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Old 09-08-2011, 10:41 AM
 
Location: Sierra Vista, AZ
17,531 posts, read 24,648,910 times
Reputation: 9980

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Quote:
Originally Posted by mkl654321 View Post
Current situation: 53 years old, just got my degree (BA, Univ of Oregon, English). I was born in SF, grew up in Marin, and right now I'm anticipating another rainy Oregon winter and I'm starting to feel really homesick. There's no jobs here, and no reason to stay.

What I want: I'm single, and only need to support myself. I want to find a decent job that will let me live in modest fashion. I want to live IN the City; I never have. I've lived in San Rafael, Vallejo, Hayward, and Berkeley, and doing anything in the City always involved fighting traffic, paying insane bridge tolls, riding BARF, etc. I just want to live near the downtown core (or a decent Muni ride away) and dispense with having a car at all (since CA DMV fees are vampiric and you can't park in SF anyway). Ideally, I would commute via bus (or BARF, or Muni Metro) to my job in a cubicle in one of the downtown skyscrapers, endure nine hours of soul-sucking, mind-numbing tedium, then the rest of my waking hours would be my own. Just being in the City would be worth whatever hassle it takes. I should add that I love the weather there--it seems like "home".

So: can I expect to find a decent job there within, say, six months?
Will I be able to live alone, or will I have to share a three-bedroom house with nine other roommates, who play their Kill All ******* CDs until 3 AM, never clean up after themselves, slam doors at 5:30 in the morning, have loud sex at all hours, and watch American Idol on the communal TV?
What are the practical limitations to living without a car in SF?
Am I out of my mind for even considering moving during the Second Great Depression?
Do I have the slightest prayer of being even considered for an interview before I move there? Or do resumes with out-of-state addresses get immediately consigned to the circular file?
I'd look at the Federal Government or the Universities for jobs before loading up the truck. Get a converted basement studio in Outer Richmond or Sunset Districts hopefully with access to the yard. Take Muni to work, wherever that winds up being. I did it for a while, eventually my whole family moved there
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Old 09-08-2011, 10:47 AM
 
125 posts, read 168,925 times
Reputation: 70
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigdumbgod View Post
On the other hand, there is a dearth of people with these skills in the tech-heavy employee pool, so there may be hope.
I totally agree, but I see countless instances of bad (really bad) English in web postings, user manuals, blogs, internet advertising, etc. etc. etc., and nobody seems to care. Heck, I've read the online version of the SF Chronicle (SF Gate) daily for some time now, and there are always several egregious grammatical and/or spelling errors that shouldn't slip by a proofreader, let alone shouldn't have been committed in the first place. The English language has degraded, when some nerdlet texts his friend, "JST TK AWSUM DUMP" and that's valid communication.

I'd like to think that there is some company out there that might value not having its promotional literature, web pages, etc. look like they were written by a bright eight-year-old. But since the bar has been lowered so far, maybe the skill of decent writing has obsolesced. After all, if everyone speaks and writes like an uneducated moron, that's the new standard, right?

I do agree with your basic premise, that a job market filled with semi-literate bright young proto-nerds might have room for someone who can actually parse an English sentence. But so far, I'm not seeing it (in SF or elsewhere). My original goal was to be an English teacher once I graduated--but there are 300,000 laid-off teachers nationwide. So it looks like private industry is the only prospective venue--but what I have to offer isn't in demand. To put it mildly.

It looks like moving to SF is a pipe dream, and I'd better stay up here in Oregon and get rained on for a few more years.
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Old 09-08-2011, 11:16 AM
 
Location: South Korea
5,242 posts, read 13,054,023 times
Reputation: 2957
Quote:
Originally Posted by mkl654321 View Post
Well, of course, that had occured to me, but I find that work so boring and tedious I would probably go berserk within a month. Besides, I quit doing the accounting/tax thing in 1995; I'm sure the rules/methods/laws are quite a bit different now. And as far as a temp agency goes--I resolved never to work for one of those crooks again after I found out that while I was getting paid $9/hr, my employer was paying the agency $21/hr--for three months. So the agency made over $6000 from the half hour or so of work they expended to hire and place me. Never again.
It's not like whatever random office job you expect to get would be any more exciting. At least with accounting you can make a decent wage while doing drudge work. Again if you really care about living here, get a CPA license or whatever and get trained in modern accounting rules, you'd be in a much better position when applying for jobs.

Yeah temping sucks, but something good that temp agencies can do is get you a permanent job. They basically act as your agent and get you into an interview and into a permanent position. If you're on your own and responding to every job opening on craigslist, you will HARDLY EVER get any replies or any interviews. I have only ever gotten permanent jobs through temp agencies. Doing temporary work sucks because the pay is usually lower and you aren't getting any benefits while the client is paying twice or thrice your salary.

And if you really want to live alone here in SF and not somewhere cheaper like Oakland or Berkeley, you do need to make about $45-60k a year to be able to afford a studio which is going to be at least $1200 on average, probably more these days. And I don't see you getting a job making that kind of money if you're just applying to random office jobs based only on having an English degree and unrelated accouting experience. If I knew a way to make 60k from that kind of beginning position I would have done it a long time ago, I have three college degrees and about 10 years of working experience and make nowhere near that.


Now I'm not trying to be uber-uber-negative, just realistic. Realistically what would happen is you'd apply to jobs on craigslist, never get any replies because you're competing with every college grad in the nation, then finally take my advice and look for work with temp agencies. If you're lucky they place you in some random office job and you're making like $16 an hour which is something like $500 in take-home pay a week. You figure you can afford to pay something between $600 and 900 a month for rent. That puts you out of reach of any studio that is anywhere but the Tenderloin (which you really don't want to live in). Your options at this point would either live with roommates in SF or get a studio or 1br in a nice part of Oakland. Your choice.

Or you could go back to school, get a CPA, then apply in SF for jobs and maybe get something making around $50-60k a year.

Last edited by mayorhaggar; 09-08-2011 at 11:26 AM..
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Old 09-08-2011, 12:06 PM
 
125 posts, read 168,925 times
Reputation: 70
Quote:
Originally Posted by mayorhaggar View Post
Or you could go back to school, get a CPA, then apply in SF for jobs and maybe get something making around $50-60k a year.
Thanks for the advice, but I really would rather be shoveling bat guano or be Third Assistant Coop Cleaner at the chicken farm than ever, ever, ever do accounting/bookkeeping/taxes again. And to become a CPA would be to turn into a soulless robot with a suit. I'd rather die.

I do agree with your numbers, depressing as they are. I'd either be expending a ridiculous amount of my income on rent, or living in a sqaulid and dangerous place where my life expectancy would probably be measured in hours. I suppose most people go the (multiple) roommate route, and purchase large amounts of narcotics to suppress the inevitable homicidal tendencies that arise therefrom.

Temp agencies may indeed be a useful route to permanent positions, but my God, they make fistfuls of money from your labor in the process. I just can't abide the idea of an agency devouring 60%+ of the money I earn. Of course, my reluctance to get a**-****ed for even a short length of time has denied me opportunities in the past.

It sounds like the abundance of bright-eyed and bushy-tailed younguns with degrees, and the resulting massive demand for a housing stock that cannot, because of geographical restrictions, grow in response to that demand, means that I would have to both fiercely compete for and then drastically overpay for a place to live. Not to mention either be robbed by a temp agency or be dramatically underpaid for crap work.

The bottom line, I think, is that while I love SF, I'm not willing to be ripped off in order to live there. And $1800 for a studio apartment is definitely a ripoff, aside from the employer abuses (temp agencies or otherwise) that arise from a job market like the current one ("One of your job duties is that you will be daily beaten and sodomized. And no unauthorized bathroom breaks.").
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Old 09-08-2011, 12:36 PM
 
Location: SF Bay Area
13,520 posts, read 22,064,834 times
Reputation: 20234
You sure post alot about what you can't or won't do. Perhaps a focus on what you can and are willing to do may splash some icy cold water on your dilemma. From what you've posted so far, it doesn't sound like moving to SF is a good idea given your inflexibility.
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Old 09-08-2011, 12:38 PM
 
Location: West Coast
1,189 posts, read 2,548,957 times
Reputation: 2108
An English degree is important for a technical writing position.
An English degree is important for a ESL teaching position.
An English degree+business owner experience+an interest in teaching is
important for a Director of a tutoring center position.
An English degree+corporate experience is important for a position as an executive speechwriting position, or corporate trainer position.

I could go on and on with opportunites for people with an English degree, which by the way is the global language that everyone in the WORLD needs to learn if they want to compete. The WORLD is in or on their way to San Francisco. You have a very valuable degree.
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Old 09-08-2011, 03:40 PM
 
125 posts, read 168,925 times
Reputation: 70
Quote:
Originally Posted by jaypee View Post
You sure post alot about what you can't or won't do. Perhaps a focus on what you can and are willing to do may splash some icy cold water on your dilemma. From what you've posted so far, it doesn't sound like moving to SF is a good idea given your inflexibility.
You style it as "inflexible", but I'm simply articulating, and being realistic, about the things I cannot tolerate. And yes, there are some things that would be tolerable to ***YOU*** that I, nonetheless, cannot put up with. I'm sure there are several (maybe, dozens) of living/working conditions that ***YOU*** would not put up with, yet ***YOU*** would not describe yourself as "inflexible" because of those reservations.

It's more realistic to have an idea going in of what living and working in a new location would be like, rather than just moving there with no foreknowledge and consequently having to live and work under conditions that are so unpleasant that the trouble and expense of having moved turns out to not have been worth it.
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Old 09-08-2011, 03:46 PM
 
954 posts, read 1,278,912 times
Reputation: 384
Quote:
Originally Posted by bigdumbgod View Post
On the other hand, there is a dearth of people with these skills in the tech-heavy employee pool, so there may be hope.
Wouldn't that be nice, but liberal arts degrees are a dime a dozen, you don't get one because you think it'll help you get a job (or at least, you shouldn't).
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Old 09-08-2011, 03:48 PM
 
125 posts, read 168,925 times
Reputation: 70
Quote:
Originally Posted by Joy74 View Post
An English degree is important for a technical writing position.
An English degree is important for a ESL teaching position.
An English degree+business owner experience+an interest in teaching is
important for a Director of a tutoring center position.
An English degree+corporate experience is important for a position as an executive speechwriting position, or corporate trainer position.

I could go on and on with opportunites for people with an English degree, which by the way is the global language that everyone in the WORLD needs to learn if they want to compete. The WORLD is in or on their way to San Francisco. You have a very valuable degree.
Thank you, and I agree about the value of both an English degree and the value of expertise in the world's lingua franca in general. It has seemed so far, however, that English proficiency isn't valued in the American marketplace (which seems bizarre); what matters is being able to speak fluent Nerd and to schmooze. However, point taken about those specific jobs. Those are the fields, in fact, where I'm doing the most diligent searching. I still can't shake the frustrating feeling that I'd have much more market value if I knew how to program an IPhone app or put together a flashy PowerPoint presentation for Scudzo Detergent.

I think the low market value of being learned in the liberal arts is like the ridiculously low salaries paid to teachers: a manifestation of the sad fact that we, unlike the other cultures that are eclipsing us, do NOT value education. Duh
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Old 09-08-2011, 03:49 PM
 
954 posts, read 1,278,912 times
Reputation: 384
Quote:
Originally Posted by mkl654321 View Post
Thanks for the advice, but I really would rather be shoveling bat guano or be Third Assistant Coop Cleaner at the chicken farm than ever, ever, ever do accounting/bookkeeping/taxes again. And to become a CPA would be to turn into a soulless robot with a suit. I'd rather die.
Quote:
Ideally, I would commute via bus (or BARF, or Muni Metro) to my job in a cubicle in one of the downtown skyscrapers, endure nine hours of soul-sucking, mind-numbing tedium, then the rest of my waking hours would be my own.
I have to ask, do you even know what you want, or would put up with?

Quote:
Originally Posted by mkl654321 View Post
Thank you, and I agree about the value of both an English degree and the value of expertise in the world's lingua franca in general. It has seemed so far, however, that English proficiency isn't valued in the American marketplace (which seems bizarre); what matters is being able to speak fluent Nerd and to schmooze. However, point taken about those specific jobs. Those are the fields, in fact, where I'm doing the most diligent searching. I still can't shake the frustrating feeling that I'd have much more market value if I knew how to program an IPhone app or put together a flashy PowerPoint presentation for Scudzo Detergent.

I think the low market value of being learned in the liberal arts is like the ridiculously low salaries paid to teachers: a manifestation of the sad fact that we, unlike the other cultures that are eclipsing us, do NOT value education. Duh
An English degree isn't about being proficient with the language, it's about literature (and of course, the critical thinking skills that go into analyzing it). Everyone is supposed to have proficient grammar upon graduating college with any degree.

Ultimately, you need to find a way to make the English degree compliment your other marketable attributes, it really can't be your sole marketable attribute, unless you want to be an English teacher.
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