How to never get fired.

I'm skimming Linchpin by Seth Godin.

The book's about how to make yourself indispensable to your employer, thus guaranteeing employment. It's important to do this in today's economy you know.

He talks about how traditionally employers wanted compliant, robotic employees. This creates a problem for us middle class employees. We're replaceable because we're so robotic.

Also, our wages don't increase much because why would they? There's always a huge pool of robotic workers who can pretty much replace us at any time.

He argues that ABC (Attendance Based Compensation) is dead. You just can't expect to show up to work and get paid anymore.

I skimmed the first few chapters and then stopped reading. No point to continue really, as it seemed like common sense. Don't know why it needed to be a huge book. A few paragraphs would have done just fine.

Why it's hard to find a job here.

Well I had another phone elimination interview last week. I hate these pre-phone interviews where they ask you questions in hopes that they can eliminate you from their short list.

I wrote another blog entry about the challenge of a phone interview - how to keep my voice positive and upbeat when I sound naturally depressed and monotone.

I sensed I did okay in this phone interview. Hopefully he'll call me in for a real interview this week.

Anyway, a few people have asked me how the job market was here. I don't really know at this point. My impression is that there are jobs here, but they're hard to get because of a hugely qualified pool of workers.

In other words, when you apply for jobs your biggest obstacle are the hundreds of resumes from people who are very highly qualified.

It's an employers' market, and they have the best of the best lining up to work for them. That's why it's hard to get a good job.

(At least this is what I tell myself whenever I get rejected for a new job.)

An easy way to lose your job.

If you want to lose your job, just get your wife pregnant. Works every time.

For example, when Jake was born in 2007, a couple months after his birth, and the day before his heart surgery, my employer took me into a room and said they were laying me off.

Flash forward to the present. My employer just told me they were ending my contract early because they ran out of money. When? The same week that my next child is due.

This technique of losing our job by getting your wife pregnant works really well during a recession. It also works well in a tight-labour market.

It's great because at about the time in your life when you're most sleep-deprived, broke, overworked and exhausted you also get to look for a new job.

80% of jobs aren't advertised.

I'm thinking more and more about my upcoming job-hunt in June. I'm a bit worried about finding a job in this economy. It took me almost a year to find my current crappy job. I don't have a year to spare this time around.

Anyway, I've read a lot of books about how to find a job and they all say this in one form or another. 80% of jobs aren't advertised. I find this, literally speaking, to be very false. In every place I've worked, every position has been posted - either internally, externally or both.

The trend nowadays where I live is to no longer promote someone within. The human resources trend is to post the job internally and externally and have the public and the employees apply for it.

(Another trend is, instead of internally promoting your employees, you hire someone from outside your organization to fill the roll. That's why it's often better to leave a company and come back, rather than stay in the same old job hoping for a promotion.)

Many not-for-profits and union contracts have it in their bylaws that they have to post a job. Also, any company big enough to have a human resources department almost always posts their jobs because that's standard industry practice.

I will say this, however:

1) Even though a position is posted, many managers and companies already know who they're going to hire. By posting it, they're just going through the motions.

And it's for this reason that "networking" is important. And that's why all the books say "80% of the jobs aren't posted." Because they want you to network and it's easier to say this then to explain it the way I did right here.

Nothing has improved in the last 10 years.

I just read an article about the economy in the States. It's about the same as it was 10 years ago.

Over the past 10 years, not one new job has been created in the private sector (but the population has grown 8%). The stock market is at about the same level, despite the government pouring billions of your tax dollars into it.

In other words, all the work that's been done in the last 10 years hasn't made anyone more prosperous. How many weekends have you worked in the last 10 years? How much stress did you have?

How many days did you show up sick because you had to get that project done? How much sleep did you lose?

All for nothing. We're at the same level as we were a decade ago. This decade has essentially been a waste. We might as well have taken the last 10 years off.

Of course you might argue that your business made small improvements in efficiency or service. You might argue that products are a little better nowadays. But the point is, you're not any richer.

The country isn't any better off in an economic sense. This means that we've all been running on the treadmill, just to maintain.

We're covered in sweat, our hearts are pounding, our legs are sore. And we haven't gone anywhere. We're huffing and puffing just to stay in the sample place.

Maybe the tens will be a better decade.