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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
Sure, there are plenty of opportunities out there -- if you have 10 years of experience and are willing to work for free.
Mar 13, 2003 | Last summer, Tanya Bershadsky, a Web designer in her 20s who has worked in the up-and-down tech industry since the mid-1990s, was laid off from a big-name dot-com that unsurprisingly went belly up. Like a couple million others in her situation, Bershadsky quickly started looking for a new job and, like everyone else's, her search didn't go well.
Bershadsky discovered that it was possible to find dozens of job listings for the sort of work she was looking for. The trouble was, most of the advertised positions required prospective employees to have a skill set that rivaled Superman's -- you not only needed expertise in Flash and Java, but your new bosses also preferred that you'd graduated first in your class from MIT, knew how to shoot and edit and encode video, were "glamorous," typed 70 words per minute, took dictation and would perhaps wash the executive's car and feed his dog once in a while. Many times, the ads asked for intimate knowledge of the inner workings of some specialized world -- the cosmetic industry, say, or the French Foreign Ministry.
The worst part, Bershadsky found, was that several postings warned that employees should not only be qualified to do a job, but that they be "excited" and "passionate" about it -- a requirement that Bershadsky found difficult to fulfill because "80 percent of the jobs I was seeing posted, with these outrageous requirements, were unpaid internships," she says. "These were internships that required you to have three or four years of experience. What kind of shit is that?"
After a couple months of this, Bershadsky had had enough; she wanted to do something about the jobs she was seeing. So she went to a domain-name registration service and bought a URL for a new site she thought would, if not exactly make a difference in the world, at least make her feel better. The URL Bershadsky registered was fuckthatjob.com. "It was exactly what I was feeling," she says. "It felt right. I couldn't think of anything else to call it."
Bershadsky had a simple idea for the new site. She asked her close friends, many of whom were also looking for jobs, to send her the most outrageous postings they spotted; she would put up the listings and add snarky comments about the employers behind them.
She was quickly inundated with examples of over-the-top job requirements. There was, for instance, the film editor who wanted an assistant to help him finish a project -- the assistant would get no pay, and would need to provide his own editing equipment. Or there was a marketing firm in need of a "team player" to work as a copywriter. The applicant, who would be an unpaid intern, had to know HTML, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, PHP, JavaScript and "search engine optimization." The company wanted this person to have four years of marketing experience, and work for about 20 hours a week. The position was perfect, the ad said, for people who had "a desire to keep their skills polished during a lapse in employment. In other words, if you haven't been able to find a job and want to stay 'in the marketing loop', this is a great way to do so."
Fuckthatjob.com, currently making the rounds of the unemployed, provides a good window onto the dismal reality of the current tech job market. If one needed any proof, the jobs on the site -- as well as interviews with several people now looking for work -- indicate that we're now in an employer-dominated labor market. Employers will ask for the world from their employees, and often they'll come close to getting it, and for very little money.
It's a sad time to be looking for tech work. Three years have passed since the Nasdaq stock index closed at 5,048.62 -- which turned out to be its apex, the high-water mark of the late-1990s economic boom. Nothing has picked up for tech workers in that time, and many of them seem gloomier than ever about their prospects. "It seems like everybody I used to know in this industry has got some unbelievable story that isn't getting told," says Bill Lessard, the founder of Netslaves, a site that chronicled, through the good times and bad, worker exploitation in the tech economy.
Lessard is now halfheartedly looking for a job himself, but he's all but given up hope of finding something in technology. "I think that these job postings are indicative of just how truly crazy things have gotten. And the fact is that none of this is funny anymore; this is not just a fad story anymore. The fact of the matter is that the economy is awful -- there's no other way to put it."
