Flaws that would make someone unemployable?

sirex wrote: ↑
Why cant a corporation grow to a size, become stable, inovate new products, and survive that way?

Most companies do exactly this. I'd say the overwhelming majority of companies grow to a stable size and then just hum along providing products/services to customers, and paying a dividend to the owner(s). Think of most restaurants, bars, garages, farms, barbershops/salons, cafes, convenience stores, and other extremely common businesses. There are multinationals in each of these industries who aim for perpetual massive growth, but most businesses are not multinationals, are not listed on any stock exchange, and have owners who are generally content with managing a stable enterprise year after year without taking on massive debt or equity liabilities for risky expansions.

Multinationals get more press than boring stable restaurants and bars so it just seems that everyone is trying to build a worldwide empire. Only a minority of companies are trying to do that.

An interesting thread. I have a few points

Mark77

It has been a few years since you began railing against how its difficult to find a job in your sector in Canada. Why don't you emigrate? (Not trolling, 100% serious). Unless you have wife/kids what is stopping you? There must be work somewhere commensurate with your experience.

General Jobs

I think the general reason for the perceived lack of goods jobs is twofold. One, with everyone with a heartbeat going to university and academic standards dropping, everyone and their dog has a university degree, even in engineering. Second, the baby boomers are simply never going to retire as they lack the financial resources. This results in promotions that never occur once you get into a job.

zoltorg wrote: ↑Mark77

It has been a few years since you began railing against how its difficult to find a job in your sector in Canada. Why don't you emigrate? (Not trolling, 100% serious). Unless you have wife/kids what is stopping you? There must be work somewhere commensurate with your experience.

I've brought this up before for people struggling to find work in general. I don't think we should encourage emigration of qualified people, but emigrating isn't just about finding a paycheck. You gain invaluable international and cross cultural experience (the world is moving closer and closer to a single, borderless economy). The idea is that you move abroad for a few years, spread a little bit of Canada, return with money still in your pocket, some new previously unattainable experiences, and a little bit of the world.

This is what I'm going to do in September. I'm fortunate enough myself to hold an EU passport, but there's plenty of bilateral immigration programs for qualified people. Granted, I'm also not tied down by anything in Canada. Still, I find it strange people here won't even leave Toronto or Vancouver to Alberta for a job.

zoltorg wrote: ↑An interesting thread. I have a few points

Mark77

It has been a few years since you began railing against how its difficult to find a job in your sector in Canada. Why don't you emigrate? (Not trolling, 100% serious). Unless you have wife/kids what is stopping you? There must be work somewhere commensurate with your experience.

+1.

Mark come join us down south (Canadians working in the US on a TN).

zoltorg wrote: ↑An interesting thread. I have a few points

everyone and their dog has a university degree, even in engineering

Care to back this up with some stats, rather than just posting off-the-wall statements and proclaiming them as facts (also known as 'pulling a Mark77')?

Abel4Life wrote: ↑+1.

Mark come join us down south (Canadians working in the US on a TN).

I spend much of my time in the USA and a good chunk of my applications go to US-based employers -- things aren't really any better there in the technology/engineering sector. Which makes sense since, due to the TN visa, we have a fairly integrated labour market.

JK400 wrote: ↑Care to back this up with some stats, rather than just posting off-the-wall statements and proclaiming them as facts (also known as 'pulling a Mark77')?

And trolling should be known as "pulling a JK400" because that's what most of your comments in this thread have been comprised of.

zoltorg wrote: ↑ I think the general reason for the perceived lack of goods jobs is twofold. One, with everyone with a heartbeat going to university and academic standards dropping, everyone and their dog has a university degree, even in engineering. Second, the baby boomers are simply never going to retire as they lack the financial resources. This results in promotions that never occur once you get into a job.

The problem specific to engineering in Canada/USA has a number of facets:

a) We've exported much of our manufacturing and R&D capacity. These sectors create a ton of engineering employment. Entire industries (ie: the tech industry in Canada) have suffered massive downturns with little to absorb the displaced workers and new entrants to the field.

b) Financialization has meant that 'financial' skillsets, rather than technical skillsets, are more in demand at the corporate level. Engineers can and often do have deep and rich 'financial' skillsets, but since they tend to be hired into technical positions at the entry-level (when they are hired), they lack the head office exposure to upper management. Moving from a successful role in the field to an office job proves to be difficult within the business structure because businesses are relatively reluctant to move their successful resources out of jobs that they are doing well in. The culture of hiring and promoting the best has been significantly eroded in favour of policies that actually place successful people in a sort of career "jail".

c) Immigration policy, particularly in the USA, but also in Canada, seems to be disproportionately targeted towards bringing in additional engineers in excess of the actual labour market demands.

d) The trend in human resources management has been to hire the least costly individual who is most tightly aligned to a particular job. "aptitude", "potential", "trainability", or even "leadership" are not in the vocabularies of most of the HR personnel I've met. There is no risk taking attitude, no, "if we hire a top engineer....they might come up with an idea that makes us a few extra million a year" sort of approach to the problem. Hiring is generally done, at the non-executive level, for the most compliant drones possible. Indeed, firms have spent millions of dollars on bringing in Deloitte and Mercer's finest "consultants" to standardize their human resources business processes, rather than the customization that is inherent in creative businesses looking to attract, hire, and retain the brightest talent.


By definition, when you have jobs receiving 50, 100, sometimes 500 resumes, even for engineering positions -- a lot of folks are going to be left out in the cold, not for any lack of skill, not for any personality trait or character flaw, but rather, due to the simple numbers of the situation.

DrXenon wrote: ↑ All you have to do is look at the TSX index to know that things are very unbalanced; it is full of bankers and miners. Rather than bail out Nortel, we paid billions to American car companies to maintain branch plants here and paid further billions to bail out our banks. We are hewers of wood and drawers of water, and should be ashamed of such.

Absolutely, and well put. But even our mining companies and banks are really, IMHO, under-investing in engineered goods and services. The mining sector is mired in instability, and the banking sector is highly subsidized by the taxpayer (CMHC, CDIC, etc.) such that they don't need to really improve efficiency.

People in electrical engineering programs don't talk about starting companies, they talk about how they are going to get nice cushy jobs at Ontario Power Generation and suck on the public teat until retirement. It wasn't like that in the early-mid 90s.

Yup, but OPG only hires a relatively small number of engineers, and they're mired in a very innefficient and engineer-hostile bureaucracy that makes it difficult for engineers to actually get their jobs done. The other problem with OPG is they really don't want innovative people, they don't want the top of the class -- because they have to keep the engineers' salaries down to keep the bloated salaries of their other staff up. $160k HR clerks, for instance. There's really nothing in OPG's business that can be changed from a technology or engineering point of view that will make a major difference to the performance of their business -- so they don't need to hire the best. OPG at this point is basically a legacy business -- the only thing that will really drive OPG's costs lower are reducing the salaries of its personnel.

BTW, on the topic of Nortel, the management of the company should be in jail, not bailed out. Engineers, or even the relatively modest compensation of Nortel's engineers, had absolutely nothing to do with Nortel's demise.

Just some rant, so its been another month, and i'm still unemployed, I looked kijiji, school website, everything every single day ( i didnt start late, i started looking when i was still at school around feb-march), i just want more business organization experience before i graduate, sigh.

JustMan wrote: ↑Just some rant, so its been another month, and i'm still unemployed, I looked kijiji, school website, everything every single day ( i didnt start late, i started looking when i was still at school around feb-march), i just want more business organization experience before i graduate, sigh.

uh, Feb-March is late. Very late! Most schools & companies have employment sessions around Oct/Nov and do a lot of hiring then. I'm surprised you didn't notice this.

Sylvestre wrote: ↑uh, Feb-March is late. Very late! Most schools & companies have employment sessions around Oct/Nov and do a lot of hiring then. I'm surprised you didn't notice this.

depends what industry, the industry I'm aiming for usually starts feb-march.

JustMan wrote: ↑depends what industry, the industry I'm aiming for usually starts feb-march.

Baseball?

DrXenon wrote: ↑I don't know why everyone is so down on Mark77.

In relation to this thread:

- Unwillingness to accept any personal fault for the outcome of his career.
- Unwillingness to accept anyone's suggestions.
- Blaming his unemployment on a conspiracy of HR and senior management, balding hiring managers, lowly underpaid consulting/power engineers, immigrants, lack of free market/excess free market.
- Sitting on his hands and waiting for the market to return advantageously recognize his skill set.

There's also preamble to the tone of our responses from many other threads:

- Repeating the same points in every thread that remotely relates to engineering, even if it's off topic.
- Making absolute unsubstantiated claims then never defending them when called out, disappearing for a while, and repeating points mentioned above.
- Condescending attitude to people in other professions, and even those in his own professions he perceives as "below" him.

These pretty much speak for themselves why many people may disagree with him. Part of it is history, part of it is the existing argument he puts forward. Unsurprisingly, the above points can be added to the list in the OP.

Let's face it: from many of his posts, it can be finally concluded that Mark Pitz has a high sense of entitlement. He ultimately believed his superior engineering knowledge entitled him to a high-paying job after graduation. But, oh dear, the tech crash, Nortel, immigrants, niggardly employers, Nortel, bottom-grads, they all screwed him. A decade later, voilà, the venue for self-commiseration has been a bargain hunting website, sowing discord in the forums.

You see, young, fresh, ambitious grads, what long-term damaging effects a high sense of entitlement can do to you? A lack of humility, a build-up of hubris, and if you keep parroting yourself excuses (or pleasant lies) for your shortcomings, eventually you'd convince yourself that they're the truth. I guess Goebbels was right. Mark's post history is sufficient to craft an excellent case study on the entitlement debacle permeating Canada, and Boomerspeak.

If Mark had really put his engineering instincts to good use, he'd be gainfully employed right now, even if that meant leaving this derelict, mediocre motherland.

JustMan wrote: ↑depends what industry, the industry I'm aiming for usually starts feb-march.

I'm curious - what industry starts hiring 1-2 months before graduation?

Sylvestre wrote: ↑I'm curious - what industry starts hiring 1-2 months before graduation?

Top international banks start hiring 8-12 months before graduation.

- ambitious
- independent

Truemana wrote: ↑In relation to this thread:

- Unwillingness to accept any personal fault for the outcome of his career.
- Unwillingness to accept anyone's suggestions.
- Blaming his unemployment on a conspiracy of HR and senior management, balding hiring managers, lowly underpaid consulting/power engineers, immigrants, lack of free market/excess free market.
- Sitting on his hands and waiting for the market to return advantageously recognize his skill set.

There's also preamble to the tone of our responses from many other threads:

- Repeating the same points in every thread that remotely relates to engineering, even if it's off topic.
- Making absolute unsubstantiated claims then never defending them when called out, disappearing for a while, and repeating points mentioned above.
- Condescending attitude to people in other professions, and even those in his own professions he perceives as "below" him.

These pretty much speak for themselves why many people may disagree with him. Part of it is history, part of it is the existing argument he puts forward. Unsurprisingly, the above points can be added to the list in the OP.

Looks like he's gone into his "disappearance" mode again. He's probably on some other forum spouting his nonsense, waiting a couple days for the gold-fish-brained members of this forum to forget his antics so he can start up once again.