Bad Ideas and Poor Choices

I am officially(ish) out. Apparently LinkedIn is failing many people, not just me, but they have gotten desperate. It’s not just the number of messages in my inbox (20-40 per 24/7), it’s not just the randomness, it’s the probability factor. Opening an email from LinkedIn is like buying a lottery ticket. Clicking on one of the internal job links is like shooting yourself in the face. I know I’ve covered this, but I’m not done.

I had a premium account, purchased last year in an attempt to rise up at least a little in the recruiter job searches. It was a waste of $175 but at the time it made sense. Renewing it would not make sense.

While I was canceling my subscription I noticed that there are MANY settings and options. This is good. I want to stop the insanity. I’m missing email that actually matters. Like from my kids and stuff. I had a field day. I went so far as to nearly put my account in hibernation mode but decided that was going a little too far. In a lot of cases, that’s the only way people can reach me. If you’re throwing AI generated spam in my direction, I don’t want it. If I’ve worked with you in the past and you want to catch up, this is the only way you’ll find me unless you actually saved my number or found me on Facebook. I don’t encourage new Facebook connections unless I really, really like you.

That said, if I ever want to receive another message out of that platform, I’m going to have to actually login and check for relevant mail. Kind of like logging into regular email but more spam because it will still be there.

So, I’ve cut my possible networking down to a ‘maybe I’ll see you, maybe I won’t’. Recruiters can still find me (except they don’t anymore) and that message will hit my inbox. I think. Do I really want it to? No. I actually don’t but I haven’t had the nerve to unplug that last open pipe. The open pipe that echoes when I speak into it.

There are articles all over the interwebs talking about the job decline after fifty, as if that’s the problem. We learned a long time ago to remove any profile reference to age or years in service. Graduation dates are removed from education (unless you’re still young enough to be padding your resume) and work history is truncated. For example, my profile confesses to job history going back to January 1997 and the only reason it does that is because I spent nearly seven years at The Castle (super cool financial software company with even cooler name than I made up that was acquired by Oracle in 2007 and we still don’t want to talk about it).

The seven years I spent at The Castle is still the largest networking base in my deck of cards. Why, you ask? Because we were and still are a seriously incestuous bunch. If we were a country, we would not be patriots, we would be nationalists. Useful if you don’t piss off too many people.

Mostly I need the right key words to pop up in search.

On the other hand, my current resume begins in 2016 which is when I became a legal entity. It details my most recent and relevant work history in the form of my biggest and best clients. That’s all I want to talk about. If you REALLY want me to back up a little more, I’ll back up to 2012 and if you push harder, I’ll go to 2006, but that’s it. Quite honestly, only the last ten years are relevant in the tech industry.

This is not an age thing. My profile pic is relatively current and it’s really good. My last boss took it as a screenshot during a Teams conversation because he said I was making ridiculous faces (I’m sure I was) but he got a good one and I popped it up. I don’t look 60. I’m not sure you could even say 50. The lighting was perfect, and I’m not covered in wrinkles for some reason (I should be, I didn’t discover the joy of sunblock until I was forty).

This is not an age thing. I have a friend who’s a dirt scientist. OK, that’s not exactly right. Soil, maybe? He has worked for the Federal Government since he graduated from college. His position was eliminated about two months ago. I think he’s thirty-six. Maybe thirty-eight. Absolutely no older. He didn’t even have a LinkedIn account. I yelled at him. Later he yelled at me.

This is not an age thing.

My almost twenty-five-year-old daughter who is in her fourth year of teaching at a NYC charter school needs to quit her job. It’s either that or jump off the GW Bridge. She doesn’t want to quit her job for a lot of reasons, none of which has anything to do with liking her job. The number one reason is her fear of not finding another job.

As an aside, I had the privilege of sitting in on her fourth grade classroom for four hours about this time last year and she is, hands down, the best teacher I have ever seen. She’s not this year. She’s flagging. Funding is drying up, there are more students in the room (35 this year I think) and the student day is 8 hours, and for some reason, of the 35, 12 are IEP students. Her day is probably closer to 12 hours. And she would interview when, exactly?

There is almost always a secondary teacher. The secondary teacher is generally a first-year mentee which means they are not permitted to interact directly unless guided by the primary teacher. I think this is a great way to bring up new teachers unless you’ve got a very full room and very tight guidelines on how the class is taught and managed. This year it’s a shit show.

Here’s the kicker. When her dad died last year, at the ripe old age of just barely sixty, she inherited his entire retirement fund (boy, did he manage to squirrel it away) in addition to receiving substantial life insurance benefits which are untaxable. She’s like her dad. She squirrels that shit away and pretends it isn’t there other than to speak with her financial advisor periodically.

That kid, sorry, that woman could conceivably quit her job and do absolutely nothing for a very long time assuming she didn’t change her current lifestyle (teacher’s salary). She could also quit her job and pursue another masters. Or take on that JD she’s still considering. She wants to effect policy and to effect policy, a JD is extremely useful. She has many choices and while she considers those choices and the damage that is done when an employee is suffering so badly, they cry on the way to work every morning (been there, did that, still picking at the scabs) she is paralyzed. In the meantime, her skills are eroding by way of trauma. Yes. It’s trauma. If you’ve ever spent time in a job where you cried all the way to work every single day and were too numb on the way home for tears, you know perfectly well those scars are still there and it took you awhile to come back.

So why is she still there? Because she is more affected by the current situation than the reality of her circumstances.

Here’s the current truth about teachers in New York City. There is a significant shortage. If you want to live in the city and you want to teach, go for it. It’s one of the few job markets that are still hopping. Even medical professionals are having to think twice. It’s not as if we have enough of them (we do not), it’s that we can’t pay them and it’s going to get worse.

Teachers in New York City are often hired in the middle of the year. Teachers that come from charter schools are greeted with an, ‘oh god, I’m so sorry’ and then marched into a classroom assuming they have a freaking heartbeat and the proper credentials.

She still can’t do it.

Back to LinkedIn. Why not just change my status to retired? Why not mention an extended sabbatical? I mean, that would dry shit up should any shit pop up. Every time something does pop up, I panic. I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to talk about it, and lord knows I do NOT want another interview that’s more likely to go sideways than not.

Remember Quiet Quitting? Now we have Quiet Cracking (my kid), Rage Applying, and something called Job Hugging (I’ll have to look into that because I do not believe it includes physical contact with another person). There was a term for employees just getting up and walking out the door, never to return. Generally young people, not brand new to the workplace, but new enough to know, omg I’m going to die if I stay here and these people are fucking nuts. I’m leaving.

I’m one of those. I’m not sure which, probably Quiet Cracking on the periphery of the job market (vs in an actual job) and I think my daughter probably falls into the Job Hugging category but I’m not sure yet.

I quit. I know I said that before, but it bears repeating (probably over and over until I let it go). I quit. There is no option on my LinkedIn profile to change my status to ‘I Quit’. Not that I’d use it. Well, maybe I would.