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The Idled Young Americans

nytimes.com

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Re: The Idled Young Americans

#31

Post by peterwaller »

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…

Honest question: what field are you in which means your candidates are going to need to write custom allocators on a regular basis?

What problems need custom allocators? I'm a fan of lower level details and all, but surely you can get away with one of the many existing allocator implementations when the problem to be solved isn't "sudo make me an allocator"?

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#32

Post by com2kid »

Riesling wrote: post #25
laughfactory wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@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, w…

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

Economies are not created in any traditional sense (though ours is highly managed, for better or for worse).

They come into being as a natural part of human behavior.

For instance, we all place value on our time. If you ask me to do something, I will most likely ask for some form of reciprocation. Now maybe if I really like you, feeling good about helping you is payment enough itself, but there is a finite limit to that.

Even favors have an economic component to them. If you help a friend move, you reasonably expect him to help you move at some point in the future. Quid pro quo.

Our system of currency is a highly abstracted away formalization of those basic ideas.

Call providing some positive good or service "value".

You get reciprocated for providing value to others.

We use currency as a medium of exchange to represent this.

At times, it is easy to see this exchange. If you go watch a local band, you pay for a ticket, a portion of that ticket goes to the venue for providing you with a quality place to watch a performance, and part of the ticket price goes to the band for providing you with entertainment that you derived personal value from experiencing.

Other times, well, things are a bit more abstracted way. :) (And at some point it becomes arguable if value is provided at all, but that is a separate discussion!)

> 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.

My argument is that people should acquire a degree that enabled them to provide value to society.

> 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.

The later half of the 20th century is the first time it was possible for a large number of people to have even a hope of doing work that they enjoyed.

That said, ask the people who laid your sewer pipes, built your building, pave your roads, how much they enjoy being out at 4am in the rain and snow working.

Ask those mining the rare earth minerals that are used to build our technology if they enjoy their jobs.

Middle class Americans have this romantic ideal of jobs being something someone enjoys. We are all spoiled and need to admit to that. But hey, it is a nice goal to make it so that everyone can enjoy their job right?

So here comes the funny part.

We are automating away the miserable drudge work jobs, and people are now worried.

Because it turns out the middle class fantasy of singing joys at work and coming home to a giant house with 2 (or 3 now days) cars and all that other assorted crud is not maintainable on a large scale.

I don't have a solution to this, really no one does. But we have to accept that we have made our bed and now we are going to lay down in it.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#33

Post by com2kid »

peterwaller wrote: post #31
com2kid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Honest question: what field are you in which means your candidates are going to need to write custom allocators on a regular basis? What problems need custom allocators? I'm a fan of lower level details and all, but surely you can get away with one of the many existing allocator implementations when the problem to be solved isn't "sudo make me an allocator"?

> Honest question: what field are you in which means your candidates are going to need to write custom allocators on a regular basis?

Embedded. :P

> What problems need custom allocators? I'm a fan of lower level details and all, but surely you can get away with one of the many existing allocator implementations when the problem to be solved isn't "sudo make me an allocator"?

Memory is being counted in kilobytes. Processing time in cycles.

I'm loving it, but finding others who feel the same, and who are serious about software engineering, isn't easy!

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#34

Post by nfoz »

goostavos wrote: post #19
svachalek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, the middle class isn't coming back until the employment situation improves, with consequent improvements in salaries etc. Soon we're going to be seeing low-skill jobs go almost entirely to machines, while higher-skill work gets more and more levered up. I expect at the pace we're going (on both technology and economy), that will happen before we ever recover from the current crisis. A large percentage of…

>A large percentage of workers are not going to have much to offer, economically, and I'm not sure where we go from there. I wonder about this all the time. My primary interest is in fields like Computer Vision, with an ultimate goal of contributing to the self driving car scene. As excited as I am by that and want to see that future as a reality, there's a side of me that wonders what the workforce will do as automa…

Instead of self-driving cars, please instead use your computer vision to automate an entire food production line. Then we can move to a roughly post-scarcity society where only a minimal base-line of work is necessary to give people comfortable lives :)

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#35

Post by com2kid »

princess3000 wrote: post #29
com2kid wrote: post #17

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. 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…

> 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?

The way we have defined it in an open capitalistic market is that if someone is willing to pay you money, you are providing value!

(Societal value is obviously slightly different, since people will pay for things like hitmen, who are obviously providing value to one party but taking away a near infinite amount of value from another.)

And yes it is sort of a circular definition.

> 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.

So what we need is a certain % of people who are willing to be entrepreneurs, thereby keeping others employed.

Thus one has to ask:

• Are entrepreneurs being provided with enough incentive and possibilities to open their businesses?

• Has something changed from a societal perspective that has decreased the percentage of people who have an entrepreneurial mindset?

Obviously the first the government (and private industry) can help solve, but the second, well, that is a bit harder of a problem!

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#36

Post by bulatb »

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…

  Covering how $a or $b does stuff on a PowerPoint slide
  isn't the same thing as having students write a $thing.
  Which sort of sucks when they go on the job and have to
  write a $thing!
That statement is true for many different projects in many different niches. Colleges can't possibly teach them all. If they try, then classes spend less time on CS fundamentals and employers are unhappy. If kids learn about $thing, that means less time for theory and employers are unhappy. (Not to mention that practically speaking, less time on theory means they won't be passing "top tech" interviews at all.)

"We need people who know $thing" does not imply that "colleges should teach kids $thing" is true. Is $thing important because you know it and use it, or do you know it and use it because it's important?

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#38

Post by carlisle_ »

jleader wrote: post #21
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 d…

This is exactly what I was going to say, thank you!

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#39

Post by com2kid »

bulatb wrote: post #36
com2kid wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Covering how $a or $b does stuff on a PowerPoint slide isn't the same thing as having students write a $thing. Which sort of sucks when they go on the job and have to write a $thing! That statement is true for many different projects in many different niches. Colleges can't possibly teach them all. If they try, then classes spend less time on CS fundamentals and employers are unhappy. If kids learn about $thing, that…

> That statement is true for many different projects in many different niches. Colleges can't possibly teach them all. If they try, then classes spend less time on CS fundamentals and employers are unhappy.

Well yes, very true, I believe in fundamentals.

But the 3 types of common memory storage (stack, static, heap), and how each is commonly implemented, seems like it should be covered. :)

Likewise, common GC algorithms should also be gone over!

CS curriculums really are over stuffed, just from a theory point of view there is so much that is already not covered.

Re: The Idled Young Americans

#40

Post by motters »

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…

So it's a chicken an egg situation. If consumers aren't demanding it's probably because they don't have enough disposable income and if the ways of obtaining an income are becoming scarcer then you have a positive feedback effect which depresses the economy. The economic question then becomes one of how to break that positive feedback.
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