The reverse job applicant

He should have made the text/content a program..

For example, I have a recruiter android game that I sometimes send to recruiters when they enter my inbox...answers their questions in a neat way and still allows me to poke fun at the process....

If I was a hiring manager(and I have been once or twice) I would turn him down without a 2nd glance.

In Canada, things actually happened to be quite a bit nastier then than they are now:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Unemployment-Rate....

Now look at the current era. I graduated college in late 2007, at almost the exact moment hiring froze in almost every industry. By 2008, you'd be lucky to get a job if you had 5 years experience, nevermind zero. By 2009, the unemployment rate had jumped up to 10%, a level the US had not seen since the early college graduation days of "generation X". In 2010 we've seen moderate levels of hiring, but no sustained push. Now those of us who graduated in 2007 are looking at possibly a 4th year of sluggish hiring.

So again...I maintain that young humans, in general, have less humility than they should (primarily because they don't know the difference between "good" and "bad"), but this level of humility in the application process (however you can even measure that) probably varies heavily on market conditions. If you graduated college in 1981...my condolences to you. You had it rough there for a few years. But try to keep in mind that there are lots of people out there right now who are in the exact same boat.

And with regard to "being worse off than your parents", I don't think there's a young person alive in the US who isn't at least partially bitter about the massive debts your generation and the ones that came before it have left us with, all while being bragged at by older people about how amazingly humble they are. And let's also not forget that your generation isn't "worse off" than your parents if you're counting by measure of inflation-adjusted income.

Also important to note: this kid wasn't getting responses from employers after going the humble applicant route. I had the exact same problem: people just wouldn't return my calls. So if he does have a lack of humility, it's a direct result of not having a job in a poor economy.

This is going to ruin your world view, so brace yourself

So, this is ridiculously tongue-in-cheek, and the reply is over-the-top to the degree that I can imagine with no effort the same being uttered from underneath a drill sergeant's hat against some fresh recruit who copped a serious attitude.

It's not an unfair response to brash cockiness, but it has set me thinking.

Whether a language, or a framework, or a library, or any other handy tool of the software trade, there seems to be two camps that drown everyone else out in the din.

There's the camp that declares that learning new things is a matter of extrapolating from the understanding one has already developed to fit with whatever assumptions this instantiation of thing X makes. For instance, you understand what Object Oriented programming is, and how it works. You are presented with a language you have never used before, but know it has support for OO. This puts you from a level of having to understand OO to a level of understanding this language's semantics for OO.

Then there's the camp that declares that learning new things always starts from a position of absolute ignorance. Prior knowledge and understanding of concepts that would seem to apply to this new thing you are learning don't apply, almost as an axiom. As with my example of OO above, it doesn't matter that you know what OO is, and what it means to the structure of your program. If you don't know OO in the language of discussion, you get no points toward credit of understanding OO.

If I may be blunt, both these stances seem like bullshit. You don't magically know the syntax of how to do OO in a new language simply because you know OO from a theoretical level; it's something you have to look up. But different languages' implementation of OO aren't so disparate that the only thing they share is the name. There is a basis there you can rely on, but it doesn't get you 100% of the way there.

I guess the question I don't think people answer enough, which I would like to inject into the conversation is "how far does it get you?"

I realize that the answer will vary for different theoretical ideas, and different practical realizations of the same. The point of my question is to challenge the presumption that understanding of related concepts either gets you to the finish by default, or leaves you gasping at the starting along with the people who didn't have that understanding. I think this gets left behind when we start having all of these political battles based on generational identity, and I'd like to see what people think when smacking other generations around isn't the primary goal of a thread.

Society doesn't focus much attention these days on "upward mobility." But but an overreliance on "experience" (generally "paid, professional experience"), in extremis, will permanently shut out an entire generation from the world of middle-class employment. Is that really a good idea?

"Resolved: Individuals who did not have a good (preferably government) job on July 31, 2007 and a record of unblemished professional success with progressive experience and responsibility and no failures or false starts should abandon all hope."

Is this really what we want to promote?