Comments by "Patrick Berry" (@MundaneGray) on "A Life After Layoff" channel.

I tell them that I'll be happy to negotiate salary and benefits when an offer is on the table. Until then, salary negotiation is premature.
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About those companies that ask what you were paid by previous employers: how would they respond if a candidate asked how much they paid the previous employees who held the job? Would they disclose that information? I don’t think so.
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I can tell you a few ways to be first in line to get laid off. 1. Be the new guy. Last hired, first fired. 2. Be a contractor, not an employee. One of the reasons employers love to hire contractors is that they can be easily terminated at a moment’s notice. Need to cut costs? Dump all the contractors! 3. Be a technical writer. They are always seen as expendable. Products don’t really need documentation, do they? If they do, we’ll just have the engineers write it. 4. Be experienced. If you have decades of experience in your profession, that means you’re expensive. The company can’t afford you. So you’re terminated, and your job will be given to an inexperienced new hire — or even better, a random person in India who can be paid a quarter of what you were. So what if he’s not a native speaker of the language he’ll be writing manuals in? He’s cheaper, and that’s all that matters.
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I would respond to that question by saying “Are you offering me the position?” If they say no, I politely suggest that salary negotiations are premature at the interview stage. When they have made the decision to hire me, I’ll be happy to discuss compensation.
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If you are male, never comment on a female coworker’s appearance in any way. Don’t do or say anything to suggest that you have even NOTICED that your coworker is female.
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@lauracoutinho5478 I just point out that it's premature to start negotiating salary during the interview process. The appropriate time for that is after they've offered me the job.
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I used to maintain Word and plain-text versions of my resume — the former for human readers, and the latter for ATS to suck into its database and use for keyword searches. Nowadays I just apply with my LinkedIn profile if the employer will accept that, which a lot of them will because it’s in a consistent and predictable format that they can easily import. I do still have a Word resume for those who want it, but it contains exactly the same information as my LinkedIn profile.
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I’m a technical writer, and I once saw a job listing for a technical writer with a master’s degree in statistics. My immediate reaction was: “I’m not sure there is a single person on the planet who meets those requirements.” Then I thought: “If you you have an M.S. in statistics, why would you be applying for tech writer jobs?”
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@championmagnus Agreed. At one point, my resume used table formatting to make everything line up nicely. Eventually, I realized that most employers were trying to import the resume into a database, and the fancy formatting was interfering with that. So I got rid of the table and made the formatting as simple as possible.
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Regarding pregnancy, Dave Barry said it best: “You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.”
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The idea that remote workers can’t collaborate effectively is pure BS. I’m a technical writer, and I just finished collaborating with another writer on a manual that had to be developed in a short amount of time. Both of us work remotely. I’m in North Carolina, and he’s in Indiana. We used Sharepoint, which enabled both of us to edit the same Word file simultaneously. We communicated with each other throughout the day via Teams — mostly by chat messages, but if necessary, we had a voice call and shared our screens. It worked beautifully, and we got the manual done on time. Our bosses were delighted with results. None of this required us to be in the same STATE, let alone the same room.
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