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The Idled Young Americans

nytimes.com

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Re: The Idled Young Americans

#21

Post by jleader »

com2kid wrote: post #4

As someone who is in his 20s (for another year!) and dating of the same age, my belief is because the current generation has a real lack of motivation. I think it is something those of us on sites like this one, and in our field in general do not notice, we tend to surround ourselves with highly driven and motivated people, but we really are the exception to the rule. Roughly 60% of the young women I have dated (gene…

As someone in his 50s, I can tell you that my generation was criticized for lack of motivation. The generation before mine was criticized for lack of motivation. You can find criticisms of the younger generation's lack of motivation (and lack of manners, and respect for their elders, and taste in music, and ...) written in ancient Greek over 2500 years ago.

Different people are motivated to different degrees, to do different things. A list of anecdotes won't convince me that there's any sort of trend in either direction.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#22

Post by aridiculous »

I'm always perplexed by the (possibly rhetorical) surprised tone of these kinds of articles. As if it wasn't glaringly obvious that young people are getting screwed because of their lack of employment histories combined with an ultra-competitive job market (for most industries).

The discussion then usually turns to how young people have useless degrees or are lazy or entitled, or some other monday morning quarterback commentary. The reality is that prior generations goofed off and made blind decisions just like this one. They just had more of cushion to rebound from.

I'm steadily employed in a fantastic job but have been on the other side of the fence as well. One thing is obvious: most white-collar, educated people who already had jobs before 2008 are doing just fine, haven't noticed a thing, and don't give a neuron to thinking about unemployed people.

This is just another indication to me that there is a growing class divide and there will be plenty of losers (and no, the rising tide doesn't help undeveloped, inexperienced college grads with nondischargable debt). The means of production are now more abstract than owning factories -- they're owning the information networks. We have yet to see anything close to the sufficient political will or desire in DC to bust up these modern day trusts (like Teddy Roosevelt did with the industrialists a century ago). By design, they're harder to identify and harder to educate the public about. And with mass media stomping out thoughtful journalism due to basic economics and a civically uninterested public, where's the opposition going to come from?

If you happen to be in a line of work that helps those in power (like most programmers), you'll probably thrive. If you don't, you're going to have a tough road ahead: our public institutions are behaving more and more like results-driven board-run corporations. They're misappropriating improved efficiency to matters that benefit more from longer-term strategies ("Instant Dashboards! Metrics! Data-Driven Decisions!"). I fear most the speed at which the consolidation of power could take place (aided by the speed of technological progress).

Have a great weekend :)

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#23

Post by com2kid »

svachalek wrote: post #15
com2kid wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AND we need more H-1B's? This guy's a real piece of work. We already have the ability to bring in extraordinary talent. We don't need 50,000 more outsource firm slots. Being on the hiring side of things, America needs all the talent it can get. Hiring good software engineers is seriously hard. Maybe the problem is just connecting people with jobs, but given the low unemployment rate in the tech sector, I really dou…

I'm not against H1 for other reasons, but I'm a little skeptical of the trickle-down benefits of software engineers. Civil engineers, industrial engineers, sure. But who else do we add to a company's payroll? A few sales, HR, here and there. A little business to local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. But I don't see software as a leveraged job-creation industry.

> I'm not against H1 for other reasons, but I'm a little skeptical of the trickle-down benefits of software engineers.

Video Games are a great example.

How many jobs has Halo created?

Well there are all the various paraphernalia that goes along with the series. From artists hired to design custom Xbox face plates, to the sales person selling the t-shirts, to statues, action figures, etc.

Then there are the advertisers who make the TV spots. The writers who run the various alternate reality games before releases. The musicians who do the score, the voice actors, directors, texture modelers, and so on and so forth.

Then there are the gaming bars that draw patrons in with Halo tournaments. The additional drinks sold, the chairs for spectators, extra food that is sold, and so on and so forth.

> A little business to local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. But I don't see software as a leveraged job-creation industry.

Ask Puget Sound and Silicon valley what the economic impact is!

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#24

Post by sliverstorm »

scarmig wrote: post #8
com2kid wrote: post #4

As someone who is in his 20s (for another year!) and dating of the same age, my belief is because the current generation has a real lack of motivation. I think it is something those of us on sites like this one, and in our field in general do not notice, we tend to surround ourselves with highly driven and motivated people, but we really are the exception to the rule. Roughly 60% of the young women I have dated (gene…

Oh, Christ. Start-up wankery has its place, but something to keep in mind: there's nothing that makes working for a start-up the be-all, end-all of a meaningful life. You complain about people just wanting to exist and live and enjoy time with their friends and family? And that they don't have grand dreams of starting a business, running it, doing a bunch of shit that's secondary to their actual interests? Here's the…

Let's not forget that if everyone started their own business, we wouldn't have anybody to staff the large companies that create the things we actually use day-to-day.

Just take a moment to consider. I am sure startups are mind-bogglingly amazing, but did a startup make your car? Your computer? Did a startup pave the roads you drive on?

Startups are good. Big companies are good. We need both.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#25

Post by Riesling »

laughfactory wrote: post #14
com2kid wrote: post #4

As someone who is in his 20s (for another year!) and dating of the same age, my belief is because the current generation has a real lack of motivation. I think it is something those of us on sites like this one, and in our field in general do not notice, we tend to surround ourselves with highly driven and motivated people, but we really are the exception to the rule. Roughly 60% of the young women I have dated (gene…

@com2kid You're spot on. As a recent college graduate (at a non-traditional age: in my 30's) I saw a TON of exactly what you describe. Our peer group (not the Hacker News peer group, clearly, but the rest of the 20 to mid-30s group) is, by and large, listless. They simply don't have much drive or motivation. They're--as you put it so aptly--merely "existing." I attribute this to changes in "higher" education. High sc…

Why do people have to adjust to the economy?

Shouldn't it be the other way around in an ideal world?

Why has the economy been created in the first place? As an end in itself? Or was it to make life easier for everybody?

In my opinion, if the system fails to enable a fullfilled life for the majority of the people, the system needs to be changed.

It's easy to say people should not acquire worthless Film & TV degrees, when you yourself have a C.S. degree, only because computers have been your passion since the age of 8.

I would not want to spend the majority of my precious time on earth with something I do not like to do. And of course I think other people shouldn't either.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#26

Post by revelation »

enraged_camel wrote: post #7

Like many people here, I work for a software company. We develop business automation software. Perhaps unlike most though, I'm closer to the bottom line (Sales Engineer), and are more closely tuned in to the types of business conversations our customers have when they are thinking about whether to buy our software. Often times, the conversation revolves around the fact that the software we sell makes the average work…

Huh? As you note, these are not constant gains, but per worker. So they will just scale with added demand.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#27

Post by sanderjd »

com2kid wrote: post #4

As someone who is in his 20s (for another year!) and dating of the same age, my belief is because the current generation has a real lack of motivation. I think it is something those of us on sites like this one, and in our field in general do not notice, we tend to surround ourselves with highly driven and motivated people, but we really are the exception to the rule. Roughly 60% of the young women I have dated (gene…

Great comment! I'm similarly situated in life and know plenty of people my age who aren't so well situated. While my anecdotes tend to differ from yours in that I don't see a general lack of motivation, you've already handled that argument; perhaps I just know people who are highly driven rule-exceptions.

Having said that, I do believe there was a time in this country when going to college meant you were a motivated person who could expect a high likelihood of success finding a good job after graduating. This seems to be different now. More people go to college now, which could either represent an increase in the number of people who are motivated or a decrease in the proportion of people who go to college despite being unmotivated. A smaller proportion of college graduates are successful in finding a good job, which could either mean that it has changed in lock-step with the diminishing level of student motivation or that there are motivated students who now have more trouble finding good jobs.

My anecdotal sense of both of these things is that increasing college attendance is a sign of more young people being more motivated than ever rather than a sign of unmotivated people increasingly attending college, and that the market for good jobs for college graduates has lagged behind the number of motivated graduates competing for them. I think there was a time that people with humanities degrees from good schools were widely thought by businesses to be highly intelligent, hard-working, and imminently employable. Now I see people scoff at such degrees as the useless outcome of bad decision-making. Perhaps the new reality is that far more people need to be motivated to develop the passion and drive required to succeed in a business of their own making, but I personally think it's a shame that there seems to be far less room these days for people who just want to work hard for someone else.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#29

Post by princess3000 »

com2kid wrote: post #17
princess3000 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the worship of the startup culture gets to be a bit much... there's nothing inherently more valuable about making your own startup than there is in working for someone else, and you also forgot to add "money" to the list of things that drive the YC crowd. We're basically still inside of a global economic recession and no amount of drive and passion can fix that for everybody. There are certainly some edge c…

> Sometimes the worship of the startup culture gets to be a bit much... there's nothing inherently more valuable about making your own startup than there is in working for someone else, and you also forgot to add "money" to the list of things that drive the YC crowd. Before there were massive corporations employing everyone, people typically did work for themselves in some way shape or form. Heck go to other countrie…

Who said anything about corporations? Hiring people to do work has been a basic part of the human experience for thousands of years. Unless you can run your entire business on your own you're going to need help, and so you give someone else money to do what you can't. Many people are fine with this, they don't necessarily have the desire to start their own ventures for whatever reason. This tends to work out because the people who do want to start their own companies are eventually going to need to hire another employee if they're at all successful.

I'll accept increasing amounts of automation and efficiency as a reason for the reduced number of open positions but the idea that this generation is somehow more lazy than any other is ludicrous.

And finally the idea of "contributing to society" is so nebulous I don't know where to begin. Is someone who makes a really good latte contributing to society? Is an investment banker contributing? Kim Kardashian? Zynga?

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#30

Post by sanderjd »

com2kid wrote: post #20
aspensmonster wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring top talent is certainly expensive. And if you're searching for the best of the best, it will always be hard by virtue of the fact that you're looking for people at the extreme of a bell curve, no matter how large the sample set is. As for knowing how malloc works: fewer and fewer universities are even touching C. It's all C++ or, better yet, Java (no need to understand memory management _at all_ in that case).…

> And just to quench my own personal curiosity, since you're on the hiring side and I'm not: why is it that every company absolutely must find someone who fits the bill exactly? What is with this aversion to spending any amount of time training people? We don't have an aversion to training, but when someone has supposedly 8+ years of development experience and cannot answer simple questions, well, on to the next cand…

I wonder if your hiring process isn't more narrow and exclusionary of independent learners than you think. It is really quite easy in 2013 to have racked up 8 years of real high-quality development experience without having any idea how memory allocation works at a detailed level. For some portion of the people with 8 years experience it will be easy for them to go and independently figure out how it works and for others it won't. You want people in the first group, but you can't find them just by asking them questions about memory allocation.

(Also, do you do something having to do specifically with memory allocation or is it just your pet entry on the list of things you think everybody should know about to not be dumb?)

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