They Call It Work For A Reason
Hiring, Firing and Spiraling
Supposedly, it’s not hard to find a job, if you’ve been reading the news.
As a matter of fact, the unemployment rate is low. Super low.
Look at this graph from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Don’t be like that. Look at this here graph
You can see the high unemployment rate when the market crashed in 2008-2009.
You can see the Covid number stark as day.
Right now? It’s decent.
That’s not what this is about. I know, this is going to sound entitled and, dare I say, bougie. I’ll get to that.
I have a stupid saying but I say it all the time.
They call it Work for a reason.1
It’s not supposed to be fun, or playtime, or, as ungodly awful online articles will tell you, starting the day with coffee on the beach in your kitted out van with your Mac Powerbook and your yoga-pliable young wife in a crochet bikini and your stupid bicycle and your abomination of a haircut.
They call it Work for a reason.
Life is hard. Get over it.
But. OK. You’ve paid dues. You’ve sucked it up your whole career. You’ve had corporate highs. You have awards.
Like I have awards – The Grocery Manufacturer’s Association award for Innovation and Creativity and the Guinness World Record are crazy awards we won at Batter Blaster.
I didn’t invent Batter Blaster, Sean O’Connor did, but I worked my ass off for years, running Operations there, being O’Connor’s right hand guy. And we all worked to coordinate the extraordinary thing that was serving 72,863 pancakes in the middle of Centennial Park in Atlanta. A guy died there, allegedly. There was an ambulance standing by. We weren’t fucking around.
But OK, so I put that on my resume, and that and $10 American dollars will buy you a coffee at Starbucks. They might even spell my name right on the cup.
It is not hard to find a job. It IS hard to find a good job. It’s hard to find a job that caters to your lifestyle. It’s hard to find a job that covers your nut, if you’ve lived your life instead of scrimping and saving.
It’s hard to find the perfect job. It’s hard to find the “Thank God I have this job” job that you so desperately believe you’ve earned.
I’ve spent my life chasing startups and industries that seemed to capture my cultural loves: movies, music, food.
So have you. And then you had kids, or then you got sick, or then you went off to build your wacky startup idea that shit the bed, and that bed, and then a larger bed, or then you had comfy jobs and then layoffs happened. Or god forbid, you got fired, or replaced.
Technology has tectonic shifts. Some of us fall into the earth, or at least get knocked on the head by heavy things ill placed on high surfaces.
Sometimes, instead, companies just start to lay off employees like it’s the fashionable thing to do, like if you aren’t laying off people, are you even?
And if you get sidelined for any period of time in technology, or fall behind the times for even a moment, you are now “out of the game.” And there’s always someone waiting to fill that gap you left.
But listen. It’s also tough trying to hire good people right now.
The job market is just absolutely stupid.
At my last full-time gig, I was astonished, while hiring for senior engineer types, how many of the resumes we received were not real people. We’d advertised that we were hiring only on-site roles, and the resumes would be located in a town conveniently near Austin, with precise formatting, a spreadsheet of skillsets and programming languages, and impenetrable lists of experience.
The resumes were nearly identical – word salad skill descriptions with every technology on earth mentioned.
I peer-reviewed 600 robots.
My gut said these were foreign sweatshops where these employees would work remotely for a number of companies for fairly top-level US pay, double- and triple- and quadruple-timing, under the guise of an identity and location close to home.
Not to mention, it was so rare to receive a cover letter. The cover letter used to be *everything.* Now it’s just Easy Apply - fill out your resume on Indeed or LinkedIn, and hit a button to apply. So the hiring manager has to weed through hundreds if not thousands – we Easily Received 2000 applications for a single developer role – of resumes sent with absurd speed, no cover letter, no context, and nothing to do with the job itself.
For an employer, finding the right candidate can be excruciating.
Your most valuable asset is time. And that is what you spend trying to find the right candidate.
You want that person to not only fit the bill in terms of experience, knowledge, and personal network – especially if you’re hiring for business development or sales roles.
But you also want that person to alchemically augment your existing team, or similarly create magic out of limited resources. Especially if it’s a startup.
You want this person to come in early, work late, never complain. Otherwise, it makes your life harder.
So where do we meet in the middle?
After I started writing about this, a friend reached out and through that I got a consulting gig. It’s a fractional operations role.
This makes sense.
I get my time and freedom, they get the benefit of all the mistakes I’ve made — they won’t have to make them again, with someone younger, less experienced.
I get that the gig economy has its problems. But for those of us who are past our so-called prime — no, I don’t believe that either — lending our experience to multiple clients can be a lifesaver for everyone.
I’m not claiming to be inventing “consulting,” like when Elon suddenly invented “bus stops.”
What I’m saying is, maybe there’s an idea here, to unite startups with “experienced workers” who can fill fractional roles at a, yes, fraction of the cost.
These things, of course, exist already - they’re called recruiters, or there’s even an app for that, “Shiny.”
But they’re expensive. Recruiters typically charge 20-30% of the first year salary of an employee they refer. Shiny doesn’t publish their pricing, and says “Get a quote.”
I always intended to start a forum with this Substack, for job seekers and employers who don’t have the budget to hire a recruiter or use an expensive service.
I’m feeling like that’s a natural next step.
Ok, I’m off on a tangent, this is how my brain works. I even already had a buddy help me set up that forum. More on that soon.
Anyway, there’s work out there. It may not be the exec role you know you deserve, but there’s a place for you.
Or not. It’s stupid out there. Let’s get a bagel.
Thanks for reading Are You Experienced? As usual you can get in touch with me at nicholas (at) areyouexperienced.co
YES dot C-O, it’s cool now.
I’m Nick Tangborn, and I’ve been a media exec, a writer, a product guy, a marketer, and an ops guy, at companies like Batter Blaster, Rhapsody, CNET, BitTorrent, Napster, Lazaza, Otter Network, and Noise Pop.
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That post about grief took the wind out of my sails. Hopefully this week was a bit lighter. There’s a goddamn monkey gif.
I started to think about great movies about jobs while I was looking for that clip from Lost in America.
Have you seen “A Shock to the System,” with Michael Caine? He’s a nebbish executive (his wife Swoosie Kurtz says to him “I forgive you for failing”) who discovers he can change his life by murdering his rivals. Dark, but very funny.
I didn’t even know “Swimming with Sharks” had been remade as a TV show in 2022. The movie has Frank Whaley turning the tables on abusive boss Kevin Spacey. I don’t know if you can legally watch Kevin Spacey movies anymore, maybe it’s on Tubi.
It’s October so it’s horror movie season - watch “Return of the Living Dead,” where a new employee at a medical supply store accidentally unleashes brain-eating zombies, “Watch your mouth boy if you like this job!”
“The Inkeepers” by X/Maxxxine/Pearl director Ti West is a good, solid, meat and potatoes indie ghost movie. I love those Larry Fessenden-produced Dark Sky Movies of the mid-oughts.
Dick Maas’ hilariously stupid The Lift is about a haunted elevator at an office building. The trailer speaks for itself:
Or “Session 9,” an atmospheric haunted asylum movie about an asbestos removal job gone horribly awry. It’s one of my favorites.
Turns out there’s a book called “It’s Called Work For A Reason!” by Larry Winget but I’ve never read it. I’m pretty sure I heard an uncle say it once.
Great read! Yes, there are jobs out thare. And it’s shocking that EAs a recruitable roles these days, but we are…the “more experienced” the better!