Applying for a corporate job in 1980s Los Angeles

I hit that magic time of 2-3 years of experience in my field after getting my degree by 1986, so I decided that it was time to look for a nice corporate job at a big company. I moved to the San Fernando Valley, a suburb area of Los Angeles, and started sending out resumes and going to job interviews. I was lucky because I got a good job, in my field, for one of the biggest employers in the area. And like everything else, luck played into it, I was in the right place at the right time.

Even after all these years I'm uncomfortable talking about what was going on, because the people who were doing the hiring at the time were (of course) older than me, and they had lived in a world of prejudice.

Prejudice isn't a term that you hear very often nowadays, but it was commonly used in the 1960s and '70s to describe someone who was racist, or bigoted. And it simply meant that people had "pre-judged" someone, in a negative way, based on the color of their skin, or their culture, or their gender. And while times had started changing, attitudes mostly weren't, and large corporations tended to do the same thing that they had been doing all along, hiring people that were the same as they were - the same race, the same culture, the same gender. Diversity wasn't valued, corporations valued uniformity. And so laws were put in place to try to change this, to give more opportunities to women, to minorities, that sort of thing.

The net effect of this was that someone like me, based on my gender, race, and culture, while they were valued as employees, weren't valuable in fulfilling quotas. And yes, that's exactly what it was, a quota system. A certain percentage of people had to be hired based on the requirements that filled a quota.

Because of my age (I'm in my sixties now) most of the young people that I talk to imagine that I worked in the corporate world that predated the 1980s. You know, all of the jobs done by men who looked just like me and the only women were secretaries, but that wasn't true.

The company that I worked for had a lot of diversity, and yes I know that it was forced, but it was wonderful. I got to see how having people with varying backgrounds can make the workforce a richer place, and started digging the hole that narrow-minded companies had created in the United States after World War II. It had started with the best intentions, giving preferential treatment to men who had been veterans, and needed the job to support a family, but it had stagnated corporate America, which needed a transfusion of new blood, which it got in the 1980s.

I have lived in interesting times, and continue to do so.

Thank you for the encouragement! If you want to see daily pics of my adventures on my recumbent trike in suburban Phoenix (just for fun, of course!) you can follow me on buymeacoffee.com/bradhall, and you can buy me a coffee if you'd like to!