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This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

thelastpsychiatrist.com

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Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#111

Post by eitally »

cynicalkane wrote: post #24
yalurker wrote: post #13

Sigh, another blogger trotting out the tired, false cliche that college is useless. From the article: "Were you smarter at 21 post college than your Dad was at 21? And whatever the difference, was it worth the $50k-$200k he paid to get you it?" Yes. Yes I was smarter. And I didn't pay 200k because I went to a state school. I graduated a wholly different person with a completely different world-view and a ton of appli…

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to exp…

Agreed 100%. I have a BA in history & religious studies from UVA -- I had intentions of becoming a museum curator -- but decided to follow a career path in technology instead. I parlayed my hobby & part time job into a Manpower temp-to-hire gig and, courtesy of a couple of tremendous bosses, was empowered to further my education on the job (trial by fire style). Now I direct a full stack (analysis, design, dev, ops, support, administration) of ~60 great folks and love my job. And it pays quite a bit better than $40k/yr....

I stopped trying to write code back around 2004. It's not my forté. I excel at dataset analysis & pattern recognition, and communication/soft skills. While it does not apply so much to the startup scene and bleeding edge tech companies, the corporate world has a dearth of competent technical managers, not being technicians are hard to find, but because it tends to be a lot easier for liberal arts majors to acquire a working competency of tech knowledge than it is for hardcore geeks to learn people skills.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#112

Post by potatolicious »

jtbigwoo wrote: post #22
sliverstorm wrote: post #17

Just out of curiosity, the article derides the fact that his job search begins and ends in the morning- when I read that, I thought "well, you could certainly use the rest of the day for self-improvement- fitness, projects relevant to the job you want, volunteer work..." Is that a bad strategy, or when job hunting should you be pounding the pavement 24/7?

That was my thought, too. No matter how I feel about rejecting the insurance job, I can't deny that he's showing sufficient dedication to job hunting. The trouble is he doesn't seem to be showing any dedication to anything else. Why is he not tutoring or coaching little league? Why is he not learning something or building something?

SHOwnsYou is right - he is not showing sufficient dedication to job hunting.

Firstly, why are his feet in a house and not on the pavement? The jobs available in a listing on a website are a vanishingly small portion of the total available jobs out there.

I have a friend who once needed a job (he was a qualified electrician a self-taught and fairly talented IT guy, in industrial settings not a terrible combination) but had no degree or shiny paper to back him up. What'd he do?

He hit the road. He drove down highway 401 in Ontario (the industrial heartland of Canada), hit up a number of factories and shops along the way. He would walk in, demand to speak to someone senior, introduce himself, talk about their need for someone of his qualifications, leave his resume, and move on.

He had a job within a week, after multiple callbacks. None of the places that called him back had the position externally open, much less on a website.

The vast majority of the world's jobs are unadvertised - if your only source for jobs is a website, you are failing yourself.

[edit] My friend is also the highest-paid high school dropout I know. Hell, he makes more than I do.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#113

Post by SHOwnsYou »

randallsquared wrote: post #105
SHOwnsYou wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not settling for less. Look at it like a basic negotiation. You suggest a proposition, if it gets declined, you keep coming back with propositions more in the favor of the other party until they accept. That is how I view it. I can't get a job that pays 60k right now, so I'll take this job at McDonalds that pays 20k. Meanwhile, I will continue to work my ass off to find a 60k job and prove to the hiring manager…

The difference between people that work hard and have something and people that work hard and don't have something is a combination of desire, drive, and confidence. There's certainly something to that. For me, though, it was psychologically difficult, to say the least, to hold the confidence and drive to make something of myself, while doing a good job at manufacturing refrigerators or operating a cash register. Giv…

A lot of people that stay in dead end jobs either don't mind being there or aren't making the effort required to get out.

Don't make excuses for them or yourself. It is a matter of ignoring the negative things (or spinning them in a positive light) and not giving up. Change can happen if you let it.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#114

Post by kd0amg »

Tycho wrote: post #99
kkshin wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would personally find it a sad, sad day if enrollment in liberal arts rapidly declined. People that major in liberal arts bring great joys to our world. Film, music, art, dance, and great books are all things that truly enhance life, and honestly, is also the cultural force that makes the United States so great. One of my biggest regrets of my collegiate education was not making a conscious effort to expand my curr…

how many great filmmakers went to film school, though?

I think the question you want to ask is "What proportion of film school graduates become great filmmakers?"

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#115

Post by WingForward »

djb_hackernews wrote: post #59
cynicalkane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to exp…

Just a reminder but Hard Science degrees also make you take some general education requirements, for instance my Computer Science degree came with courses such as: * 4 Semesters of Latin * Chinese Mythology * History * Linguistics * Entomology * Sociology * Macro Economics

Brown?

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#117

Post by Yzupnick »

fuzzmeister wrote: post #35
cynicalkane wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm rather bothered by all the people knocking liberal arts degrees, in this and other threads. I did go to a school with a reputation for having a hard liberal arts core education, and it turned out to be a great decision. (In retrospect, I now wish I had gone to a different school, but the one I chose wasn't bad at all.) It's hard to explain why it's good to be able to think about these things, but it's hard to exp…

As am I. A liberal arts education makes you better able to understand and explain the world around you. The notion that every moment of college must be teaching you a skill that you will directly apply in your future career is positively stifling.

There was an article in the NY Times a couple of weeks back describing all these students are getting into tons of debt, graduating private colleges, and expecting to leave college and get some high paying salary because they went to Harvard or Columbia. The article at followed one girl in particular, showing examples from her life how tragic the situation was for these college grads. It wasn't until the end of the article that her major was mentioned: Womans Studies.

A liberal arts education can only be supported by an economy that that is strong enough to allow it. Thats just not the case anymore. At least not for people to spend 4 years on; not to mention the negative cash flow. Its not that Liberal Arts is inherently bad, it is just unsustainable as it exists right now.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#118

Post by AlisdairO »

rick888 wrote: post #67
AlisdairO wrote: post #48

Overall I found this article disappointingly full of worthless generalisations. There is absolutely no way that anyone who reads The Economist can have concluded that Europe has surpassed America in anything not involving riots, in the way that no one who reads Maxim can conclude that acne is in vogue. I find this attitude deeply aggravating. Europe has simply chosen a different path to the US, and to pretend that th…

"Europe, on the whole, balances lower individual buying power and higher unemployment against taking substantially better care of its citizens," "lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money. Right now, the unemployment rate in most European countries is almost the same as it is in the US: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&...

"lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money

Yes, I know. I prefer to lose some of that freedom, because I believe the society I live in is better for it. I'm not someone who believes in individual freedom above all - I just think a high level of individual freedom is important.

Good data on the unemployment figures, although I believe (I may be wrong) that in the past Europe's unemployment has been worse than the US.

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#119

Post by stck »

cma wrote: post #95
rick888 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Europe, on the whole, balances lower individual buying power and higher unemployment against taking substantially better care of its citizens," "lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money. Right now, the unemployment rate in most European countries is almost the same as it is in the US: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&...

>>"lower individual buying power" means much higher taxes and less freedom with your money. Higher taxes don't necessarily mean less freedom with your money; a collective good that a group largely (or even unanimously) in favor of purchasing might go unpurchased due to the free rider problem. See Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups"

That's an interesting way to see taxation: as a possibility for a group of people to purchase something that otherwise would go unpurchased.

"sharing the value of common resources through taxation and public expenditure" is a related article: http://www.feasta.org/documents/feastareview/robertson.htm

Re: This Is Why The American Dream Is Out Of Reach

#120

Post by tjmc »

mkramlich wrote: post #84

Discussing whether college education is worth it is an inherently controversial topic here on HN, I think, and here's why. First, because most would agree that getting degrees in a technical field are more justified and warranted than non-technical fields. So you're going to get two totally opposite conclusions from the folks dissing $100k history degrees versus the folks praising $70k electrical engineering degrees.…

Your post should be in the HN submission guidelines. With the banishment of politics, religion and the other usual suspects, "formal education" has become HN's flame war topic.

It would be an interesting experiment for pg to list flame war topics when they emerge, link to a few insightful summaries (like yours) in the posting guidelines and then ask people to write about something else.

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