I haven’t been able to find a job in 16 months and it feels like I have to pass through the eye of the needle to have a life
I haven’t been able to find a job in 16 months and it feels like I have to pass through the eye of the needle to have a life
I got a bachelors degree in mechanical engineering from a ‘good school’ and yet I never got a good entry level job in the field so I was just wandering the wastelands for a long while before I got a good corporate bullshit job from which I got fired after 3 years and now I have no actual engineering skills and tens of thousand in college debt
I’m 33 and live with my parents and I’m in this constant cycle of living with them until I find a good job in some far away city. They live in a remote place where the only jobs available are 7.50 and yet the living costs are absurd so really, you’re pretty much working just to work. The problem is I can’t move out and do human things such as live by own and have a meaningful because I need a decent salary to survive, and that can only happen if I get something in a far away big city. I don’t want to have to fend for peanuts living paycheck to paycheck(i’ve already tried that a couple of times) in some rathole in a city but I also hate living with my parents so I’m forced in an all or nothing mindset where I need to have a decent salary. I wish I could just take a low wage jobs in some other city but the logistics don’t allow me to.
I feel like I’m rambling, I just feel incredibly stuck, my social life and dating lives are nonexistent and I’m completely fucking broke. I just masturbate all day in my parents house. I have a degree that should be lucrative according to this shitass society, I’m not the archetype of a basement dwelling reddit loser because I do have drive and have moved from place to place and worked and clawed my way through life and stay fit and know how to talk to women and I constantly feel like I shouldn’t be where I’m at but…I kind of am a fucking loser.
Experience shows me that, I guess, this too shall pass and I should land on my feet but god damn I’m regressing constantly and every aspect of my life can’t be moved forward if Instay with my parents in this town. Sorry to rant
If you need a fake reference, I'll tell anybody whatever you want.
seconded and i can do the professional BS jargon too.
Thirding this, if you need a reference can help (we should do a r/bemyreference knock off).
The problem is I can’t move out and do human things such as live by own and have a meaningful because I need a decent salary to survive, and that can only happen if I get something in a far away big city. I don’t want to have to fend for peanuts living paycheck to paycheck (i’ve already tried that a couple of times) in some rathole in a city but I also hate living with my parents so I’m forced in an all or nothing mindset where I need to have a decent salary.
I think this is very true for a lot of people in your age cohort. It really sucks that without the necessary "start-up capital" so many people are trapped in this sort of scenario. I'm sorry this is going on for you right now.
Just keep applying to whatever you can find, if you need to leave stuff about yourself off and try to get into one of those horseshit min wage jobs since some money coming in is better than none, especially if your parents are chill that helps you save money. Use chatbots to piece together a bullshit resume and cover letters, its chatbots, unicru personality tests and ATS AI bullshit all the way down to fucking capitalist hell. Play every trick you can to get a job. This is a failing of society rather than any personal one, never was, never will be, every time I see someone in a situation like yours (myself included, exact same scenario a few years older) it should trip that whole shake of injustice, not self deprecation. Survive is the game, it doesn't look pretty for most on this planet, and especially not in capitalist hellholes.
With all the hexagonal bears having employment issues maybe our own jobhacks sub should be in order.
I agree with the majority of this except the chatbots and AI part. Having just gon through a stack of resumes to choose a candidate I can tell you the ones that were generated by AI stood out and were immediately discarded. So disingenuous I didn't give them a second thought
I always heard there's a few rounds of AI reading before you get read by a person (if ever), and in your case the applicant can always rewrite to sound less AI-y. For instance, when you submit your paper for publication to the world's laziest journal remove 'some say' and 'certainly', but you'll probably be fine.
Honestly this sucks but the way out of the "educated but no experience and all jobs require experience" trap for a given field is internships, and probably the only way to get internships if you didn't do them in undergrad is to take on more debt & go back to school for a masters. Either that or become very good at networking online through niche field-related hobbies. It's easier to network if you live in one of those cities with the good jobs you want but that's expensive and nobody is giving out loans to go be unemployed somewhere for a while unless that place is a college.
internships
'You are overqualified for the position, so we have to reject you'.
I made the dumbass mistake of going into debt to get a bachelors from a supposedly good that I might have too much to qualify for student loans. I have been looking at studying in Europe since apparently (grad) school is subsidized. I might be wrong
Also, I tried getting an internship in college and I couldn’t and it’s evidently fucked me for life. Getting internships is just as hard as finding a job, and it feels like the entire field of engineering is built on the farce that it has an abundance of opportunity.
the following is assuming you're in the US:
i think in general, and definitely my experience, that getting grad school paid for is considerably easier, structurally. my undergraduate cost me a boatload. my MSc cost me like $400 in lab fees. undergraduate is the "cash cow", but the university runs on exploitable grad student labor through assistantships and tuition waivers for "university employees". this is where you work some almost full time job being a figure-it-out-and-do-all-my-scut for a research lab/team at some R1 school, and then also take 1-2 classes a semester, mostly in that same department that your boss is in, and for your masters research project, you glob on to whatever research project they are running and carve out some little piecemeal research question for your own limited investigation. in theory, you could totally go rogue and dream up whatever question you want, but its easy to paint oneself into a corner.
this is a tricky route because you're effectively signing up to be the serf of some tenure tracked faculty and many younger faculty are careerist psychos who were traumatized by their advisor and are now going to visit that trauma on their own grad students. if you can find an older professor, they can be more chill because they have less to prove. sometimes.
anyway, so you're taking classes, doing that homework, doing scutwork most hours of your day, and also having to learn how all kinds of equipment works and following weirdly complex/ad-hoc procedures. if your relationship with the professor goes bad before you can get your MS, you're kinda fucked unless you can find another prof to take you on and help you across the finish line.
an MS opens more doors into federal and state gov jobs and is about 2-3 years ish for part timers.
Pros:
- you can pause your student loans because you're technically back in school (though if you're going non-profit/state work, i wouldn't. i would look in PSLF.)
- after 2 years as a research tech + MS, you will have enough fodder after that to have an "impressive" resume/CV
- in theory, you are getting paid to go to grad school and develop expertise
- there is a camraderie to being a grad student with other grad students. you're all nerds, you're all broke. they know about cheap housing and bus schedules and cheap food.
- a broadly recognized as respectable way to press pause on entering the job market
- aside from specialized knowledge and experience, in terms of professional development you will get a lot better at written and oral communication in those topics and public speaking more generally. if you suck, you'll become OK. if you're OK, you'll become good. if you're good, you'll become great.
Cons:
- the academy is second only to the military for harassment and bullying. motherfuckers can be toxic AF and the institution will protect them at your expense.
- it fucking sucks to work all day and then have homework and class. my social life and hobbies were fucked.
- the PhD cult will try to recruit you into doing a 5+ year bid instead of a 2+ year bid. a PhD informally closes certain professional doors and has a way of narrowing the horizon to include just the academy. i know people who have made it work and "do well" now, but honestly i don't think the juice is worth the squeeze for mental/emotional development. tenure tracked junior faculty with intact souls are the exception.
- the public university system is very neoliberal anymore and nowhere is this more evident than as a grad student at an R1. the most odious aspect is that the people who are most highly remunerated at these institutions pretend they are public servants and engaging in public intellectualism instead of the most base and vain careerist sophistry. do not dispell their illusions or they will probably try to destroy you.
the way you get into this is looking at job openings at the R1 on campus, in the department that you would want to attend graduate school. you would apply for the job and once you figure out who the professor is that would be your supervisor, tell them you are interested in graduate school and inquire if that's an option. look up everything you can on that professor on their university profile and if you are actually interested in their research, that can really work in your favor in pitching yourself. someone who is curious about what they are curious about and can critically engage with the research is a rare diamond for a research professor. you also want to find a way to have candid conversations with their other grad students and see what they say, but you'd probably have to be stealthy about that.
i don't know if i fully recommend this path, but it exists, i took it out of frustration, and it worked out. if you've worked shit jobs before, you can handle the scut easy.
Yeah. Getting internships in college is important if you want to go into industry, so it's unfortunate the school let you down in this way. Often schools will have career fairs or databases of registered internships through their career office, and those offer higher chances of success than applying from outside channels.
Your situation is very similar to one I found myself in after becoming unemployed from the job I had after graduating with a CS degree. We’re close to the same age, also.
I’m still not using my degree, but things have gotten a bit better, I found a job that’s not high paying but it’s stable and I got out into my own place again and got married (also again, a divorce was a big part of what left me on my ass financially too). I’m still hoping to actually get into my field and a higher paying job at some point but I also have contingency plans for if that doesn’t happen, and we’re scraping by for now. I hope it gets better for you as well.
I really identify with the "have to pass through the eye of a needle to have a life" feeling. Until recently I was jobless for 13 months, just yeeting job applications into the ether. Each day, each application felt like a dice roll with the worst odds in history, and potential employers were the disinterested croupiers blankly watching me try to gamble my way out of limbo.
I did eventually get a winning roll just a couple of weeks ago, and it feels like my adult life is finally starting. It CAN happen. It's just really hard to feel like anything else can happen until it does.
Like others have said idk if you're open to advice, but the only universal bit of that I've got is to keep trying. It really sucks, and I can't tell you how many times I broke down in front of my therapist lamenting that fact, but it's the only thing to do at the end of the day.
For slightly less generic advice, I was able to get some hours on DataAnnotation like others here which helped pay for groceries. Depending on your living setup it could help you build up a little cushion for when you do take that leap into the next part of your life
My three step plan for you:
- Get a remote IT support job; lots of those and they should pay enough to make them worth the time.
- If you can't start at a company in your M.E. field initially as IT support, pivot to one once you've got your IT support claws sharpened.
- Either via networking within that company or some resume tomfoolery, pivot to a job in your field from that field-adjacent position.
Optional fourth step:
- Realize that you pine for a life at sea and enlist in the Merchant Marines for a somewhat alternative life where you don't have to pay rent anywhere for most of the year and you'll never need to think about a resume again.
it feels like the only way to get a job now is to go to a staffing adjacency where they pay you less and urge you to work multiple jobs. middle men capitalists on top of middle men capitalists, all the way down
Unfortunate where I live the staffing agencies are super transphobic, they outed me to HR when I got into a factory job and since I've legally changed my name etc they made up a deadname based my legal one and misgendered me every 3s. Said agency also misrepresented all experience I did have as factory work. There was obviously no training due to this, quit in like 3 days.
In CA all the positions staffing agencies would offer all required blood draws, nothing like having your blood taken with nothing to show for it but a bruise on your arm and no work.
More proof that capitalists are vampires
I didn’t know there are jobs outside of creating bombs and tanks for mechanical engineers
I'm not really sure if you want advice or to vent. If you don't want job advice, please ignore the rest of my comment.
An option is looking at remote work that is technical, but not related to your degree/what you want to do. It won't be a fun experience but it helps pay bills.
Something like data entry or technical writing doesn't have much of a barrier to entry other than having a technical degree.
Another option is assembly/factory type work. This one is very location dependent, but there are stuff like PCB houses where if you know how to solder, you can probably find work. Or welding or something since you're a MechE. It isn't great pay, but it is usually more than retail.
similar situation here, shit sucks. unsure whether your hope is a gift or a curse, good luck.
Are there seasonal agriculture jobs in your area? They aren't exactly fun but especially with overtime can pay quite a bit. Now is about the time a lot of them would be hiring.
Alternatively you might check out room and board type jobs anywhere.
How would I go about finding either agricultural jobs or room and board type jobs? Would massively appreciate if you could elaborate just a bit.
assuming you're US, the department of labor has a site for seasonal listings
I think I've got links on my computer so I'll try to find them when I get home, but sometimes they don't advertise super well so it might be a matter of looking up what farms exist in your area and calling them.
There's a few sites dedicated to room and board jobs so I'll try to grab links for those too.
Other than that searching "seasonal harvest jobs" will pull up some of them.
Sorry for the late reply. I couldn't find my old bookmarks, but here's what I found from memory:
https://www.coolworks.com/jobs-with-housing
https://old.reddit.com/r/roomandboard/comments/r4748p/room_and_board_megathread/
As well as the link the other comrade posted. I did search my old job on there and it didn't show up, so it may be worth searching google for companies and/or checking local labor boards
similar position here.
I'm 34, no degree, haven't worked in 8 years (just got approved for Disability this February for mental health reasons, so I get like $1500 per month which conveniently is average monthly rent here).
I never got to experience a dating life, or even have a FWB or anything. And I don't see how I ever will. It's so hard to get anywhere or do anything, and at my age nobody will even want to sleep with me unless I "have my shit together". Like it doesn't matter who I am, it only matters my future financial prospects and being someone to brag about. Especially on dating sites.
I live with an abusive, emotionally unstable grandparent that I dream of being able to move away from, but rent prices are just too fucking high and I don't know anyone else in this stupid world who could help me.
I'm just so fucking depressed about my dating life prospects. I recently met a girl on some dating site who is also on Disability for mental health reasons (nice to know she also wouldn't judge me for it). We were talking every day for like 4 months, but she suddenly started soft-ghosting me and I don't know why. Probably nothing this good will ever happen to me again -- and it was barely even anything. I'm in good shape but obviously no car + no job + on disablity pay + live at home => nobody will ever want me, not even just for a FWB/no commitment type of thing
Don't be so hard on yourself, keep putting yourself out there you may still find someone, it won't be Hollywood or conventional, but it will be something.
One day I'm going to do the everyone is wanted post, but it probably should be a badpost since how...off I realize it sounds typed or said outloud.
Don't be so hard on yourself, keep putting yourself out there you may still find someone, it won't be Hollywood or conventional, but it will be something.
I don't see how. I've been using dating sites for years and that was the closest thing to a thing I ever had, and even this one fizzled out.
where am I going to find a woman who doesn't think no car + no job + living at home in my 30's is a deal-breaker?
Same boat comrade. The future sucks. Empire in decline. I wish you good luck
I feel you op. I’m in the same position I’m just not even smart enough to hack a degree. You’re obviously a hardworking person so I wish you the best of luck
Nah it has nothing to do with your intelligence. You shouldn’t in any form feel like you’re less than for not having a stupid piece of paper
Idk I can’t really concentrate on learning things anymore
