[DanI-S]

There are a shocking number of people here with no outward empathy, understanding nor willingness to see outside of their own limited experience.

The world is not the tech industry. Not everybody has the same perspective as you. In fact, more people find themselves in this chap's shoes than in yours.

You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur. How can you build a successful product if you can't put yourself in another's position?

[krschultz]

I agree that CS majors/professionals aren't representative of the rest of the economy.

But this guy also isn't representative of the rest of the economy.

My brother has an architecture degree. He graduated college in 2008. That is about the worst major you can have right now, and the unemployement rate for that degree is very high right now. To add insult to injury, architecture is a 5 year degree so he gave up 1 year of earning potential and tacked on more debt.

He was interning at an architecture firm before graduation, and started working there full time after graduation. About 6 months later, they went bankrupt and he was unemployed.

He got another job tangentially related to architecture and construction for the last 3 years, but wasn't very happy with the salary.

Meanwhile he has been applying for better jobs. Not 100+ like the author of this article, but networking through people at school and work. He interviewed with 3 or 4 major companies that would have been 'good' jobs. They all basically said, we are impressed with your resume and you personally, but we have a glut of people applying with 10 years of experience and you effectively have 0.

Finally in the last two weeks, one of those interviews came through. He was given an offer at a salary far lower than he would like, but it's in the industry he wants to work in. He took the job, at least he will now build experience.

It's a long freaking road sometimes, but throwing your hands up and saying 'my life is over' at age 29 won't get you anywhere.

And even with all the trials and tribulations - a 5 year degree and 3.5 years of work experience, my brother is only 27. So he still has 2 years before he turns into this guy. What the heck are you doing looking for your first job at 29?

[obtino]

I whole-heartedly agree! What people don't see past the 100 resumes a week is the underlying desperation that has engulfed this person. He's nearly 30, isn't married, doesn't own a reasonably sized home, doesn't have a family of his own and doesn't command the wage that he had expected to earn by that age. He has lived a majority of his life with (what he thought were reasonable) expectations. However, he has hit the cold, stark nature of reality.

People do strange things when times get desperate. I'm saddened that some people here can't seem understand this.

[tatsuke95]

I'm going to assume, since the newspaper is Canadian, that he's Canadian, like myself. He is also near to my age. There is ample work in our country, but you have to be mobile and willing to do labour.

It sounds to me that this fellow's problem is this:

>" I wanted the tailored suits, the chance at a high income, the BMW, the prestige, the respect, and the power."

Yet he wants that opportunity to be given to him, rather than going out and making it happen. He seems entitled, after graduating from University, to these opportunities. That ship has sailed. Our (my generation) father's worked in labour and helped create the middle class of North America. Why are we so against it?

[jarek]

If you're 29, your father would have most likely been born around 1955, reached adulthood in the 70s, and have middle class handed to him on a platter. Other than that, I have no concerns.

[jakejake]

I have some, but not a huge amount of empathy because I came out of school right during a similarly depressed time for finding work. I pounded the pavement looking for jobs with similar results.

Clearly this guy feels that he is entitled to be at an executive level even though he hasn't built up much real experience. He doesnt want to pay any dues and scoffs at a $36k/year job. I lived in Chicago working for $18k/year making photocopies with an evening job cleaning offices, barely able to pay my bills. I did that for 4 years and was able to use that experience to get a decent job. (probably could have moved up sooner had I been looking during those years) A few more years at the new gig and I made a more significant bump.

I would have killed for a $36k first job . (even with inflation it's much better than my 18k gig - I'm not that old!)

I'm doing very well now but it was a lot of work to build up the career that I now have. I probably could have moved up faster, but even still I needed that first crappy job to start the ball rolling. Ironically I'm starting to think about being unemployable due too being old, since tech can tend to be a young persons field. Maybe I'm just too old to relate, but things were not any easier back then.

[ef4]

You're right, I have a difficult time trying to empathize with this guy. Because my own emotional alarm bells would have been going off much, much earlier, back when he was failing to make any serious plan for how he was going to earn a living. When I put myself in his shoes, there's no way I see myself doing what he's doing. His pain is self-inflicted.

There are a hundred useful paths he could be taking to learn marketable skills. And yet he managed to write this whole essay without mentioning one.

This isn't just tech industry bias speaking. He could go to one of the natural gas boom towns and easily find work. They're having a major labor shortage, so wages are good. He could learn carpentry, or plumbing, or any number of things. Instead he keeps sending out futile resumes.

He's limited by his own faulty self-image. He sees himself in a suit, wielding power, but he doesn't see himself actually doing anything that produces value. That's his problem.

[TDL]

I have little empathy for this guy because I was him a decade ago. Going through life with a false sense of entitlement is no way to live. This individual believes that he was entitled to an opportunity, not that he had to go out and earn it. Furthermore, it seems as though this individual has allowed others to define wealth for him, in the end he has no idea what he wants and blames external issues for his misery.

If he really wants to work & make money, well companies are desperate for workers in the Bakken Oil Shale. I don't know about Canada, but in the U.S. many of the craft trades are also desperate for young people to get started. For example, in Illinois the average age of a plumber was 58 (it might be older now, I read that statistic a couple of years ago.) Young people aren't going into the trades apparently because it's not an acceptable profession. Everyone here knows about the needs in the tech industry so I won't go over them.

Lastly, his approach to finding a job is terrible (this is not necessarily his fault.) I've said this before & I will continue to say this (and I tell any young people this when I get a chance), when looking for a job you do not lead w/ your resume. It does not matter how well you researched the company, if you have not talked to people @ the firm or the hiring manager you do not know what they need.

[Doches]

You're right, I don't have a lot of empathy for this guy. If I found myself in this situation -- a not-implausible outcome, given the state of my life at the moment -- I would most definitely not react by mailshotting ~100 law firms every week. Or maybe I would, once, and when it didn't work I'd move on to something different. He's stuck in a rut and he knows it, which is what's so frustrating about this letter. It's not working, dude!

So do something else.

[randomdata]

To be fair, it is pretty difficult to imagine his situation. It is such an outlier example that it is needs more information to fully understand; information which is lacking from the article.

At 29, he's had 15 solid working years behind him. Not a single job in that time? (less a couple of short contracts - which are still jobs, so the headline is a bit of a misnomer) The economy hasn't been bad for that long, and arguably still isn't that bad, at least in Canada.

I get the impression that he decided to spend the first 20-some-odd years of his life focusing on himself, which is fine, I respect that if done without any illusions, but now he's scrambling to catch up thinking he should be at the same level as his peers who have spent years focusing on their careers. The world doesn't work that way.

If that is not his situation, it wasn't clear from the article.

[jczhang]

"You're likely posting on here because you're under some illusion that you're an entrepreneur." Ouch. That's gotta sting for some people here haha.

[cafard]

I was 29, quite a while ago. I was working in what clearly enough was s dead-end job, in business that hardly exists. During my 20s, I had only one brief spell without a W-2 job, but I wasn't making much money or doing any very interesting work. I regarded the roots of this as my own not figuring out what to do.