In some ideal America, my research experience and effective scholarship for gun rights would be of some economic value to someone. If there were a national organization committed to gun rights, they could hire me, even at a very, very tiny salary (as long as there was health insurance), to do the type of research and writing that I have been doing very effectively for a number of years as a part-timer. But alas, there are no such national organizations.
Clayton Cramer, hero to millions of Second Amendment supporters for, among other things, his debunking of the work of lying anti-gun activist and writer Michael Bellesisles, is apparently unemployed.
Well, yeah, so are a lot of people. But Clayton deserves better than this, especially given the number of utter goobers lolling in phat foundation and think tank jobs even in these hard times.
If you know of anything suitable for him, drop him a line.
UPDATE: Hey, Clayton! Plaster your email addy in a prominent, easy to identify location!
UPDATE: If there are any other gun rights bloggers out there who’d like to help a genuine hero in the Second Amendment movement to find a job, why not post something at your place, too?
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. If you have something for Clayton, email him here.
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Bill, whether Clayton is in immediate need of employment, I do not know. I have read his blog and his columns in Shotgun News for some time, now, and he does appear to have several ongoing sources of income (a small side-business doing roller kits for celestial telescopes, sales of prior books, etc.). However, I would agree that he is more than deserving of employment on some remunerative basis by some pro-gun organization - his columns, in my view, deserve far wider circulation.
Not to minimize in the slightest the value he would bring to any organization - but I’ve sometimes wondered why his pro-gun writings could not be syndicated and widely vended to firearms publications (both online and print) and pro-gun blogs by the syndicator(s). Even a nominal fee from each customer would quickly mount up - there are a lot of gun blogs and magazines/webzines out there.
BTW: From Clayton’s own website (not from the blog itself), this is both the reason why he does not stick his e-mail addy out there in easy-to-find form, and his e-mail address itself…
JB, he can worry about spam or make it easy for potential employers to contact him. I know which way I’d go.
Also, he may have some dribs and drabs of income, but he makes it plain it isn’t a great deal and, most important, he is without health insurance. An older guy without health insurance is not a good place to be.
Which is why, although I’m not big on socialized medicine, we do need to find some solutions for situations like these.
Understood and agreed - he does have a full, up-to-date personal/professional resume link on his website - the resume (it’s a .pdf) is here - and it lists his e-mail addy (as well as his website) in proper form at the top, along with his physical address. According to what he states on the website, he is, in fact, looking for work.
His regular website is here.
Very impressive resume, BTW - the man appears to be a majorly qualified software engineer, as well as having other professional skillsets. Yes, there are (unfortunately) a lot of qualified and “available” folks in that business these days - but it would certainly seem like someone could use a gent like this.
In this economy, all that weight might be a disadavantage, especially in tech, where younger and cheaper might have a better chance. I still think a nice, cushy think tank position would be best for him - the academy and its environs is one of the few places left where age and experience is not an automatic handicap.
I’ve long thought that he should go to law school (perhaps GMU Law) and then into the academy. I would think his preexisting body of scholarship should be enough for tenure somewhere. If that didn’t work out, at least he would be on the East Coast/in the D.C. area where most of the think tanks and foundations congregate.
I guess a truck driving job is out of the question. It is for me, a truck driver.
Dean, I understand what you are saying - I even alluded to it:
I’m just saying that I’d like to see Clayton get some sort of safe harbor as a reward for a lifetime of work - and more than a few victories - in protecting and defending one of our most important rights - the right to keep and bear arms.
I’m currently trying to hire a programmer at a consulting company for a particular customer. Every candidate has been rejected by the customer as either not experienced enough or too experienced and hence expensive. All I can figure out from the explicit customer requirements and the stream of rejections is that they’re looking for someone who started programming when he was 10, has no debt, has no family or other distractions, and is naive enough to work long hours for no extra pay and no job security. (We’re a contracting company, and any of us can be on the street on almost no notice.)
I’ve seen this a lot over the years, both in looking for a job myself (We want someone with a master’s degree, ten years’ development experience overall, five years in these three specific and uncommon technologies, and willing to take a salary that a recent graduate would hesitate to accept.) and in looking for staff (What’s wrong with you? We’re not asking for much. Why can’t you find anyone?) It’s getting more common, with the worse economy.
I don’t know what to tell older, more experienced, more expensive job hunters except to be up front in saying that you’re willing to take lower pay during the down economy. I’m not sure it will do any good (the HR department might expect you to jump ship as soon as things improve) but it’s worth a shot if nothing else has worked.
Bill, thanks for linking.
Anonymous Guy: Yes, it is astonishing how many companies want 30 years experience in C# (yes, there’s a problem finding people with 30 years experience in C#), and are willing to pay almost nothing for it. Amazingly enough, I figured out some time ago that I am going to have take a lot less pay than I made at HP. But that still doesn’t help much, since there are so many engineers here in Boise who are out of work, and are also quite experienced.
That’s why I was hoping that some nonprofit interested in gun rights would pay me a very low salary plus benefits to do what I like to do anyway. Even $30,000 a year (maybe less) and health insurance, if I didn’t need to relocate, would take my mind off the struggle to find health insurance after COBRA continuation expires–and i could get a lot done. I know that nonprofits in DC are paying secretaries more money than that!
AG, the simple, sad fact is this: In a down economy, technical people with extensive qualifications and experience are mostly screwed from both directions. The positions for which they are well qualified are, of course, those where (as you alluded to) whoever is in charge of filling the opening is looking for the Impossible Dream, someone who has vast abilities and qualifications, and is simultaneously eager to relocate at no cost to the client company to work long hours for roughly half of the compensation that would normally be expected.
The true double-whammy, though, is that in most cases, that same whoever’s-trying-to-hire will not even talk to most people with extensive qualifications and prior experience. It’s not that they don’t want good personnel - they want the very best they can get, albeit as cheaply as they can get them (as noted). However, they’ll figure (and I’ve actually been told this by a few recruiters and other H.R. types in the past) that either a) there must be something wrong with this “highly qualified” guy - otherwise, why is he out of work? (i.e., “how do I know they didn’t take advantage of this lousy economy to can his deadwood butt?”) or b) if they hire the guy (at, likely, inferior pay and/or bennies), as soon as the economy comes back up, he’ll be gone with the wind, to a better (read: “pays what he’s actually worth”) position.
I don’t really know any useful way to defeat this - I do know that preemptively saying I’m willing to take less pay has not worked for me in the past. If anything, that seems to make them even less likely to talk to you, since (I think) they seem to see that as confirmation of either a) or b) (or possibly some of both).
In my own case - I’m a design engineer, mostly aerospace and automotive and largely contract for the past several years - I’ve been fortunate enough to skate through several past recessions, with only a month or so off of work in one of them. This time around, though, it’s looking different - and not good. I’ve been drawing unemployment for a couple of months, now, and despite lots of resume copies sent out and quite a few phone conversations, there’s just not much going on right now. It’s looking more and more like a pretty long dry spell - I’m looking at other things I can do, for now.
If merit really means anything, I agree with Bill; Clayton, in my view, richly merits as full employment as he desires in something involving the field where he’s been doing yeoman work for a long time, that of gun rights and the background and philosophy and substantiation thereof, even while he’s been gainfully (monetarily, that is) employed full-time elsewhere.
Unfortunately, it all too often seems that those who make the hiring decisions are not terribly impressed with “merit.”
As a software engineer and mathematician with 30 years experience, my last two jobs were outsourced to Israel and the Netherlands. I took a job at 25% of what I was making, just for benefits. When my youngest daughter gets out of college, I will be 60, and I will work until medicare or whatever is left. I have enough money to last the rest of my life because when I run out of money, I am going to walk out onto the ice floes.
Every candidate has been rejected by the customer as either not experienced enough or too experienced and hence expensive.
How exactly do they arrive at that conclusion without asking the candidates themselves what they’re willing to take?
I was recently contacted by someone at some outfit in another state regarding a potential position and at some point in the phone conversation was asked what I made on my last job. After telling him my last salary, he told me I had been stiffed. I said that I had no problem with what I was making, as I had no big obligations (no kids, no mortgage, and no wife, but I didn’t divulge these details) and my paycheck, after accounting for rent, utilities, the occasional credit card balance, and vehicle support costs, basically went into the bank. He hesitated momentarily, as if surprised, but not once was I asked what I would be willing to accept.
No further word on this prospect so far, but it’s unlikely that any notice will be forthcoming if it’s been decided I don’t fit what they’re looking for. It seems no one sends out thanks-for-applying-but letters anymore…
Far, far too individualist of you. The government will tell you when and where you go out on the ice floe.
Your experience has been mine. From 1979 to 2009, I have never been unemployed for more than three months (and that was all after 9/11). I thought that I had managed to dodge the bullet this time as well (unlike many of my co-workers at HP) because I had a contract job in central Oregon even before my paychecks from HP ended. But cash flow problems seem to have made that job go away, and nothing else is popping up.
I’m teaching one State & Local Government class at ITT Technical Institute, so there is some income, although not much. (I do get a chance to influence young minds, however, so that’s worth something.) My wife is teaching five classes at two different colleges, and for the first time in my life, she’s bringing in way more than me. But because she teaches at the college level, there are no benefits. It makes you wonder if the “Wal-Mart exploits its workers” rhetoric you hear so much from academics is projection of their own guilt about how adjuncts are abused.
I keep hoping that I will be able to get more classes to teach, or even a full-time teaching job (with benefits), but it turns out that my rather astonishing book and journal publication history isn’t of any importance at the community college level.
This assumes that the hiring manager sees your resume. When I worked as an employment agent, back in the 1970s (I’ve done a lot of things over the years), I found that the primary function of human resources in most companies was to prevent hiring–and to screen resumes according to a very simplified model. As an employment agent, I found that by bypassing human resources, I was often able to get people interviews–and hired–whose resumes had been rejected by HR.
I suspect that because my bachelor’s and master’s degrees are in the wrong field, my resumes aren’t even getting to the hiring manager–in spite of having experience that is easily equivalent to at least a bachelor’s in computer science.
True enough -and, as you pointed out, oftentimes (even in my own field) an unwarranted assumption. Perhaps I should have better written “…those who make the decisions on who to interview…”
My experience, over my roughly 23 years in design engineering since I left teaching, has been that, if I can get an interview with the one who actually makes the hire-or-don’t-hire decision, it’s about 95%-98% certain I’m going to get the job - in large part, I think, because a) I always interview well (I certainly should; when I was a teacher, one of the things I taught was how to interview properly for a job), and b) I refuse to either “inflate” - or “deflate” - my resume, and I don’t apply for a job unless I am pretty certain I can actually do it, based on the job description. As in your case, neither of my degrees are in the “correct” field - I didn’t originally set out for a career in engineering, that’s just what happened.
In this field, I deal (nearly all the time) with/through recruiters, of course - and I always try to convey to them the same message: “Get me the interview with the person who can actually hire me, and I’ll get the job.” A lot of the time, I think that means they have to “go around” some of the H.R. people.
It’s getting that chance to talk with The Man (or The Woman) that’s the hard part - in times like we have now, it’s even harder than usual.
For now, I think I’m going to go further into gunsmithing/gun repair, something I’ve done for a lot of years as a part-time venture - mostly a somewhat-overgrown hobby, in the recent past. It doesn’t pay all that well, but I have the skills and the tools - and I’ve certainly got plenty of time for it, just now…
JSB, take a look at this. Six months ago you thought about trying to make one. Maybe now is the time.