resume

[monster]

Apply to the post office. None of those people like other people as far as I can tell......

[jimhelm]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

It's a two-way street: I've been laid off and/or fired as much as I've gotten disgusted and quit. My average time with any employer has been about two years. And in as much as I see my life as a series of failures, that's a treadmill I shouldn't return to. I need to find a place that fits, or jump off the Walt Whitman.

you're never going to find a place that 'fits.' Sorry if I'm being negative here, truly. but your ideal job with ideal coworkers? does anyone have that apart from business owners? just get a job that you're good at, that you don't hate, that pays you well enough to live... and suck it up. and don't joke about jumping off bridges. if it gets that bad, go walkabout.

[Undertoad]

Yeah, no. You have no idea.

It's OK, what I'll wind up doing is using a quarter of my abilities, to make half the pay I could, in a job where I refuse to play politics. And that's OK.

[jimhelm]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Yeah, no. You have no idea.

oh, I don't know about that. into every life a little rain must fall. I've gotten myself painted into quite a financial corner. I may have a good paying job, but you'd be amazed at how little I keep, and how much I owe. It's a truly untenable situation, and some days I think about high places. But I keep going. I get up and drive 1hr40min in, work 13 hours and drive 1hr10min home, sleep repeat. because I have to.

don't take a shit job. but take a job. don't worry about finding one that fits. fit yourself. I'm just saying it this way because from my perspective, you've been unemployed for far too long considering the intellect you posses.

you'll be able to justify it, I'm sure. And believe it or not, I'm not judging you. you're alive and breathing. you're man enough to attract and keep a mate. you've got a lot going for you. if you really want a job, GO GET ONE.

[Undertoad]

[jimhelm]

Or, shave, get a haircut and a suit, and go hand your resume to people in person. smile, and talk nice, and tell them that you want to work for them. And let the rejections roll off. You'll get more rejection than acceptance, count on it.

this is hard for me. i'm being a dick, i know. I'm sorry for it.

... but i see you dreaming and wishing. If you want a J O B, you need to act. I could just blow some more sunshine up your ass, but that seems to be covered already. WHAT YOU'VE BEEN DOING IS NOT WORKING. change it.

If I didn't really like you, I don't think I'd bother posting my opinion at all. But I DO.

I'm willing to help, if you think I can. for serious.

[Undertoad]

Thank you sir but I am highly aware of the bullshit.

It doesn't work like that in IT. In IT, you are judged according to what technologies you are aware of, what you did in your last job, and whether you can survive an on-the-spot quiz about the platforms you are expected to work in.

In IT, shaving and wearing a suit is bad, it means you are not an engineer and cannot work with your fellow neckbeards.

I went the traditional route after being laid off. But after two years of it, what I learned was that it wasn't going to happen for me that way. It was a subtle combination of things:

=> System administration, my area of expertise, is out of style. Due to simplification over the years, larger businesses can make do with fewer administrators, and smaller businesses can manage it themselves. And then there's cloud computing, which reduces the administration load by half.

=> My ability to survive the on-the-spot quiz diminished. I found myself unable to answer even questions that were routine when I was doing the job. Once some of this stuff is not on the tip of your tongue, everything changes. I was never particularly good at the quiz, because I always found it strangely difficult to go from interview mode to engineer mode at the drop of a hat. I found myself consistently embarrassing myself.

=> Being an older techie. Not just my own excuse, the NYTimes documented it recently: Old Techies Never Die; They Just Can’t Get Hired as an Industry Moves On

So... what to do...

I decided I had to create my own job, and that's what TOKEN was for the last year. It was not a successful business venture because we didn't have a sales model that actually got enough sales. But along the way, I did 65 different designs and taught myself good web design. Now I have a design portfolio:

http://tokeninternet.com/portf.php

And after tonight it'll also have a local beverages web site instead of my mama's site, which is actually too old to be up there.

THUS if I can't get a job involving my skills in web design, web development, marketing, system administration, and online community -- because people don't often hire GENERALISTS in IT --

I will then just go for the one sector of those five I actually qualify for, on the basis of the actual work I've done for the last year: web design.

The problem with that is, pure web design pays less than half what system administration paid.

And I'm damn certain there are web houses around that would die for someone who does all of the above and would pay much more for it. They won't advertise for it because they won't find anyone. It's highly unusual. And should be valuable. I don't know.

But web design, that'll my jobby job where jobbies grow on jobbies, if it comes to it, and that would actually be OK, if it comes to it.

Can't keep the house anyway, so fuck it.

[Aliantha]

My cousin and her husband started up a web design business from scratch because he couldn't find work in his chosen field that he could do from home.

He makes good money out of it although it was slow to start up, and he gets to work from home. Hardly ever has to deal with his customers face to face and works whatever hours suit him on the day.

If you're good at it, there's a market for it. You don't even have to be in the same country as the business is.

Think big. Go global.

Alternatively, think about a site you can start that'll be popular enough to support advertising or monthly subscriptions and build that instead.

I know a bloke who started the website www.stayz.com and he's making a very nice living out of it now and it's only been a few years.

You have skills most of us don't dream of. Use them.

[xoxoxoBruce]

My buddy got a job. They had a 15+ year man train him, which took almost a year. As soon as my buddy was trained, they got rid of the 15+ man. My buddy went to the boss, telling him he felt bad about taking the guy's place.

Boss, "I fire the frown".

[Undertoad]

I am the guy at work who always grins. They say UT is the happy guy. I used to be Bashful but I turned into Happy.

It doesn't work. The last guy who fired me said "You're a really nice guy but uh..."

A guy who fired me 15 years ago said last month "I'm really proud to have known you."

Another picture of this puzzle is that managers in IT are generally terrible, having come up as antisocial tech people and reached their level of incompetence. The best manager I ever had came up through supermarket management. Dealing with a thousand part-timers gave him great insight into what makes people tick. Best job I ever had.

And I left it for a $20,000 raise... at a consulting company that brutalized me. THAT job I left after six months for a $30,000 pay cut. The company was gone a year later. Live and learn.

[Undertoad]

If you're good at it, there's a market for it. You don't even have to be in the same country as the business is.

Think big. Go global.

In my experience, finding the market and figuring out how to sell to it is the hard part.

That was Token. The idea was, hey, most small retailers actually need a web site at this time - I could build nice ones and sell them very cheaply - we could even make it "no risk" and they could see their site before paying a dime - the competition charges twice as much, for a much shittier website. It should be the easiest thing to sell, ever, right?

[kerosene]

What exactly went wrong with Token, anyway? Could you adjust the sales model and make that business grow? Perhaps you could offer some kind of affiliate program for people who live in other states? I was thinking about your business just the other day while driving into my small town. I know there are businesses in my town that don't have websites and I believe I could get you some of those clients if you were interested. Let me know what you think.

[Undertoad]

It continues on as a sort of part time trickle

The theory was that, at our price, we could get a salesperson about $100-$125 out of the $399 "basic site", and that a motivated full-time salesperson could sell as many as one site per day and gross $50k/year.

In practice, when we tried it, it was never more than one per week. My biz partner seemed to suggest that he was not a good enough salesperson, but he could never convince anyone else to do it, except for one guy who is a part-timer and just gets things here and there for a few bucks.

Eventually the idea was to branch out, and we sorta had a model in mind for salespeople and sales managers.

What you suggest is always possible and I would be happy to accept sales from you and give you a fair cut of it. To ramp up to the point where it makes a fair living for me, it probably doesn't, but if we can both make some side money that is a fine thing.

~

I also wonder if the price is far too low to actually attract business.

I posted this earlier. Nationally, I think the biggest company selling websites to small business is Yellow Book. They have a million customers.

Here is the Token Internet website for Star Plumbing which cost them $399 first year, $99 each addl year

And Here is the Yellow Book site which cost them $840/year

To be fair, people prefer national brands for this kind of stuff. And they did get a link in yellowbook.com as part of the deal.

[jimhelm]

We are doing commercial vans now, so i'm meeting a few middling contractors that are doing well enough to purchase work vans.

If you have business cards and/or brochures, I could shill for you. If not....I just did a deal for these guys. It looks like their website could use a bit of a face lift. Maybe you could work out a deal in exchange for some printed materials?

[classicman]

I also wonder if the price is far too low to actually attract business.

and/or make enough money. What the YP does sux. I know web designers that charge 10x
what you do for multiple page sites, maintenance,SOP and all that. They never were below $2000 - NEVER.

Those may be directed toward a different demographic, but still, I think you'd be surprised who will pay (x) for a site.
I used to rep out on the side for one guy for a % of the total sale.
Since I've lost my job and the contacts I had, its a lot harder now for me.

OTOH, there are a lot of companies who've entered this market including ValPak, Money Mailer, Clipper, H&D
and a few others who have lost a lot of print revenue to the internet-ish types.