How to get a job?

[fredreload]

Now I remember looking, probably not seriously enough, during the depression back in 2009 looking for a job. And for half a year I couldn't find one until I get back to Taiwan. I am saying that jobs are pretty hard to get either in Taiwan or America or just about anywhere. I remember wanting to work at Pixar in Emeryville or for companies like EA. Now I am alright with a job that pays reasonably for my daily expenses. The problem with job is just that they are too hard to get.

 

What if the job has entry level positions to increase job positions? I mean really entry level jobs where you just surf the web and try to collect information. There are dumasses like me out there who is in desperate need for a job

 

What if you pay for the position you want? Ya, I'm not saying anything illegal here but we apply to schools we want with some money, why not do the same for jobs?

 

Open for your thoughts on how to get a job, many thanks

[Sensei]

You have to have valuable knowledge for employer. Or you will end up in manual labour, or repeatable stupefying labour.

Knowledge that you can show in PhD, license, history of work for other employers, or projects that you made for customers as freelancer.

 

Programmer can work as freelancer.

But you have to be good programmer, which means everyday writing programmer.

Write applications for yourself, to gain experience, and not forget how to do it. *)

You will be able to show them to clients, to show work you did.

When you will have couple such applications, or one bigger,

start calling/mailing companies (use phonebook for companies to learn their names),

and asking whether there is something you can develop for them.

F.e. utility which will increase their everyday work productivity.

Companies need/should have website.

Search for companies without website, or ugly/badly designed, and show them you can do it better.

If you are not graphic designer, hire one for cooperation for work on single project. You will program in PHP/JavaScript/CSS, while graphic designer will make gfx.

Restaurants can have on-line ordering system for customers.

Search for restaurants without this feature, talk to bosses that you can make such system, and write it.

(Better have code ready (without gfx, or with simple example template) prior calling them, so you will be able to show them how it will work, if they will hire you for this job).

 

*) do you need to calculate something? Don't run Windows calculator application. Write one in .NET Framework by yourself.. One week of work.

Do you need excel/spreadsheet? Don't run Excel/OpenOffice SpreadSheet. Write one by yourself.

If you have calculator code, you also have ready function returning value for equation user entered. Repeat it in rows, and columns, and there will be basic Excel. Yet another one week of work.

Edited November 24, 2016 by Sensei

[fredreload]

Getting a PHD could be helpful, but most of the time job has little to do with school work. What we need is on job trainings. Freelancing could work but that would require much more experience

 

 

P.S. But you are right, PHD always gets a higher pay

Edited November 24, 2016 by fredreload

[CharonY]

Entry level jobs are hard to get, if you do not have any obvious skill sets that you can sell. A PhD does not help in itself as your competing pool would be other PhDs. Also note that a PhD level degree has almost nothing in common with school work, which is why it is accepted as proof of higher qualification.

 

How to get a job? Figure out what your employer wants, network and make yourself a good fit. If you do not know what you have to offer, no one is buying it.

[fiveworlds]

P.S. But you are right, PHD always gets a higher pay

 

 

What? there are plenty of people with PHD's who work in Mc Donalds flipping burgers. Take for instance a guy gets a degree in chemistry. Sure he can make some product but he hasn't been taught any skills on how to market his product. If you need to market something and everything is done online nowadays then you need to be able to program. If you can program but can't do art then your website will look horrible and nobody will buy your product.

Edited November 24, 2016 by fiveworlds

[CharonY]

Few PhDs actually develop their own products. What you market are your skills.

[fiveworlds]

Few PhDs actually develop their own products. What you market are your skills.​

 

 

Obviously but there is also the possibility that jobs in your field won't be around when you leave college. Your skillset could be completely irrelevant to 95% of the job market in your locality with you being in competition with other highly qualified people for the role. Most people with PhDs are already married with kids and there may not be the option to move for work without leaving the rest of the family behind.

Edited November 24, 2016 by fiveworlds

[Arete]

What? there are plenty of people with PHD's who work in Mc Donalds flipping burgers.

 

That's not my general experience at all. PhD graduates do tend to fall into a diverse array of professions, but pretty much all of the graduates I know of, especially in the sciences tend to wind up in technical fields. Many are academics. Some are in government - from local to federal, some are consultants, some are analysts in the financial and non-profit sectors, some are entrepreneurs, one I know of is now a sommelier and another I know went into construction management. I don't know any who work minimum wage jobs.

Edited November 24, 2016 by Arete

[fiveworlds]

I don't know any who work minimum wage jobs. ​

 

 

I know plenty. Time was that degrees were rare few people had degrees so therefore people with degrees got jobs. Now pretty much everybody has some form of a degree.

[StringJunky]

Few PhDs actually develop their own products. What you market are your skills.

I think of PhDs as knowing an awful lot about about a little, so I imagine it's quite easy to be out of the required knowledge and skillset employment-wise. If you are good at presenting your skillset as relevant to other jobs that's good but not everybodyhas that ability.

 

 

I know plenty. Time was that degrees were rare few people had degrees so therefore people with degrees got jobs. Now pretty much everybody has some form of a degree.

I hate to agree. As currency for employment , a degree has diminished.

[CharonY]

I think of PhDs as knowing an awful lot about about a little, so I imagine it's quite easy to be out of the required knowledge and skillset employment-wise. If you are good at presenting your skillset as relevant to other jobs that's good but not everybodyhas that ability.

I hate to agree. As currency for employment , a degree has diminished.

 

I think you (and others) may misunderstand what the basic skill set of a PhD is (or is supposed to be). I is is less the specific subject they were investigating, but the ability to take a complex project, disassemble it into work units, acquire skills to tackle these units and fulfill the project in a timely fashion. Another common skill set is communication. You learn how to communicate your findings, and explain it to people outside your field. These problem solving skills are mostly independent of the subject matter, though with different emphasis on how a problem is approached.

 

Biologist tend to be more empirical, for example, whereas physicists are better equipped to deal with problems of numerical nature. In almost all instances you take the skills you obtained and mainly use the specific topic you dealt with as an example how you managed a project. That does not mean that there are not important technical skills that one should learn during that time, but I would be a bad mentor indeed if I let people out of my lab with nothing but data and protocols.

 

 

 

I don't know any who work minimum wage jobs.

 

Actually, if we take actual work hours into account postdocs are quite close in that bracket (though one could call that a special case... to some degree).

Edited November 24, 2016 by CharonY

[fredreload]

Well, anything that would land me a job lol, pay service sounds good. Well the idea is you still have to work your way out, getting a job is a start

 

 

P.S. Man, everyone wish they'd find a job Iron Man style, but reality just seems different

Edited November 25, 2016 by fredreload

[Klaynos]

I work with lots of people with a range of science backgrounds. From bsc biologists to PhD physicists and the whole spectrum. You can tell, even after they've been in the work place for 10 years those who have done PhDs. The problem solving skill set and communication skills tend to be significantly better. Very few use the specific knowledge from their PhDs.

[DrP]

Who needs qualifications and experience anyway? Just apply for whatever job you like.... Not having qualifications or experience didn't stop Donald Trump applying for and getting the POTUS job did it? The world is your oyster if you are are bold enough to pretend you know what you are talking about - just wing it!

[StringJunky]

Who needs qualifications and experience anyway? Just apply for whatever job you like.... Not having qualifications or experience didn't stop Donald Trump applying for and getting the POTUS job did it? The world is your oyster if you are are bold enough to pretend you know what you are talking about - just wing it!

^^^^^ This!!! It's all about sounding like you know what you are talking about.... mostly.

 

Anecdote: After filling in many application forms, about twenty five years ago, I said to my mother "This application form is full of bullshit" and she replied "Well, you've been honest all your life, let's see where this gets you." I got the job. I might add that I lied by omission than tall stories to 'smooth' the gaps.

Edited November 25, 2016 by StringJunky

[fredreload]

^^^^^ This!!! It's all about sounding like you know what you are talking about.... mostly.

 

Anecdote: After filling in many application forms, about twenty five years ago, I said to my mother "This application form is full of bullshit" and she replied "Well, you've been honest all your life, let's see where this gets you." I got the job. I might add that I lied by omission than tall stories to 'smooth' the gaps.

LOL, I got asked many times what I did for my senior design project, though I didn't really work on it, my partner did it all. Partly the reason why I'm stuck with a software job now sigh. But you are right, it is nothing to regret over, if a company can't handle this then I probably shouldn't be hired, life permits a few mistakes

[waitforufo]

Who needs qualifications and experience anyway? Just apply for whatever job you like.... Not having qualifications or experience didn't stop Donald Trump applying for and getting the POTUS job did it? The world is your oyster if you are are bold enough to pretend you know what you are talking about - just wing it!

Fake it till you make it has gotten me a long way in my career.

 

I have always considered job adverts to simply be a wish list of attributes for an ideal candidate who likely doesn't exist or won't apply. I have applied for jobs where I had very few if any of the job qualifications requested and landed the job. I have found that most employers are simply looking for a person willing to work diligently and learn quickly. Once on board, do the work everyone else avoids and your employer will be happy that someone is finally working those tasks and those who avoid doing those task will be happy to help you up the learning curve so they don't have to do that chore anymore.

 

As a hiring manager the first thing I look at is work history. I look at and ask questions about every job the person ever had. That includes babysitting children for your neighbors, delivering news papers, working fast food restaurants, day labor, work study, etc. I have seen other managers higher people with advanced degrees straight out of college who never held a paying job in their lives. Such people often have no work socialization skills. They have no idea what it is like to show up at work five days a week, eight hours a day, with people they would likely never socialize. Work social skills that many learn washing dishes, clearing restaurant tables, or sacking groceries when they were in high school. An expectation to meet aggressive work schedules seem simply unfair to such individuals. The idea that they may have to work comp time to meet a deadline sends them into depression. I have seen many such candidates fail within a year. I have seen and been a hard working individual with little competence at the job hired for transferred to other better suited work, because employers rarely get rid of hard workers. So I recommend that if you don't have a job, get a job. Anything will do.

[Sensei]

LOL, I got asked many times what I did for my senior design project, though I didn't really work on it, my partner did it all. Partly the reason why I'm stuck with a software job now sigh. But you are right, it is nothing to regret over, if a company can't handle this then I probably shouldn't be hired, life permits a few mistakes

 

Here nobody in IT looks at degrees in diploma.

Knowledge is tested in (off-line, so you have no internet access) exam in company building.

I was hearing multiple stories about interviews for local programmers.

One (easy) question was: develop multi-thread safe stack/dynamic array, which will not use mutex (or other multi-threading blocking functions).

Edited November 26, 2016 by Sensei

[Arete]

 

 

I know plenty. Time was that degrees were rare few people had degrees so therefore people with degrees got jobs. Now pretty much everybody has some form of a degree.

 

Just to clarify - you mean people with some form of tertiary education, or people with doctorate degrees?

[StringJunky]

 

Just to clarify - you mean people with some form of tertiary education, or people with doctorate degrees?

I think he means all degrees. I know people now with degrees that would not have been degree material in the 70's.

Edited November 26, 2016 by StringJunky