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chaosmage comments on Open thread, Dec. 8 - Dec. 15, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: Gondolinian 08 December 2014 12:06AM

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Comment author: MathiasZaman 08 December 2014 11:41:36AM 8 points [-]

In the spirit of asking personal questions on Less Wrong I'd be pleased if some of the community's brainpower could be directed in my direction. (It's a minor problem.)

After about a year of being unemployed, I found a job (hooray), but it's not a job I want to do for a long time. This means looking for a new job, but due to the long and unpredictable hours of my current job I'm left without time to look for a new job. The time away from the job is spend, in decreasing order: sleeping, quality time with girlfriend, internet, food and personal entertainment/projects. As it stands, I don't feel like I can touch either of the non-work activities without going insane, or at least not to an extent where I can shave of an hour to allocate to looking for a new job (I know from previous experience that doing it for less than an hour doesn't result in anything) without going insane.

Current options (I can see):

  • Find a way to create time (probably by spending less time faffing about on the internet). The risk here is that I'll stop having enough fun things in my life and lose productivity due to lying on the floor crying (which is a real possibility, going by previous experience).
  • Stick with the job and enroll as a working student at something to do with IT (I know what courses I want to take, I just can't translate it properly). This would take at least three years, which means being stuck in a job I don't like and missing classes due to the aforementioned unpredictable working hours.
  • Slack at work and use that time to look for a new job. The downsite here is being caught and losing the job I kinda need.

Ideas, recommendations or "third options" I failed to see?

Comment author: chaosmage 08 December 2014 02:14:36PM *  3 points [-]

Look around your current company and see if there's another job in there you'd like better (or which would suck less). Switching jobs inside a company is often easier than switching companies.

Ask someone to find a job for you. Family and close friends will often do this for free. Others might if they like you and they trust you'll remember you owe them a favor. Your girlfriend might, because it means you get more time together.

Learn how to slack and not get caught. If you're in an office, there are HowTos. If not, you can still determine which parts of your job are safest to slack off at.

If you haven't, become friends with someone who has the kind of job you want. If you have, deepen that relationship and ask to be introduced to similar friends. As long as you never directly beg for a job, it is perfectly alright to say you're looking for a job in that area.

All of this is assuming that one year of unemployment was entirely due to factors outside your control. This is very unlikely. You could almost certainly raise your employability in lots of ways that you haven't used. Move to a place with a better job market for example, dress better (to use the Halo effect), or whatever it is - basically remove some of the differences between you and the kind of person who gets the job you want.

For more advice, be a lot more specific about your situation. What kind of job do you want, why don't you have it, how much are you willing to sacrifice to get it?

Comment author: MathiasZaman 13 December 2014 03:49:58PM 0 points [-]

Thanks for the advice. I love how Less Wrong is a place where you can say you want to slack at work and someone points you to a good resource for doing so :-)

Changing job within the company isn't an option, due to it being a small cultural non-profit that mostly works with freelance artists.

If you haven't, become friends with someone who has the kind of job you want. If you have, deepen that relationship and ask to be introduced to similar friends. As long as you never directly beg for a job, it is perfectly alright to say you're looking for a job in that area.

Will do. This should be possible.

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