[sdiy] HR hell spam and other porridges.

[karl dalen]

Person 1 said:

Why can't you get hired?
It is simply supply and demand. I believe the supply of engineers greatly out strips the available demand of jobs to the point of being a glut. Managers and HR are simple little “thangs” and accusing them of anything more than taking advantage of a plethora of engineering choices is giving them too much credit for thinking and could be slanderous. Rather than engineers, imagine if one was a very rich customer who walked on to a car lot with thousands of new and used cars, what car would he pick? Imagine a young rich beautiful woman looking for a date in NYC, how would she pick? I saw a mid-1950’s article that IBM hired the whole engineering classes of a university sight unseen. Today, finicky managers have tens of thousands of graduates worldwide to choose either the best of the best or the lowest bidder and run them through a duplicitous HR wringer without a care. They cannot lose and have no reason to change until they run out of choices. If they
 ever did run out, then job ads as in the past will simply say “Engineer wanted, apply at XYZ” instead of the current ads where the word “and” is used like a machinegun in trench warfare to mow down the Mongol hordes of charging engineers and leaving only a lone “purple squirrel “that can do several jobs and more.

In economics class, any discrimination, other than price and quality, leads to inefficiency and those who make such biased decisions earn lower profits than non-discriminators. Age discrimination in economics is no different. Thus the duplicitous “thinking” of “man-agers” who think everyone is spent by 30 . . . except for them. But, Karma is a female dog and most of these same discriminatory companies I have seen are now either extinct or gasping for air. Needless to say, most engineers and college students are picking up on this “group think” and saying “why engineering”? For the pay, the girls, the retirement plan, the benefits, or the job security? People are not going to spend 10 years gaining education and experience to qualify for a career only to be scraped at 30. Alas, the more managers practice age discrimination, the more smart people will eschew engineering and the more these same managers will whimper to engineering schools to
 provide them with even more cannon fodder because they desperately need more “qualified” workers. Not because there is a shortage of experienced engineers, but only in their arrogant opinion that old engineering experience is not a quality. In the immortal words of an ex-manager at an ex-company when he said to an experienced engineer, “you do not have thirty years’ experience; you have one year experience thirty times over. Alas, is it no wonder that my alma mater’s CS program has dropped 75% and EE by 80% over a ten year period. The free market is working as promised and when the wind changes direction and it is HR/management’s turn to fall into the grinder, oh well. In 10-20 years, when all those unwanted unemployable old (40-60) engineers are scrapped and all those new smart graduates if they are really that smart, will not have become engineers what will they do then?

Person 2 said;

The unemployed do not get hired because they are not "safe" choices.
All the electronic filtering and hr screening is about finding safe 
choices, not about making good choices. A safe choice is one that can
be quickly justified to someone who doesn't know the particulars of the
situation. Being unemployed at any time, regardless of the economy, means
that some will think "maybe there is something wrong with this person". 
Not safe!!

Referrals work because someone trusted is taking some of the
responsibility for the decision.

Person 3 said:

Old people often learn slower.
Young people rush into rash catastrophes quicker work less hours.

Risk/Reward Ratio is completely unbalanced.
1.)fear - HR sees that corporate research has been cut and
they are next.
2.)greed - top down control organization. - hire only those with
the exact skillset; no more and no less. You are old and OVER-qualified.
3.)pride - HR can assess talent in 'snap judgement' 5 seconds.
4.)lust for the 'old ways' - we will continue doing things 'the same old factory way.'
The knowledge economy and 'open source' gain ground,
yet HR manager work mostly as 'clerks.' Very few have 'project manager'
skillsets where talent assessment is critical.
5.)anger at the 'cost of specialization and domain expertise.' Simple
example: Best Buy CEO over-expanded and wanted to keep the fancy stores.
So, he cut ALL the experienced salepersons SUDDENLY. He did not understand
that he ALSO cut the high profit sales revenue in areas like cables and
warrantees. Best Buy goes bankrupt. Note: headquarter's staff was NOT cut.

PS. the incessant 'networking' and
'youth' making friends at 'potential
employers' is a DISadvantage. It says:

1.)interested in job-hopping
2.)it's WHO you know, not what you do