A job is becoming a dim memory for many unemployed

WASHINGTON (AP) -- For more Americans, being out of work has become a semi-permanent condition.

Nearly one-third of the unemployed - nearly 4.5 million people - have had no job for a year or more. That's a record high. Many are older workers who have found it especially hard to find jobs.

And economists say their prospects won't brighten much even after the economy starts to strengthen and hiring picks up. Even if they can find a job, it will likely pay far less than their old ones did.

The outlook is unlikely to improve on Friday, when the government issues its monthly jobs report. Economists predict it will show that employers added a net 56,000 jobs in September.

That's far fewer than needed to reduce unemployment. The unemployment rate is expected to remain 9.1 percent for a third straight month.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last week called long-term unemployment a "national crisis" and said it should be one of Congress' top priorities.

If all their systems are unix, you better know the basics. There is nothing legacy about it, unix and its various flavors are still the most widely used server platform in the world.

Our development and production servers at work are all unix boxes, and while I don’t do sys admin type work, I still need to be able to write little scripts, use things like cvs, vi, sed, grep, chron, change permissions on files, that sort of thing. Routine, daily work. If experience with unix is not on someone’s resume, they get tossed in the round file.

If you are just starting out, I’d recommend an online linux tutorial for command line—any will probably do to get you started. GUIs are nice, but knowing many of the basic commands from a command line interface (CLI) is necessary.

Yes and no.

I’m with you. I got out of the University of California Davis with an engineering degree in 1982, to the worst recession prior to this one, and no jobs. I worked as a busboy and a grocery clerk before I finally got an engineering job.

So yes, if you aren’t working, you probably aren’t trying hard enough, and the generous government “safety net” is so sustantial these days, many people don’t need to work to get by unless you have a house payment.

Now, onto the “no” of “yes and no”.

We are in an economic depression. Times are clearly harder and job prospects are clearly less than the recession you and I went through in the early 80s. It is really brutal out their trying to get a job. People who aren’t lazy or satisfied collecting unemployment, are really scrambling and pulling out the stops. You have to be top flight today — really energetic and great at selling yourself, a great looking woman, or a charming guy, to get a job these days.

I’m grateful I have never been unemployed since the 6 months after I graduated college in 1982, but this depression is way worse than anything we went through.

Your point is valid that motivated people who bust their ass will find something eventually while the quitters and lazy sit and rot, but it really is different this time. The job market is simply brutal in this economic depressing. I thank the Lord for my job right now, and that I am not out on the streets competing to sell myself in this climate.

I’m guessing you mean Linux, as most Unix systems are not open-source. The theory is that the more eyes you have on the source code, the less chance you have security holes. Or perhaps more accurately, the quicker people will fix the code and put out a patch for it. Also since you have the source code, if you know the programming language, you can fix it yourself.

Another factor is that Linux was originally designed to run on inexpensive, commodity-level hardware (Intel-Windows machines) as opposed to very expensive, proprietary hardware, which at the time was all that was available for Unix systems. You get near Unix-level stability for a fraction of the cost.

For you and I, it gives us a chance to learn/tinker with a Unix-like OS on our own time, without having to find a class or convince an employer for on-the-job training.

I’m not Unix/Linux expert, just user-level. If you are interested, ShadowAce maintains a FR Tech Ping list.

“...found it especially hard to find jobs...”

“find”....a word right out of the collectivist government handbook.

In our nation one should be able to CREATE (vocatio= i.e. ones’ calling), not “find” work.

The government has placed barriers against start-up business CREATION (at every level), stiffled competition, and regulated corporations right out of the States.

Furthermore, so called public “education” should have every HS grad. capable of starting one’s OWN business. Not “find” work.

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