I get told to just go to places and as for a job. My dad isn't even 50 yet, but according to him that's how you get a job.
It doesn't work that way anymore. It hasn't for years. In fact, if you go to a place in person to try to apply nowadays, you're more likely to just get laughed out of the establishment and told to go apply online. Which also never works. For major employers like Walmart or any fast-food establishment, you spend 45 minutes filling out bogus personality quizzes put in the online application by overpaid consultants and entering in the same goddamn information over and over again, page after page, all for one application, only to get shoved into a database somewhere and maybe picked out if the employer likes what they see on your Facebook page (and if you don't have one, screw you.) Otherwise, you go on Craigslist and send out email after email to job postings that are either shady as hell or have impossibly high qualifications (Why the hell do I need a master's degree to be a webpage designer?!) in the hopes that at least someone will respond. Which they also won't.
The way you're supposed to go about getting a job, at least in America, is throw yourself into seven-figure debt going to college for several years, living penny-to-penny and stressing yourself the hell out over a half-dozen meaningless subjects you don't really want to take in order to get enough college credits for your degree. From there, one of two things will happen: the likely route is that once you get your degree, at least entry-level jobs will start paying attention to you and you can spend the rest of your life as a wage-slave to trying to pay off the interest to your student loan (you'll never touch the principal loan itself.) The successful route is to meet someone important while you're still in college and they'll personally offer you a job at a real workplace, and that'll land you in what's called "upper middle class". Good job, you made it about as well as you ever will while 95% of your peers were processed into labor cattle, now you better hang onto that real job like a goddamn lifeline.
I actually count myself lucky that I'm considered "disabled" due to my Asperger's, because it means I can actually get help from the Department of Labor. I'd be screwed otherwise. I sure as hell wasn't about to set foot in any college; both my parents fell into that trap.
@Cigarettes the thing about going out and physically job hunting, is pretty much everywhere outsources hiring to third-party employment companies. The managers at stores actually don't have the power to hire you, at all.
I had to fill out an online application when then took me on a virtual image based multi-choice 'sim' of what I had to do while on the job. You had to like virtually copy text over to a tablet at one point for whatever reason in the middle of the store and virtual customers would come over and ask you stupid questions
it was for some chucklefuck retail store, its like, this is an entry level job high schoolers pick, hoooooooooow would they know what to doooooooo
I called O'reilly's once to check and see if a position was still open, they just hung up the phone without saying a word.
I went to a technical school that was supposed to be halfway decent and able to place me (85% placement rate). No one from my class got a relevant job. I haven't had an actual interview in almost half a year. No matter what I apply to now I will guaranteed never get a call back even if I am over qualified. Staffing firm once had me drive 2 hours for no interview, they canceled it once I got there. I have a friend at UGA within their IT department and even there I can't get a call back. Because of my mom feeding me nothing but fast food for the majority of my life, because it was cheap and convenient, I can't' even get into shape to do a physically laboring job. Even if I was able to I wouldn't be able to survive on minimum wage due to cost of living.
The previous generation spent our entire lives telling us that education was the key to not being a slave and struggling. Now their laughing at us and calling us entitled as we slave away the rest of our lives while they enjoy financial security and retirement.
Eating a gun to stop being a financial burden on your family becomes a more attractive option as the cycle rinses and repeats.
I thought this was some sort of a stupid joke since I have that "Snake people" extension installed.
Phew.
ngl the whole 'boomers pushing their kids into education' thing genuinely feels like a ponzi. a lot of student loans are seen as safe investments for retirement funds (wrongly imo as it's gonna blow up someday surely).
If there's one thing baby boomers seem to be good at, it's projection
Nah. It was a natural reaction.
My dad explained to me that when he was growing up, everyone was saying to become a welder because it paid a lot. As a result, the market was flooded with things like welders, and instead of making good money, they were a dime a dozen. So everyone told their kids "don't be a welder, you'll struggle too much. Those college people, THEY make money!". So they pushed our generation to college and away from the trades. Now, college grads are oversaturated and the trades are lagging. It's just a wave.
Good, the future is now old man.
wow the u.s labour market sounds fucked up
It is. I have a feeling that at the end of college I'm just gonna end up working at McDonalds or Walmart for 20 years and then grow enough of a spine to blow my brains out. Not to mention that I'm gonna accumulate 4 years of debt that is going to be nearly impossible to pay off unless I live with my parents and spend absolutely nothing on myself.
I applied for a job at a call center that does tech support for McDonald's and what-not. The interview went well, and they called me today to tell me they were interested in having me onboard.
...BUT, they had filled the position from within the company. Because of this, the training period that I was going to rely on to get me through next month's rent and bills has been pushed to JUNE at the earliest. So now I have to figure out what to do in the meantime, lest I be forced out of my apartment.
But on top of all of this, their online application was the most ridiculous I have ever seen. It filled itself out roughly 70-80% just by skimming my resume, which was impressive, but what was less than impressive was it then demanded (as in it was required, no option to skip) to specify what specific field your previous jobs were in. This was only do-able by means of a drop-down menu (meaning you couldn't try to search through with any search function), filled with what seemed like HUNDREDS, if not 1,000+ incredibly specific options, many of which were difficult to pin to any of my previous jobs.
That part of the application took me 20 minutes by itself.
But even then, despite the interview going well (their words, not mine), it took them almost TWO WEEKS to get back to me about ANYTHING.regarding the job, and even then it was only to tell me "whoopsies we don't need you just yet we'll shoot for June lol".
The thing you gotta realize is that education - much like prisons, health-care, and utilities - has become a privatized, for-profit field in the capitalist hell that is America. Our entire educational system is dedicated not to teach young people, but to stamp them into the same ignorant, obedient cogs that make up the vast majority of our country's workforce. And while primary and secondary education are still largely government-run, state-funded services (unless you go to a Catholic school or something), higher education is designed to also squeeze as much money as it can out of you while continuing to process you into a barely-functional worker drone. That whole student loan racket is an entire business in and of itself these days, and trapping people in debt for the rest of their lives isn't an unfortunate occurrence, it's quite literally how they make their money.
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... As aside: the thing is, I don't want to blame this all on baby-boomers. I'm honestly sick of this generational war. "Millennials are lazy, worthless runts addicted to their screens!" "Boomers are obsolete ignoramuses whose view of the world is increasingly irrelevant!" This isn't how this all was supposed to go. I already watched this all play out once in microcosm, when older folks started getting to video games during the Wii days before the younger "gamer" demographic drove them back out (or at least to the "exile" of mobile gaming) and I never wanted to see it happen again. My parents are boomers. I'm a millennial born of boomers and my parents are good people. This should've been a peaceful passing of the torch from one generation to the next with the implication that the other side is "always welcome in our world". There shouldn't be all this conflict where it feels like my generation is trying to wrestle control of the world away from my parents' generation's unwilling grasp. Yes, plenty of boomers are assholes (primarily the Republican ones) just like plenty of millennials are assholes (also primarily the Republican ones), and I'm just as tired of boomers hating millennials as I am of millennials hating boomers.
Just as much as I hate the "You damn kids are so entitled and your digital culture is degenerate!" I hate the "This is our world now, so just die off already like you're supposed to!" I want my parents to feel just as home in my world as elders as I was in theirs as a child.
millennials are a good thing I'm tired of electronic old people running the world
The rich don't care, and they're the ones making laws. If someone they know is struggling, they can just help a little bit directly. No need to push legislation that'll hurt their donations
Fuck money in politics
Thank you for the post, I would agree with a lot of what you have said, but from what I have read specifically it seems like there isn't a very good infrastructure or network set up to pair job-seekers with work.
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