9M American men in prime working age can’t find jobs. I’m one of them
Well, HN never fails to to disappoint with the libertarian &quot;pull yourself up by your bootstraps&quot; and &quot;just learn how to code&quot; rhetoric.<p>A slew of survivorship bias comments that seem to focus on the 1 sentence of the article, where the author is saying they do not consider a manual labor job to be practical, and neatly ignoring everything else.<p>Here are some things most commenters have willingly ignored from the comfort of their privileged ignorance of economics:<p>1. Depending on your health, working a manual labor job at 47 may be a net negative value. Your body does not heal or recover that well from prolonged repetitive tasks, so working long days for a $12&#x2F;hr wage may actually be a worse deal from not working at all. If this country had federal health care, then it might have made sense, but since we have the for-profit approach, it doesn&#x27;t.<p>This can be true even if he&#x27;s in perfect health right now.<p>2. Ageism is more real than you think. Especially ageism when it comes to the resume and job history. Since he&#x27;s not an engineer, the thought process of a potential employer goes like this: this guy is 47 and he hasn&#x27;t held a management job once in his life, nor progressed beyond basic tech support and customer service. He also has a family, so he likely won&#x27;t be willing to work extra hours for free and be as willing to be exploited as someone who is 23.<p>3. Applying for shitty jobs is more costly than applying for higher paying jobs. The application process for a job is taking a certain amount of time regardless of the job itself, but the since the payoff for a better job is much higher, it makes sense to apply only for jobs that pay above a certain threshold. This is especially true when you consider he is providing some benefit at home as a stay at home dad (presumably). If he&#x27;s providing $10,000 in value by staying at home, It will be 6x as costly to apply for a $15,000 job than for a $40,000 job.<p>4. The social stigma and not being able to network: Networking works great when you&#x27;re a professional that is able to get job offers without networking. It helps you get better jobs or more interesting jobs, but it doesn&#x27;t suddenly elevate you from a non-professional status (tech support + customer service) to the status of a professional with the corresponding salary and benefits. The only case where this work is very entrenched nepotism, where someone unqualified could get a job for which they are not suited with compensation higher than their &quot;real&quot; market rate.<p>Networking is mostly useless if you don&#x27;t have the skills to back it up, like this guy.<p>5. The twitter sentence. I&#x27;m honestly shocked at some of the vitriol from the HN community here. Do none of you ever procrastinate? If I&#x27;m not mistaken, it&#x27;s working hours right now, but most of you are finding the time to comment here, on HN. If you had ever spent job hunting for a significant amount of time, you&#x27;d know it&#x27;s at least as mentally draining as any job, so getting distracted or having some down time isn&#x27;t unwarranted.<p>I could go on and on, but the gist of it is: show some goddamn compassion and maybe step outside of your bubble for once.<p>The fact that this person is one of 9 MILLION should maybe at least tell you that it&#x27;s a systematic problem, and not just a problem of &quot;not being willing to work any job for fear of embarrassment&quot;
For every one unwilling to do manual labor like this guy, there&#x27;s another one who is (aka the other 4.5 million).