Chickens,worms and snakes

Over the past two-plus years of un- or underemployment, I've been astounded by the degree of social regression that these hard times have brought on. This began with the epidemic of "career counselors" infesting the Internet, dispensing the same advice such people have been dispensing for 60 years. Whether for this reason or for others, gradually the worldview of people in business began to regress 50 to 60 years. It is true of employers, workers and unemployed alike. Those who haven't taken part in "self-help" groups for the out-of-work have not fully experienced the timidity, yes, the cowardice, of a large number of those out of work. And what do the "career counselors" do about this? Most of them enable gutlessness.

The item that especially vexes me is the growing mania over "no unemployed need apply" notices in help-wanted ads. This began with a pair of ads for blue-collar or no-collar jobs more than a year ago: right, just two. What may have begun as the aberrant behaviour of a redneck personnel manager then got pumped up by CNN and other media. One can scratch around and find anecdotes of the attitude of this loutish hiring manager and that. When one challenges the panicky unemployed and the enabling counselors to document their claims, they fall quickly back on the heart and soul of the urban legend:
"I heard it from the friend of a friend," or its infinite variations.

Bigotry against the unemployed (and especially the older unemployed) exists among certain people, and always will. To elevate a near-urban legend to this degree aids no one. It enables fear among the fearful, vindicates clueless counselors, and encourages employers to think such bias is a good idea.

Show me. Save these ads. Publish images of them, including the names of the employers and the date of the offending ad. But I forget, don't I? We have relapsed into an era in which the relationship of Dagwood Bumstead and Mr. Dithers has become representative, at least in the minds of too many people out of work. All the same, show me: fear makes repression possible.

Barking up the wrong tree

I'm breaking my rule about not discussing job stuff, but this observation has been shoved in my face once too often.

There are many reasons that my choice of late-life career is a mistake—and this is no surprise to some of my friends. The chief one relates to my librarian spouse's observation early in her career.

In that field, some two-thirds of the professionals are women. However, two-thirds of the directors and librarians in senior or more technical fields are men. Not too surprisingly, the women notice this and resent it. There is less of that today, but the memory remains.

The same is true of my new occupation. The overwhelming majority of coders are women, but a majority of health information managers are men. This has not changed as much as in library science. The result is that men, and especially men with degrees outside of coding, must overcome the suspicion that they are only blowing through the coding office on their way to a management job. Notwithstanding all those "earn big money--become a coder" TV ads, gender is one of the major hurdles prospective coders must leap. If you have a penis, it will absolutely get hung up in the hurdle.

Men with coding education can sometimes--eventually--get sorta-kinda coding jobs, such as what I now do. These are jobs that require coding knowledge, but to the Elect, they don't make you a "real" coder. You could do these jobs for 30 years and in their eyes you would still not be a "real" coder. This strikes me as self-fulfilling prophecy. The Elect close ranks and don't admit men to the sorority, so the men take their knowledge and previous education, bypass coding altogether, and wind up in the management ranks. It's a lot like a phenomenon known to all Navy veterans. No matter where you are, you'll hear that "this isn't the real Navy. When you get to ABC, then you'll be in the real Navy."

But you never get to the real Navy. Likewise, I wonder if men ever get to be real coders.

There are other hurdles which cut across gender lines. One is that the Elect have a settled prejudice against hiring graduates of any coding programme. They want their coders to come up the good old-fashioned way, starting as file clerks and working their way into a coding desk. Trouble is, there are fewer and fewer openings for file clerks because there are fewer and fewer paper files. There are also fewer and fewer high school graduates interested in coming up that old-fashioned way: they want into the express lane.

All this is going on against the backdrop of forthcoming huge technical changes in medical records, which will make much to the Elect's hoarded knowledge obsolete. Those changes will increase the demand for new medical records people fourfold. The response of the Elect so far is to circle the waggons and cloak themselves in denial. So in two or three years, when you the consumer can't get even a semblance of a straight answer about your bill, remember the Elect and their stranglehold on medical information.

I think I should turn back to my original objective: to obtain medical knowledge and wed it to my technical communications background. Then I can contribute to the one logical outcome of this impasse: computer applications that make the closed circle of coders entirely obsolete. It's good to have a goal.

More magick beans

Of all the fantasies foisted upon a gullible world by a cynical news media, I suppose this one is the one most likely to make my bile rise. Make your fortune!! Become a [fill in the blank]!

It takes me back many years, when I was scratching out a living at a well-known Boston historic site. Someone brought in a matchbook promotion for something called, I think, the Radical History Review. It read, with obvious sarcasm:

Earn big money! Become a historian!

This little bit of trenchant wit stayed with us long after the matches were gone, for those were the days when people smoked.

But we already were historians. Most of us who snickered at this matchbook already had advanced degrees in the field, or were in graduate school. What are we to make of these jejeune tales, which appear online (at least) about once a week? Headlines pump up hope, and stories that don't puncture that hope by mentioning, "oh yeah. You need a specialised education to get this dream job, and when you get the education, there will be innumerable objections to hiring you."

You might just as well stay in your mud-hole with the other peasants.

Now where was I?

Ah yes, the exams from hell. Done on Tuesday; everything shipped on Tuesday, only to get the out-of-office message that the hiring manager is on vacation. Why was it I hurried?

Meanwhile, yet another bolt from the employment blue arrived. Such things have happened off and on through this bleak period, but what I notice is that the targeting is getting better. Is that me, or them? It may be a toss-up. What does help is that the more Federal "guidance"* there is, the more valuable a writer who speaks health-care seems to be.

Yet another insight is helpful for others who, like me, are easily paralyzed by the idea of getting in touch with people with whom we once worked. Go ahead and do it. The worst that can happen is that you'll be right and they won't want to talk to you. More often, though, you'll be pleasantly surprised by the warm reception and the unsolicited good ideas.

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* Guidance is federal and health insurer-speak for "do this, or when we re-open Alcatraz, you'll be the first guest." It's my nomination for euphemism of the century.

Learning on two fronts

First we visit the ever-popular job search front, where we have a sign that things may indeed be getting better. In the past week I was, first, approached by a potential employer about a job I would never have thought of for myself. This used to happen in the good ol' dot-com boom days, when all one had to do was hang out a cyber shingle, then find the world at the door. The interesting thing about the interviews that result from such things is that the dynamic gets reversed. Instead of you persuading them about your abilities, they are persuading you what a good fit you'd be. No, I did not fall off the turnip truck. When I get in this situation, due diligence follows.

Next, another echo from the good ol' days. I applied for one of those jobs that usually rings the "overqualified" chime with employers. Hope having abandoned me, I expected nothing but the usual black hole treatment. Au contraire: HR called first to set up a phone screen. When I called back, they said that on second thought they were sending this up to the hiring manager. She in turn responded with almost 20 pages of exams, of a sort that I haven't seen since I studied for my certificate. I opened that email Saturday morning and didn't start until Monday (see below). At the moment the score is tied, and I hope to get this paperwork done tomorrow.

The reason I didn't start until Monday comes from the second front, home improvement. I bet you didn't know that a porcelain toilet tank can spontaneously crack when the weather is very hot and the water in the tank is very cool. Odd, yes; rare, yes, but it can happen and did happen last Thursday night at Chez Oncle. The only witnesses to the actual failure were the two very astounded cats, whose puzzled noises (and the sound of rushing water) brought the humans.

There is much more water in those tanks than you would think.

Early the next morning we called our plumber, who called back in under an hour. (This is what happens when you give all your business to one plumbing contractor.) After a bit of hemming and hawing about style, space, etc., we had a new crapper soon after midday.

It has one slightly creepy feature which will endear it to wives wherever plumbing is indoors: after a slight push, the seat closes itself. Slowly, I might add, so one has time to get clear and watch this thing from across the room.

Back to all that water. The deluge moved a nice-to-do project—re-tiling the bathroom floor—up to an immediate priority. Buying the tile took care of Friday afternoon. Regular readers may recall that this is the only john in the house, that it is on the ground floor, and that it was once a cute Victorian side porch. This was the bright idea of the strange character who lived here in the first half of the 20th century. I am the third generation of oddballs to live here.

It's not the strangest bathroom location hereabouts, though. I've been in two antique houses that have even smaller necessaries stuck under the stairs. However, once the appliances are in, that cute side porch makes a very small bathroom. The size means a small tile budget. However, it also means working a section at a time so that the facility can remain in use at stated intervals. Small also means an uncommonly large amount of twisting and turning, as well as cutting and fitting, which means the job takes about twice as long as would your ordinary 5 x 8 bathroom.

That job is not entirely done. When I ran out of Sunday, three old tiles remained unconquered. Now that my priority is taking my third go at coding exams. When that's done, it's back to the tiles. Interesting how what, in other circumstances, would be a trial turns into a respite.

Any suggestions for inter-costal sprains?

Cooks who spoil the broth

This topic came up a couple of days ago in a networking group I visit regularly. (OK, I brought it up.) A thread in a certain social networking group highlighted one of the problems that has surfaced when one blends 50-year-old job-hunting practices with a culture of privilege and entitlement.

The first "networking" was more or less learning to use and love the old-boy (or good-ol-boy) network. It seems to have worked very well in those days gone by when most people looking for a job already had one. It has steadily eroded over the past 40 years as the so-called social compact between the employers and employed has eroded. Now, most people looking for a job don't have one. Many haven't had one for some time. Although the era of the social compact and lifetime employment was dying or was dead before many of these people entered the work force, most of them still believe they have a right to—not just a job, but to all the money and perquisites they had enjoyed before the HR person with the empty box arrived at their cubicle.

When earnest employment pundits trot out their Haldane-era advice, especially about networking, that advice gets as garbled as the kids' game of gossip. What comes out is not the idea that you will actually try to meet a friend of a friend, in a place or field of interest, and make them your friend. Oh no: the output is too often that you will get the name of that someone, whether you have mutual connections or not, and demand that they give you an interview (i.e., give you a job). When that someone, very understandably, either ignores you or tells you to sod off, you then throw a tantrum. This has happened more and more often over the last 15 years or so, to the point where the artificial networking structure built on the old-boy example is pretty much dead.

And yet, the job search experts still bang on this drum all day.

Entitlement shows itself in unusual ways, even amongst the formerly entitled. The 1950s were a wonderful, gilded age in the USA: if you happened to be a white Protestant male. It was solid gold if you were a rich, white, Protestant male.It seems that a great deal of the loud social angst of the present is coming from people who resent the social changes of the last 40 years or so, which amount to a message to please share. They did not want to and they do not want to: a characteristic reaction of the terminally spoilt.

As I've been poking around the topic of age bigotry, I've had the unsettling experience of discovering just how many of these spoilt brats still remain in the corporate world and in the ranks of the unemployed. Many—but not all—of them are over 50. Many are obstinate in their refusal to start their job search with a look in the psychological mirror*. To them, their loss of privilege must always be someone else's fault. People who actually have done nothing more to employers than have the gall to get older may very well be collateral damage in a conflict between the fools who did the sacking and the fools who got sacked. Possibly bigotry enters into the business only because bigotry of any sort is a symptom of stupidity.


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*A look in an actual mirror is irrelevant. Any job search pundit who advocates a physical makeover as a solution to unemployment has never taken a look at online background checks, in which age is the first data point. Perhaps dispensing online job search advice is the one field available today in which stupidity is a positive virtue.

Har-de-har

By now, regular readers (and even irregular ones) will have noted a common theme at this address, that all career advice dispensed on the Internet is worthless, especially if it's dressed as news.

Our latest specimen comes from Investopedia, by way of Yahoo news. It's one of those useless lists of jobs that are desirable for one reason or another. In this case, the desirable feature is that they are supposedly low-stress jobs.

The story hews to the common formula, which is to dredge up the list and coyly neglect to mention that one doesn't just walk in off the street, say one wants one, and demand top dollar. The formula also demands that sources, if any, be at least ten years old, and that the overall context bear no relation to reality.

The envelope please. Our candidates for low stress jobs that anyone can get are:

• Physical Therapist
  
  
• Computer Software Engineer
  
  
• Civil Engineer
  
  
• Technical Writer
  
  
• Massage Therapist

You're all welcome. As a technical writer, I knew you could use the laugh at the end of your stress-free week. Technical writing is very stress-free these days, because to have job-related stress you have to have a job, eh? On a recent occasion when I was approached about a position within my skill set, I had to delay my reply to answer a phone call. By the time I called the recruiter, the req. was gone. There had been 35 applications within 15 minutes of the req. being posted. This, mind, was for a three-month contract whose annual rate worked out to much less than $47,000-$98,000.

For my next stress-free job, I want one writing these Internet business fantasies. I imagine the pay is chump change plus all the hallucinogens you can swallow.

Wooed to return?

No older worker can accuse US News & World Report of being pessimistic. A May 10 article trots out an impressive and convincing set of statistics that support the present and future need to involve more older American workers in the workforce.

Trouble is, this will happen over the dead bodies of most middle and senior managers, and nearly all HR people, alive today.

In my experience, most managers between 30 and 50, and a few older than that, are threatened by older workers. A good many also harbour unresolved fears of their own mortality that the mere presence of older workers tends to reinforce. If one is going to make the transition, it becomes a matter of changing the psychology of management.

Nothing could be better for the future than sacking every HR department. Assuming that won't happen, they must be jolted out of attitudes toward older workers that are a half-century out of date.

Here, we have a (possibly overstated) example of the stereotype of the older worker held by most managers, HR people and job search pundits:













And here, by contrast, is an actual woman (Helen Mirren) at age 63, photographed in 2008:

One grants that many of us haven't held up quite as well as Dame Helen, but I suggest that my generation more resemble the latter than the former.

Will the wooed, if they return, be able to change the culture of the wooers? Many people who accept their enforced retirement now do so because they are fed up with long hours for no additional pay and with incompetence at every level of management. This old guy would go so far as to say the long hours are in part a result of incompetence—the combination of bad planning and lack of coordination that makes long hours necessary. They are also in part the result of a culture of phony machismo that makes excessive work hours a hallmark of manliness. Sorry: endurance of that sort only counts in one place, mates, and it is not the office.

WBZ-TV analyst Jon Keller asked, in the aftermath of the Celtics upset of Lebron James, whether that did not suggest the value of age and experience. It might, for those who have a brain...not to mention those long past the ages at which the Celtics are considered "old."

I would say that the inmates are in charge of the asylum in today's work world if I weren't entirely convinced that the results would be better if they were. The situation is much worse. The asylums of work and media are run by those people who have never been blessed with a moment of self-doubt, who are sure of their course and perennially optimistic, even as they plunge over the cliff. Many of those the world calls crazy would have more self-awareness than that.

The best revenge open to older workers is to wait for the wooing...and to reply with the finger. If we follow the US News logic, the future of this economy is in our hands. By the time the wooing begins, those of us still alive will have discovered the best of gifts: the understanding that we do not need most of the things for which we once slaved, and that we do not need to be treated like galley slaves to get what we most need in life.

And if you don't think the media speaks out of both sides of its mouth on such matters, consider this, which appeared whilst I was dawdling over this item.

Insights from the cattle show

There was a cattle show yesterday: oh excuse me, a career fair. I went, as usual, as a forlorn hope. I saw three employers, one of whom had something intelligent to say, and one of whom has gotten, today, just desserts.

The positive contribution came from a consulting firm's recruiter who left me with something to think about. Rather than focus on what my record has to offer objectively, she suggested concentrating on what it offers subjectively. That is, I have many years of varied experience related to their competencies, look "distinguished" (old) and could quite possibly play a management consultant on their TV. That's a flippant way of condensing serious advice that I mean to look into.

Now for the comeuppance. I was getting the standard polite brushoff from one person representing an IT company, when her associate barged in, evidently bent on getting rid of this annoying old fart: fine behaviour for a "diversity" job fair, but there you are. Ms. Rude backed off quickly when she discovered that I knew of and had used a number of contemporary technical writing tools. Apparently she thought that the limit of my technical skill was the electric typewriter. That wasn't so much a comeuppance as a board check.

The comeuppance came today with the news that this company has been sold. One can look forward to the possibility that some of its HR people will be looking at life from the other side of the recruiting table. One can only hope that the polite ones stay, and the jerks go.

The job-hunting peeve of the week

For some hilarity, I read an unsolicited resume review from JobFox. Now, first you have to understand that I don't apply to openings on JobFox unless I expect nothing to come of it. I've read enough reviews of the site to suspect that anything that comes from a free member goes direct to the delete button. Once in a while, they hit on something that is both interesting and up-to-date. I apply on the company's Web site.

I won't bore you with the details. It was a useful reminder that the resume they had was nearly six months old. I don't have "a" resume anymore than I have "a" cover letter. I have templates that I rework according to the position, and as a result my presentation evolves over time.

However, their professional resume writer—and what else was this but a pitch to spend $400 for their resume service—punched one of my hot buttons. No matter what you have in your resume, I will bet you that if you get a "professional" resume review, the reviewer will sing you a song about how you're not showing enough specific instances of original contributions and innovations in your previous jobs. This burns me in two ways. First, it's right out of the original Bernard Haldane playbook from 50 years ago. Second, almost no one who makes a living fleecing the jobless asks whether these sacred texts still have any validity.

When Haldane wrote, the majority of career counselor clients had a job and wanted a different one. People who played by company rules kept their jobs and their stress levels for life. Even "troublemakers" (i.e., innovators) weren't fired but sidelined. Now, anyone can get whacked, and most people writing resumes do so because they have to, not because they want to.

Even though this fundamental change has taken place, job-search pundits act as though nothing has changed. In the era of lifetime employment, the job-seeker needed this powerful record to explain the desire for change and to show what he (usually he, then) could bring to the new party. Many of today's unemployed have worked for companies that went out of their way to penalise originality and innovation: the very people whose only resume was their first one 50 years ago are now out of work. Some of today's unemployed may also come from occupations in which innovation can be an outright disaster, for example finance. Do the pundits and resume writers ever ask about this? No; the sacred texts say you have to be original and innovative. This may be true in the parallel universe that they, and HR departments, inhabit, but it may not be true in the real working world.

Two of my three recent employers were very, very cool to the idea of original thinking about anything. At one, originality was a quick ticket from the production end of things to something like facilities management . The second was holed below the waterline and throwing people overboard long before I found a way to make original contributions despite their attitude. The result of course is that innovation has no place on my job record from either.

I've lined up my position for the next time I get face time with one of these experts. After first pointing out this inconvenient truth, I mean to ask if they want their clients to lie on their resumes? It bloody well sounds like it. If not, then I still have my original question: when do they plan to throw out ideas generated in a lost world, and help people respond to what is going on around them?

A minor insight

The listserv of an area networking group I frequent, and several LinkedIn groups I'm in, have a certain monotony to their topics. In several previous comments, I've noted that the advice of most job-hunting pundits had grown a bit stale. That's me; I've lost more jobs than any three other people in any of these groups. After a dozen or so of these experiences, one has heard nearly all the ideas. It would be nice to hear something new, but the business of hawking stale job-seeking advice relies upon the innocence of large number of people (of all ages, genders, faiths, etc.) who have never been laid off or fired.

I'm beginning to see that here's more to it than sharp pundits and inexperienced job seekers. Many of today's professionals bring a set of entitled expectations to the job search party. A great many of those looking for work today led very fortunate lives until the HR person with the cardboard box showed up at their cubicle. No one has ever said no to them; anything they wanted they could have; their expectations were only going to get better. The average credit card debt in the USA was reportedly $11,000 going into this recession, and I expect I've been seeing some of the people above the 50th percentile. I meet these people every other week. Sometimes old faces by now, sometimes new: for some of them, interruption or loss of unemployment benefits could mean homelessness in a Brooks Brothers suit. This is a stunning fall for them. I was stunned once, but that was nearly 30 years ago: and I was never so deeply in debt or in shock as to be threatened with actual homelessness.

One never knows where one may find wisdom. At the moment, I've been finding wisdom in the legacy of a troubled childhood. I've found it in Navy service that didn't make me a hero but showed me how to endure. It's available in many years of public sector, non-profit work and writing, for incomes that would appall many of today's unemployed professionals. There's even wisdom in the old saying that just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean they are not out to get you.

Long ago, I had bouts of jealousy, wishing I had been born more privileged. Now, not so much. I have not liked everything I experienced, but it's made me better able to put up with hard times. It's made me able to mock the foolish aspects of the job-seeking process rather than be eaten away with anxiety. I would be able to muster more compassion for what I've been seeing if I were not so surprised at the childlike helplessness of so many unemployed professionals.

As the song says

Nobody's ever taught you how to live out on the street,
Now you're gonna have to get used to it.

More dumb job hunting tricks

Every day, I open one or two posts from the LinkedIn advice-to-the-jobless lists. From the perspective of someone who has done all this before, few have anything constructive to offer, mainly because they serve up opinion as fact, and the opinions conflict.

But they are an endless source of unintended comedy. For instance, take this nugget from the latest post on the "new" resume: if your name isn't gender-specific, or it's hard to pronounce, use your nickname in your resume. HR people shy away from names that are either, we are seriously told.

Well, that must be one hell of a diverse workplace! Here's a little rocket for the pundits. The world of Anglo-Saxon names as the gold standard is d-e-a-d. A great many of us who possess diverse names don't have nicknames, don't want nicknames or, if we do, the nicknames are as unpronouceable as the given name.

Not to mention that many people with ethnically acceptable names don't like their nicknames either and don't like people assuming that they do. This isn't advice: it's the sort of smarmy bonhomie that makes so much of American business a joke. Nope, sorry: the burden is on HR people to ask the courteous question "How do you pronounce your name?" or let the candidate pronounce it. In a diverse world, discomfort is a pathetic excuse.

It makes me wish my first name was Gruffydd (Griffith, to English-speakers, and so pronounced) so I could follow this idiotic advice and use the nickname that goes with it: Guto (GEE-toe). Wouldn't that help in HR?

Deliver us from experts.

It's an attitude, not a number

I won't be reading Monster.com's Monster Careers at 50+ News again any time soon. The lead story today was "Get Computer Skills as an Older Worker," showing a guy old enough to be my father (who would be 93 now if he were still alive) getting computer lessons from some perky Gen-X person. The text was worse: offensively patronising and totally ignorant of the cultural divide that starts, at this moment, around age 65.

People between 50 and 65 grew up with, and in some cases helped to create, the revolution in information technology that people under 50 take for granted. We are used to learning one set of IT skills, only to modify them or replace them in three or four years. The life cycle of software is in our DNA. We have learnt quickly all our lives, and aren't going to stop learning just because we have passed a chronological milestone that frightens people a few years younger than we are.

Many, but not all, people older than that do need to be brought along in their IT usage. It may not be as natural to them as to succeeding generations, but they too have been busy learning in changing times for much of their lives.

There are two different generations in that "over 50" label. I am disappointed that an entity like Monster is so unconscious of this distinction, and so ready to contribute to age bigotry whilst pretending to do otherwise.

Oh, then there are the discussions. They're inhabited by provocateurs and crybabies for the most part: the former do their damnedest to encourage and perpetuate age-based stereotypes. The latter demonstrate that attitude, as the title says, matters more than chronology.

It doesn't matter whether you are 33 or 63. Play the hand you're dealt, and don't waste your breath blaming one party or the other, or bemoaning the job you had that is now gone. Whining is both unproductive and irritating for everyone else at the table.

Pity Monster didn't have a comment option at the bottom of these articles. They did have a rating box, and I rated this one poor.

Can I have some, please?

What I want is whatever the jobistas and the reporters who cover them are smoking or sniffing when they look at today's hiring report and see bouncy good news:

• The 13 percent of firms polled plan to hire in the next quarter; this—and an unknown controlled substance—are the source of the euphoria. However,
• 13 percent plan layoffs, and
• 73 percent are still going to stand pat with the workforce they have.

If I tried to sell you on something that showed a success rate of about one in seven, then told you it was the best news since sunshine, you'd probably lock me up.

[Late news, Wednesday: I went to my primary networking group today. Even the moderator, who is usually one of those uber-optimist types, expressed extreme scepticism about the last couple of rounds of jobs data.]
[Still later news: new claims jumped to 474,000. Note that the "continuing claims" data includes no one on extended benefits, like me.]

There is one thing I'm quietly betting on. It is that those grand and spectacular reductions in job losses just announced, on the order of a 90 percent reduction, are somebody's clerical error. We won't get that confirmed until six months or so from now, and by then we'll all have something else to worry about.

We ain't all CEOs

Previously I commented here about the long shadow cast on job-seeking techniques by the legacy of Bernard Haldane and the executive culture of the 1950s. Since then I've had two further reasons to question the conventional wisdom.

A discussion on the LinkedIn group Career Change Central goes on at some length about personal branding, which has become the buzz-phrase of the moment. This one increases its buzziness by an order of magnitude because it discusses personal branding in the context of using social networking for job searches. That has become an even more prevalent buzz-phrase.

It isn't that these ideas don't have merit. It is that examples which speak to the networks and culture of the executive suite don't address the needs of ordinary worker. A friend of mine has stretched his benefits with occasional day labour on construction sites. Sometimes, he says, you have to stand out on the corner with the undocumented aliens. But the job search gurus don't seem to get it.

Along these lines, one reason many people of my generation are anxious or pessimistic about retirement is that they have accepted the generalisations of the financial planning gurus without considering their own situation. Those generalisations recommend financial resources that are perhaps half again what the most diligent working stiff is able to acquire in a lifetime of none-too-stable employment. As a result, they are alarming, depressing, and actually offer more discouragement than encouragement.

I was in a meeting the other day with a non-profit finance person, who pointed out the core fallacy. These generalisations may be valid if you have large and relatively unavoidable expenses, such as a $3000 a month mortgage or children still in college. However, if your children are grown and if you are accustomed to living modestly, she maintained that one can retire on considerably less than conventional wisdom dictates. We had run our own figures recently and come to much the same conclusion.

The lesson for people who feel economically unready for retirement is to do their own math and consider their own situation. The takeaway for financial planners is that we don't all need a new BMW every other year or travel four times a year. Now that the top 20% has to live like the rest of us, the planners would do well to lower their targets in tune with lowered (i.e., reasonable) expectations.

Solving time travel

The job fair I attended today was the usual forced-smile, dreary affair that is normal for these things in all but the very best of times. There we some three dozen exhibitors, most of whom were there to fill a handful of positions at the entry level of bottom feeding careers in bottom feeding industries. I managed to tease out four that had some connection to my skill set, had my conversations, left my resumes and left.

Imagine my surprise when I got home, glanced at the local evening news and saw what looked like the same fair, certainly the same room with the same faces. However, the fair they were covering was an IT worker's paradise, with recruiters begging to hire skilled people.

The most logical conclusion* is that the video crew passed through a wormhole and ended up in a parallel universe. The way I can confirm this is that at my job fair, in this universe, the company reps looked at my name tag, heard me say my one-syllable name—and mispronounced it. Right down to earth, that.

*Naturally, we could not suggest that TV news was lying like a rug now, could we?

The indiscreet deceptions of job hunting

The alarm of my job-hunting compeers over the fact that I express opinions here would be cubed if they also knew that here, among other things, I

• discuss in detail a chronic disease that I live with, in ways that I hope could be clinically useful to somebody
• admit to being over 40; considerably so

Twice in the past, in interviews, I detected and ignored warning signs of age bias in interviews for freelance gigs, bias that took very little time to appear. The most immediate, and subtle one, I call "the look." This is body language from the interviewer that says they clearly expected someone at least 20 years younger and that they do not want an older worker.

HR departments and hiring managers read the same articles that older job-seekers read. They want neither a bad reputation nor a followup phone call from the interviewee's lawyer. Also, they may be under immediate pressure to fill this particular position. They don't ask the giveaway questions that we're all coached to answer, and you, the job-seeker, give suitable answers to the questions they do ask. You're hired, and life in hell begins as soon as you get your cubicle.

Companies afflicted with age bigotry (that's what it is, pilgrims) are unlikely to get as far as this blog. All but the most basic HR departments now have a background check subscription, through which they run everybody. When they do that, the second piece of information they find is age. If they're age bigots, the story ends there. All of the clever little dodges job-seekers have learnt to use over the past 25 years are useless. They don't need this information; they're not even supposed to ask for this information until they've hired you. It doesn't matter, because all they have to do is key your name into a security screening search engine and they have your age, right there between your name and address. I'm not making this up: I tried it recently.

Between this revelation, and those two uncomfortable gigs that wasted my time and the clients', I've reached one of my defining conclusions. Up to a point I'll play the hiring game but, if anyone crosses a line by word or by action, I'll be in their faces. Yes, I'm old. Suck it up, because I have. Yes, I live with a chronic disease. I have taken less sick time in the eight years I've had it than most people half my age. Unlike most of them, I know how to work through pain and be reasonably productive in spite of it. Unlike people afflicted with bigotry, I'm not sick all the time.

One of the three best bosses I've ever had was on a job I began about four years ago. When we started work together, he was 29 and I was 58. It is not age difference that is a barrier to understanding. I do not think timeworn formulas about cost and seniority and sickness are anything but excuses. It is that in some essential part of themselves, age bigots have not grown up. They are afraid of what seems like an upside-down relationship with older subordinates. Most of all, they see older workers as an uncomfortable reminder of their own mortality, a thing to fear. Like most humans, they lash out at what they fear.

My 29-year-old boss did none of these things. We both knew my compensation related to my time with the company: my age meant nothing. He could see for himself that sick and well, I produced, and that I took less time off than my younger peers. Above all, he had enough confidence in himself to define the relationship purely in terms of supervisor and employee. I was never some sort of surrogate for his older relations or remembered authority figures. He wasn't afraid of his own mortality, so did not have any fear to project on to anyone.

It may be too much to expect the same thing in another job, but I hope not. As a boss, JB was the antithesis of age bigotry. If he could do it, there's no excuse for anyone else.

In this contest, at least a portion of us hold the upper hand. First, age bigots must, if they do not die, get older. By writing their fears into corporate conduct, they stand a very good chance of being treated as we now are treated...and not far in the future, either. Second, all busts end. The demographics, and the damage wrought to retirement incomes, both dictate that older workers will be a significant part of the workplace within five years. Age bigots will be obliged to face their fears sooner or later. Third, I just crunched some numbers at home. If we both retired tomorrow (which would be involuntary) there would be enough in the piggy bank to support us. No Caribbean cruises each winter, but we wouldn't be eating cat food either. In my experience age bigots tend to be assholes in other aspects of their management style. The reality of older workers with other income sources means that I and others like me will be calling a lot more shots when it comes to work-life balance. It's much harder to bully people who don't need your job to survive, and it will place a higher premium on imaginative and collaborative management styles that allow everyone to give the best they have to offer. And don't forget that a good part of our often maligned generation made life very miserable for Authority when we entered the stage. Many of us are prepared to be just as troublesome when we leave it.

The age bigots can enjoy their moment, but they should either change, or be preparing for future careers as tailgunners on dump trucks.

Tried patience

For about two months my various job-hunting resources have inundated me, and every unemployed person within reach, with fearful advice on the proper care and feeding of social networking sites.

Most of the advice is chyme.

I was thinking about this the other day whilst going over the Facebook entries of various friends and relations who are either employed or legitimately retired. They are easy, relaxed, natural, unaffected, without being the least likely to set off the sensitivities of an uber-hypersensitive age. In short, they are social.

None of this will do for the employment gurus. In their view, one must purge these products of one's hours of social activity of the slightest trace of humanity, and turn one's image into that of an asocial, Orwellian automaton. This, says I after many job hunts, may get the interview. It won't get one the job, because any sane HR person looking at the flesh-and-blood person, rather than the sanitised social networking profile the job gurus advised you to present online, will be convinced that the interviewee just showed up from a parallel universe. If you are a match for your sanitised profile—for example, if you walk the beach in wingtips and wear a tie to bed—there may not be such a great disconnect.

A Web site is in the works here, and after some thought it will link to this blog. When I mentioned that intention at a networking meeting, I said that the blog contained sometimes candid opinions. My well-indoctrinated meeting mates rose up as one and said, "be careful! You can't do that!" I said nothing to them but it made my mind up, and formed an obvious rejoinder to such over-anxious caution.

I'm a writer. When I'm not expressing my (hopefully) informed opinions in public, I'm collecting the opinions of others or, as an editor, I'm giving shape to the opinions of others. A writer who would do none of these things is of no use to anyone.

The job gods need to reconsider this approach, along with many others. Not everyone they advise is in sales or marketing, or bean-counters or in some other role where they have no right or interest in giving an opinion. Many job-seekers are in occupations which demand that they give, or present, informed opinions. By my observation, much that the authorities say about social networking simply increases the anxiety level of people who are already too anxious to make good decisions. Perhaps I'm alone in thinking that is unhelpful.

Are you worried about either your past remarks or the boisterous remarks of your friends and relations? These sites have privacy functions: use them. It costs nothing. An inquisitive HR type can discover that your name is on this site or that (which proves that you live in the 21st century) but that you choose not to share your personal information with the universe. If they have a problem with that, you're better off not working for them. Wiser heads might conclude that if you do not want to hand out free passes to your own personal data, you might be just as discreet with theirs.

There will be more on this directly.

More on the gentle art of career counseling

Career counselors recognise Bernard Haldane (1911-2002) as the founder of their profession. It was with the firm he founded that I had my first round of job coaching 27 years ago.

First, I call the reader's attention to the dates of Haldane's chief influence: 1960-1977. Second, I suggest Googling just Mr. Haldane's name, which brings you to the firm he founded (and left in 1977) and the many, many pages of consumer complaints against it. Just hold those thoughts.

When Haldane coined the expression "hidden job market," he meant nothing more or less than the jobs one finds using friends, contacts, or business networks. When I was a Haldane client, no one pretended otherwise. You were set on your feet and given some tools that allowed you to live by your wits. Anything that was hidden, one had to tease out for oneself. If you browse some of the consumer complaints, you'll get an idea that times have changed. So they have, and what has changed, I think, reflects some of my misgivings about today's career counseling/coaching/job pontificating in general.

The Haldane methodology was developed in and for the business world of the 1950s and 60s. There was no Internet, no voicemail, no key card access to office buildings. There were no mass layoffs at the first sign of economic trouble until the early 1970s. At most times, the number of people in the job market was manageably small. If you needed resumes, you had them printed. I mean printed: offset usually, but maybe even with hot lead typesetting. Telephone screening was a receptionist whom one could get (hopefully) on one's side. Building security was the night watchman.

It was very much an old boys' club, with a relatively finite number of industries. In the upper levels, the old boys belonged to the same clubs and were only a couple of degrees separated from every other old boy in the country. The very informal networking taught by Haldane worked very well in that world. His business model saw to it that only people affluent enough already to have some entree to those power networks became clients. Those people, in theory, needed only encouragement and coaching to pull strings they already had.

It was also a world of sexism and segregation, not only by race and gender but by religion and ethnicity. No manager ever had to worry about provoking a lawsuit by circumventing equal opportunity laws: there weren't any.

By the time Haldane sold his company, there were signs that the world was changing. By the time I was a client in the early 1980s, the social attitudes were under pressure, word processing had appeared, the phenomenal growth we've seen of industries, not just businesses, had already begun. Today, the climate in which and for which the Haldane model was created has vanished almost completely. I suspect the company's business model did not keep up. In the early 1980s, for example, the firm's well-compiled lists of companies who were hiring, and hiring managers, were valuable to clients, because the only other like tool a job-seeker had was the print want ads. Today, such lists must be obsolete the minute they're generated. Somehow, the mantra of the network being hidden inside you, the client, seems to have collapsed in response to the naive people who expect they are going to get a medicine show elixir of secret formulae. That's a pity all around.

What can we say of the hundreds of career authorities (feel free to pick your label) whose business model is still Bernard Haldane's? For one thing, it's no wonder the present has them stunned and confused, to use Lincoln's simile, "like a duck hit on the head." In a field that requires a continuous show of unfailing optimism, these people simply cannot say "I don't know what to do next." What do they do in an employment environment in which job vacancies must be posted, are posted globally in nanoseconds, and may have a quota of finalists (from 1000 candidates) within 24 hours? How can job-seekers trumpet a prepared list of their strengths to HR departments whose sole interest is whether a candidate fits ten qualifications out of ten without having to apply any lubrication? What if the majority of a job-seeker's actual network of friends and colleagues are either retired or themselves unemployed?

These are questions never conceived of 50 years ago. My personal cure for my native pessimism is to make a joke of it, ("I'm a Celt: I think optimism is a social disease.") but I am exasperated and amused by turns by the pervasive denial shown by so many of the people who have the damn gall to give advice when they truly don't know what the questions are anymore.

Show us some imagination, pundits, then perhaps we'll give you some confidence.

Now I know why my eyes hurt

It's because I roll them so much in response to the advice of employment experts.

The latest item, which has come at me twice in networking meetings, is a rather sinister expansion of an obvious observation about social networking sites. The obvious observation is aimed, naturally, at twentysomethings, since of course no old people would ever use social networking sites*: "keep your toga party pictures private**." The favourite cute saying is to put nothing on the Internet that you wouldn't want to see on page one of the New York Times the next day.

The sinister expansion is the suggestion that you avoid saying or posting any words or images that could possibly, by any stretch of the imagination, offend anyone in any HR department anywhere in the solar system. When last I looked, the word for this was censorship and I'll have no part of it, thank you very much. What put me over the top, I think, was the fear one person in the group had about putting family cookout pictures on the family Facebook profile.

I remarked earlier that I have no anxiety about seeing anything I write on page one of the New York Times, provided I get the byline and the cheque. I have made just about all of my living putting my name on my words, or making other people's signed words look their best, for 25 years. My education and my experience have given me both a theoretical and a practical appreciation of the limits of free speech, libel, and copyright law. This is a background that few employment pundits enjoy. Perhaps—no, certainly—most people looking for work don't have these advantages. However, some do, and people who seek to tell me how to find work ought to have the flexibility to recognise that. The credibility of career advice columnists is low enough without them trying to shove everyone into the same tent of timidity.

Kindly remember that the key term on most social networking sites is social. LinkedIn reverses the equation, giving priority to networking of the professional variety. Facebook keeps me in touch with my relations, while LinkedIn keeps me in touch with my professional relationships (or would if I gave it due diligence). Perhaps the distinction is unclear to some people. I guess they are the same ones who think that one cover letter suits all possible occasions. Who am I to disabuse competing job seekers? However, I have some right to expect better of anyone who presumes to offer me expert advice.

The reductio ad absurdum of this panicked reasoning is to imagine what Twitter would look like if every tweet had to be vetted by an attorney. To paraphrase Bobby Day:

All the little lawyers on Federal Street
Love to hear their clients go tweet tweet tweet.

New times always require new thinking, but the people making money from advice to the unemployed seem unable to grasp that. The play 1776 archly portrays the timidity of a Continental Congress overwhelmed by its undertaking until, in frustration, John Adams shouts:

It's a revolution, dammit! We're going to have to offend somebody!

As writers, we probably will.


*Note to the age-biased: you may want to check your prejudices against the demographics. Older users are Facebook's fastest-growing segment, and we'll be taking over Twitter next, mwahahaha!

**Note to the job advice pundits: "toga party" is so 1963.