The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people • Hacker News Board

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#101

Post by mhurron » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

jonathanjaeger wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cove…

> secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at

What's the point? No seriously, other than stroking the ego of the interviewer with a 'please sir, I am just dying to work here because you're so awesome and I'm not worthy.' Especially at entry level, one job is pretty much the same as the other. I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job.

I don't care how much you think I should think that your place is the best place ever to work and I should prostrate myself to get it, it's just a damn job and I am only looking for a paycheck so I don't starve and I can do things I want to do with my life.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#102

Post by icelancer » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

cryoshon wrote: post #90

downandout wrote: post #82

Most of the comments here focus on how people aren't trying hard enough to get jobs. This article indicates that the jobs don't exist and that the problem is likely to get far worse. You can try as hard as you want to get a job - if no one is hiring, you aren't going to get one. The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people. This should be a good thing, but it wo…

Yeah, there's always some holdovers commenting from the era of easy jobs and easy money. Underemployment should be mentioned in any discussion of job difficulty; in the US, getting a job as a barista or fast food is possible, but a horrendous waste of a college education. It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.

>It's really a shame that the US has decided to let its most educated generation ever suffer for its biggest strength.

This is by design, of course. The more "educated" the society is, the more "menial" jobs they have to take. Wide-swath prescription of college degrees can't solve that problem (in fact, it creates it).

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#103

Post by xrange » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

fensterblick wrote: post #44

As the article highlights, the Arab revolutions were led by the youth. I wonder what, if anything, will happen in the USA when the current generation, saddled by seemingly insurmountable college debt, comes to the realization that it cannot find stable work or afford decent housing. I truly believe that moment will be an earthquake for the current political environment; what we characterize Republicans and Democrats…

>saddled by seemingly insurmountable college debt

Does anyone know of a source for statistics on student loan debt? This site

http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data

...claims that the average debt of graduating seniors is $28.4k. I'd like to see a histogram of all recent graduates and dropouts, with the bins in dollars of debt. I'd also like to see a scatter plot showing the median debt vs. debtors age (for all age groups, not just recent grads). And another scatter plot of debt vs. income.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#104

Post by theworstshill » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:41 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #78

We should be honest and talk about just not creating more jobs BUT having LESS babies.

Why not the other way around - just kill everybody above a certain cutoff and feed them as soylent to the rest? They've already spent most of their productive years anyway, right? Its equally ridiculous, isn't it?

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#105

Post by SilasX » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

jonathanjaeger wrote: post #5

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cove…

The problem with this explanation is that, for every such person, you can probably find another one that does all of that stuff correctly but still never hears back.

That's exactly what we see with the Fizzbuzz phenomenon, with every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it, but everyone tripping over each other (including hobbyists and beginners) to say how easy it is, so "where's my job?"

I saw it too with professors and employers who blog, complaining that applicants and students can barely put together a sentence.

Where meets the twain?

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#106

Post by caskance » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:42 PM UTC

edgyswingset wrote: post #33

fecak wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago…

As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone. My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new g…

What you're seeing is actually the opposite problem. That candidates aren't obsessed enough with a potential "false positive" hire where they end up working somewhere they don't actually want to work. You can't tell me that someone applying for 40 positions a week truly wants to work at all 40 of those places. Primarily, the candidate just wants any job he/she can get because of the fear of unemployment.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#107

Post by nilkn » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

theworstshill wrote: post #104

dba7dba wrote: post #78

We should be honest and talk about just not creating more jobs BUT having LESS babies.

Why not the other way around - just kill everybody above a certain cutoff and feed them as soylent to the rest? They've already spent most of their productive years anyway, right? Its equally ridiculous, isn't it?

No, killing people and feeding them to others is several orders of magnitude more ridiculous than simply voluntarily having fewer children.

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#108

Post by 6stringmerc » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

cryoshon wrote: post #92

6stringmerc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flip side: After spending a lot of time in the process, realizing that prospective employers give an extremely low effort to respond to candidates - no matter how much effort put into a cover letter, resume grooming, or discussion of why the role might be a fit - it's disheartening. Auto-declines are the norm. Posting jobs for legal reasons when there's already an internal candidate in mind is also undisclosed. Betwe…

The dreaded internal candidate situation is a waste of everyone's time. They already know who is going to be hired, yet collectively everyone has to come together to interview you anyway. Then there's the rejection, if they even send one.

Oh absolutely, and I think that maybe, just maybe, there should be a legally mandated annotation on such a posting that an internal candidate has been identified and you are competing with them.

In my experience, even worse than a rejection was being offered a salary not commensurate with my experience, and in the neighborhood of $5,000 less than what I was already making in a nearly identical role. I've had that happen on at least three occasions, where the employer was either being dishonest about the salary range or withheld that information until very late in the process; even if for innocuous reasons, it functionally seemed like attempting to put me in a difficult position (stay where you are or leave for us for less and no written/promised path for advancement of position or salary).

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#109

Post by fredgrott » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:45 PM UTC

The reality is with $31 Billion in mobile app sales and rising those jobs will come from small businesses building mobile apps as we have 1 TBytes of free data to organize into mobile services every year that our current programming languages cannot self learn how to organize.

Yes there will still net jobs loss as tech progress eliminates them..the new job is your small business you set-up

Re: The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

#110

Post by chucky_z » Tue, Oct 13, 2015, 6:46 PM UTC

itsybitsycoder wrote: post #57

chucky_z wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to mention this exact same thing. The last time I had to go job hunting I submitted my resume to 40-50 companies each week or so, and unless I heard anything back ever, I did zero research outside of seeing if what they were looking for matched what I wanted to apply for.

How long did it take you to find a job using this method? Were you applying to software jobs?

Actually, one of my friends on Facebook saw that I was job hunting and offered me an interview. :/

I've gotten all of my best (and last few) jobs through connections, fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for me giving advice on how to get a job.

I'm specifically in the sysadmin/dba (and a little devops-y) side of things, and less in programming.