#81
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating: +
there is a thing here where if you have a disability and a degree you can get an internship with like a bank or whatever as a way of them filling their bogus diversity statements and such. anyway it pays $22,000 a year, which is basically minimum wage and also coincidentally around the poverty line. if they had to hire a person full-time under their normal rules for these jobs the pay would be about double. and only like one in three get hired on after i think.

i actually had an easy internship that paid as poorly for a bit in montreal but i flaked out and quit without warning. disability sucks for this sort of shit because like they always want to hook you up with make-work projects like assembling plastic stuff.

plus everyone treats you like you're scamming. i went to an employment center a few months ago to talk to someone about career options and volunteer placements and the first person i talked to thought i was trying to work while applying for disability, like either you are in a coma or you can work full-time. so i talked to another person and said i was interested in policy analysis and he said i should look into delivering meals to the elderly. so i started showing up at various possible places that have programs for disabled people to learn skills and such and they all send me away and tell me to email, so i do, and it takes them months to get back to me. and the whole poverty industry is so bureaucratic that i'm not sure i even want to be absorbed into it. i mean it doesn't take a smart person to know that if you gave poor people more money they'd be better off, or that rich people could easily give more money in taxes.

and i sort of know what i want to focus on, i want to grow up from my baby steps in theory towards actually knowing what i'm talking about, because i'm passionate about it, but i find it hard as hell to sit down and read even a little bit each day due to anxiety. toronto doesn't have any good schools for theory really but i will find some way to Do Thing Thang i guess.
#82
penitent
Post rating: ~

discipline posted:
really, you should be paying THEM to get experience



this is literally happening in greece, people are having to pay their employers to keep their jobs. lol. final crisis of capitalism folks

#83
Post rating: ~
just bypass the whole experience part, lie your ass off, get a paying job. it's practically expected of you
#84
Post rating: +

aerdil posted:

discipline posted:
capital already requires me to be not pregnant or with small children, preened and wearing cosmetic products, high heels, 50k in debt for a diploma which is worth less and less every day, and evidently working for quite a stretch of time with little to no pay to be considered employable. what's next. seriously. a wet t-shirt contest?



at least he's looking to hire within his community, good on him

#85
Harry the Hat
Post rating: +

discipline posted:
the first part of that book is on google books and it's about disney world, which has 8000 employees interns making minimum wage while having their pay docked for meals on site and for living in 2 bedroom apartments, two or three to a room, which for some reason cost up to $1600 a month in rent lmao.



i have an acquaintance who took a 1-year "art internship" at disney. his job duties include 1) not doing any art 2) working as a janitor at Disney World. he asked his supervisor what he was supposed to be learning from this and the supervisor says "youve got to learn to start from the bottom and work your way up to the top!"

#86
[account deactivated]
#87
Kurdt
Post rating: +

eternal_virtue posted:
Persistence helps. If the same person contacts me for a job several times I am much more likely to consider them even if I was originally unimpressed. Enthusiasm, eagerness, and respect as well. A custom cover letter (only needs to be a few sentences, specifically tailored to the company you are applying to) goes a long way towards showing you give a shit. Lots of people don't bother.

completely the opposite for me. i won't hire the desperate

#88
Post rating: ~

gyrofry posted:

eternal_virtue posted:
Persistence helps. If the same person contacts me for a job several times I am much more likely to consider them even if I was originally unimpressed. Enthusiasm, eagerness, and respect as well. A custom cover letter (only needs to be a few sentences, specifically tailored to the company you are applying to) goes a long way towards showing you give a shit. Lots of people don't bother.

completely the opposite for me. i won't hire the desperate


I'm looking for undervalued and loyal people I can mentor. You're looking for the "highly skilled" which means you probably pay too much, have to deal with conflicting ideologies and can't critique them for fear of their ego exploding.

Since you didn't opt to hire them on the first application, and you consider all further applications a sign of weakness, persistence has no negative effect when applying to a manager like you either.

#89
FLAWDA
Post rating: ~
considering taking a summer internship for a 2nd string RB for a small town football team. hmmm the possibilities this summer
#90
[account deactivated]
#91
[account deactivated]
#92
Post rating: ~

discipline posted:

shermanstick posted:
considering taking a summer internship for a 2nd string RB for a small town football team. hmmm the possibilities this summer

go jags



Fuck yeah

#93
Post rating: ~
before i came to law school i vowed never to work for free. i compromised my principles really quickly when i realized that only people willing to work at the worst of the big law firms get paid. instead i interned for a judge in a small town county court. luckily it was only a couple of days a week

this summer im interning for the public defenders office, though, where i will actually get to practice law. still not getting paid, but if i want a job with them after graduation its pretty much a necessity

heres to the worst decision ever (law school, not indigent defense)
#94
Post rating: ~

TG posted:
before i came to law school i vowed never to work for free. i compromised my principles really quickly when i realized that only people willing to work at the worst of the big law firms get paid. instead i interned for a judge in a small town county court. luckily it was only a couple of days a week

this summer im interning for the public defenders office, though, where i will actually get to practice law. still not getting paid, but if i want a job with them after graduation its pretty much a necessity

heres to the worst decision ever (law school, not indigent defense)



go work for the people's law office in chicago and make glorious proletarian revolution

#95
Post rating: ~
strange ever since getting into the PMC industry I've never been short of job offers, maybe you're all n the wrong line of work?
#96
Post rating: +

TROT_CUMLOVER posted:
go work for the people's law office in chicago and make glorious proletarian revolution



i met a guy the other day whose entire job is police brutality civil suits, plaintiff-side. the only thing better than cross-examining cops for a living is suing the shit out of them

#97
Post rating: ~

TG posted:
i met a guy the other day whose entire job is police brutality civil suits, plaintiff-side. the only thing better than cross-examining cops for a living is suing the shit out of them


n0ice.

i have a relative who got into law to work on international human rights cases but is now about to take a job in a california prosecutors office instead. whats the nicest way to say "your life choices utterly disgust me" to a loved one??

#98
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if you cant stand beside our boys in blue, stand in front of them
#99
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the absolute worst are the people who are prosecutors for a while and then move on to the lucrative field of white collar defense. truly a noble calling

i took a labor law class last semester and the first half was basically intro to labor history because nobody in america knows that stuff. the moral of the story is everyone hates labor unions, especially judges, and good luck working for one cause there are like 4 labor-side lawyers in the country
#100
Post rating: ~

TG posted:
before i came to law school i vowed never to work for free. i compromised my principles really quickly when i realized that only people willing to work at the worst of the big law firms get paid. instead i interned for a judge in a small town county court. luckily it was only a couple of days a week

this summer im interning for the public defenders office, though, where i will actually get to practice law. still not getting paid, but if i want a job with them after graduation its pretty much a necessity

heres to the worst decision ever (law school, not indigent defense)

theres like a ton of criminal defence barristers in the uk who spend a lot of time working pro bono because a) theres too many of them and not enough paying work to go round, and b) the crown prosecution service is really bad at paying their representatives on either side because its a badly managed doomed institution

#101
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i of course went into trade mark law where i get a front row seat of how silly and wasteful the most efficient and effective form of capital accumulation can be
#102
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you gotten involved with the NLG at all, TG? i kinda have on the periphery but there aren't really any active chapters around here
#103
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the chapter at our school isnt active at all. my housemate was the president his 1l year and didnt get much done and nobody seems inclined to try.

we do have a strong chapter of the Innocence Project that ive helped out with a bit, but its really sad because a lot of these people sound actually innocent but have exhausted their appeals and we cant do anything about it without new evidence
#104
Post rating: ~
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/05/work-is-work-why-free-internships-are-immoral/257130/

Now that even vanilla liberal journals like the atlantic are decrying free internships what do you guys think the odds are that they will fade out or be outlawed? Good luck convincing someone that these things advance regressive class stratification, you can handwave that shit forever with lazy ideological reasoning. But the people who relish in handwaving that shit are the same people who love to go on spiels about "what your resume says to me" when theyre in a position to employ people, and at this point everyone knows that most internships dont signal anything about a person's capabilities, theyre just a networking tool. the whole phenomenon seems to have been sustained on the premise that internships look GREAT on your portfolio, but the only place you still hear that claim is on internship applications sooo...
#105
[account deactivated]
#106
Post rating: +
yeah exactly, i know people who have cycled through internships too. it's clear to both of us that unless you use an internship to make connections and make use of those connections, then the internship routine is a zero-sum game that only leads to more internships from employers who know you're willing to do that kind of work. but if the employers know that, and you and i know that, then the only way that system can continue is by the perpetuation of the myth that internships are an effective means to "getting your foot in the door."

even people who claim that internships are a worthy pursuit don't claim that they're an end in themselves, thus they are not encompassed by the typical american thing of "you should have planned better, you should have worked harder..." the only way that line of reasoning is applicable is if the precepts of an internship evolve such that being an intern becomes a worthy pursuit -- or if internships revert to become a real entry into the professional workforce, which isn't happening. yes, the middle class was fooled into student loan slavery for a degree that means very little, but american culture has fetishized degrees as being intrinsically worthy for a long time -- they make you smarter, more worldly, a better citizen... the entire time i've been alive internships have been a punchline ("if it weren't for interns, who would fetch my coffee?"), but people at least believed they were a viable bridge into employment. now even the atlantic is arguing otherwise.

all this is not so much to directly address your point that previously professional jobs are being segmented into internships that could be parlayed into "real jobs" that just happened to pay a shitty salary, but i have to wonder how long the thing of middle class, upper middle class kids shaming themselves into working shitty jobs in professional workplaces can be sustained when these people represent a palpable class in themselves.
#107
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Well, as long as their bourgeois comforts exist and they can win wars against other countries, probably...
#108
Nippon
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When i call ppls resumes to offer them jobs in a professional setting in Boston, 40k year starting with decent benefits and no real experience about half of the young people i talk to are like "yeahhh...im strictly looking for an internship, though ..." and i laugh a lot
#109
Nippon
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Then i hire an immigrant who isn't riding the sunk-cost fallacy on his art degree all the way to the bottom of the sea
#110
Dont Mess With Sucess
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Goethestein posted:

When i call ppls resumes to offer them jobs in a professional setting in Boston, 40k year starting with decent benefits and no real experience about half of the young people i talk to are like "yeahhh...im strictly looking for an internship, though ..." and i laugh a lot

Maybe that's a euphemism for "Why would I want to live in Boston" but I especially how some of my art friends are working so much at terrible underpaid art jobs that they never make art anymore

#111
Post rating: +

Goethestein posted:

When i call ppls resumes to offer them jobs in a professional setting in Boston, 40k year starting with decent benefits and no real experience about half of the young people i talk to are like "yeahhh...im strictly looking for an internship, though ..." and i laugh a lot



an then everyone in the office started clapping

#112
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#113
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#114
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#115
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#116
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could u imagine if goatstein were your boss? ahahahhahhehhhohoahh holy hell
#117
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#118
penitent
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aerdil posted:

could u imagine if goatstein were your boss? ahahahhahhehhhohoahh holy hell



i can, because he is my boss, at the chin factory, where i just got fired. thanks a lot "buddy"

#119
penitent
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im writing an essay in which i critique the fuck out of postmodernism AND its critics, its popomo as Heck
#120
[account deactivated]