insurance -- none of these things will happen for the AUS victim, of course, but the patient still believes that happiness is attainable.

Stage 2 begins about two months into the job search process, and is marked by a vexing feeling that somewhere in the AUS patent's life, wrong choices were made. Maybe the AUS patient believes they should have studied mechanical engineering instead of getting that worthless tuba performance degree. "Why didn't I join the Peace Corps?" asks the AUS patient. "I wonder if it's too late to become a professional golfer?" These questions are usually coupled with feelings of jealousy, particularly towards gainfully-employed younger siblings.

Stage 3 is the final stage of AUS and typically sets in around the 14-week mark. After 14 weeks of job searching, including e-mailing, interviewing, bullshitting, phone calling, kowtowing, and watching way too many reruns of "Monk", the AUS patient has progressed into late-stage, incurable, full-blown joblessness. Stage 3 patients are variously despondent and angry, frequently sarcastic, and are prone to blogging as a way to kill the time that stretches into infinity like the bleached sands of the Sahara.

AUS is a serious problem that everyday affects more and more people around the world. MBAs across America are on the brink of taking jobs as bank tellers, bar tenders, and, shudder, pro bono consultants. By reading this blog, however, you are a part of the cure. Together we can fight AUS. With commiseration, sarcasm, and laughter, we can stop this epidemic.