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

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

#471

Post by hackerboos »

SilasX wrote: post #105
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 wi…

I've never had a interview which was only FizzBuzz. The problems given are usually much more difficult than that.

But I've also done interviews with no coding at all.

Point being, nobody is going to hire on FizzBuzz alone, in fact I would hatch a guess that most companies don't use it as a problem anymore given its prevalence.

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

#472

Post by hackerboos »

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.

It's not just internal candidates. It's done for H1B applications also.

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

#473

Post by Retra »

bduerst wrote: post #214
Retra wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If "just get over it" were a solution, don't you think it would have worked by now? I don't think being flippant about people's lives is all that productive.

They're just saying that some skills typically come about with experience, and I don't think they're attacking you or unemployed people. You talk about information being limited to job applicants, but interviewing is a two way street. Interviewers are human and also trying to sift through the information you deliver, and they tend to lean towards false negatives in order to avoid false positives. Sometimes there is a…

My concern is more that the information which would develop productive experiences is missing. Yes, learning comes from experience. But you can learn the wrong things when your experiences are bad. Applying for work often does more to reinforce learning the wrong things than it does reinforcing successful things.

It's a lot like having many failed relationships. It doesn't necessarily teach you to try harder, it often teaches you to become cynical and careless.

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

#474

Post by ionised »

enraged_camel wrote: post #303
mhurron wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes a good dose of self-loathing in order to get a job seems like a very healthy thing to do. It's called 'drinking the koolaid' because it's suicidal. Companies would be in a better situation if they realized that they were just a paycheck to their employees and not a damn lifestyle. That would cut into profits though, they'd have to give raises and improve compensation to keep people. Companies aren't looking for d…

People who are there "just for the paycheck" tend to be mediocre performers, whereas people who are actually passionate about it tend to do a good job.

People who are there just for the paycheck are going to make up the majority of employees all over the world.

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

#476

Post by snowwrestler »

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…

> The reality is that as time goes on, the world's needs can and will be met by fewer and fewer people.

The crucial line is when basic needs for life can be met by a minority of the population, and that line was crossed decades ago thanks to the industrial revolution.

> This should be a good thing, but it won't work under most existing economic systems.

Almost the entire world operates in an economic system that assumes, as a starting condition that not every person needs to work on providing for needs. That is how innovation can happen, and new industries can develop, like the entire entertainment, sports, and computer technology industries to just name a few.

> Our entire economy has to change to accomodate the new reality that a significant percentage of the population will be unemployed.

There is no evidence that improving the productivity of existing industries leads to long-term unemployment growth. In fact the evidence shows that the nations with the highest productivity gains are also the nations that have the highest standards of living and lowest unemployment.

The secret is innovation. Nations with growing productivity can innovate and create new industries, which create new jobs to "soak up" the new population.

On top of this, global population growth is slowing and will basically stop--and maybe even reverse--within the next century. At that point, improving productivity will be the only possible way to continue growing standards of living.

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

#477

Post by srunni »

creamyhorror wrote: post #445
nostrademons wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be careful with the word "aggregate", it obscures a lot of the complexity of what's going on. In aggregate, for example, the average person will remain...average. That's not a useful conclusion when looking at absolute wealth (which nobody really cares about anyway - the working poor today have more information available to them than a corporate CEO did 20 years ago, yet it doesn't do much good for them), nor is it a…

I like the thrust of your argument, but from my perspective in Singapore/Asia, that's not quite what I see. Big corporates are aggressively moving to dominate technology niches, while still dominating their existing verticals. * All the banks have strong deal/shopping apps * Property developers are continuing to build ever larger malls while investing in Amazon-like marketplaces (see Matahari Mall) * Every big corpor…

> I like the thrust of your argument, but from my perspective in Singapore/Asia, that's not quite what I see...The US-educated scions of well-connected families are especially responsible for techologising their behemoth family businesses and launching modern apps.

This is exactly correct. The GP's post reminded me of The Coming Transformation, a report by VC firm Formation 8: http://formation8.com/resources/the-coming-transformation/

The report draws a similar comparison between the decline of the landed aristocracy during the Second Industrial Revolution and the coming decline of the industrial aristocracy due to "software eating the world."

However, Formation 8 is taking advantage of this opportunity: one of their partners is the scion of a Korean conglomerate, and he's no doubt leveraging his family ties to obtain buy-in from many other HNW families from all over Asia:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-03-05/why-formati...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-25/sun-yat-se...

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

#478

Post by rorykoehler »

petra wrote: post #324
mikepurvis wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of BI is that the government doesn't actually need to be involved in centrally planning all of the things that need doing— it's a huge amount of unnecessary bureaucracy when many of them are things people would love to do given freedom from having to immediately "earn a living". So the government doesn't pay you to pick up trash in the ravine near your home. The government pays you because you are a citizen…

Currently people who work volunteer more than people who don't work. Further more volunteers give only an average of 3 hours/week. That's not much, in the context of our discussion.

I dunno about the metric you are judging volunteering on here. Do the people who don't volunteer and don't work have enough money to get to the place where they will provide the volunteering service.

As context and a little thought experiment:

I have just switched careers and have had to cut back on expenses to a bare minimum while I was learning the skills required to get a job in my desired field. I had decided not to work and focus 100% on learning. During this time I barely left the house and if I did I would walk, sometimes up to 10km, because I didn't have the money for even the train (food and rent come first). On the flip side my mother was a housewife while my dad worked (very traditional I know!) but she would volunteer in 3 different places because she could afford to (time and money).

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

#479

Post by newobj »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #120
morgante wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness. A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?

Good engineers can be bad at English. I've seen C-suite briefings and strategy docs with obvious errors in them. Unless you're working in publishing, I'd pay less attention to trivial errors than to evidence of an ability to get useful things done.

Bad at English and attention to detail are two different things. Thoroughness, attention to detail, and knowing how to rigorously shake something down for at-a-glance defects are all skills -- disciplines -- I would expect out of a good software developer.

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

#480

Post by newobj »

sokoloff wrote: post #74
newobj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 40, and have seen shitty resumes/interview efforts my entire life. It seems to have no relationship to economic conditions. Most people just don't seem to ... try very hard? Wish I had something more insightful to say after almost 20 years of observation.

There's also a pretty strong adverse selection problem in the applicant pool. People with strong resumes and strong interviewing skills just don't apply and interview all that often. People who are weak at the resume stage send out a LOT of resumes. People who are weak at interviewing fail to succeed at a lot of interviews. Therefore, the randomly chosen resume and randomly chosen interview candidate are well below t…

I think you're right about that.
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