Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree • Hacker News Board

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#11

Post by kaybe » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:38 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #8

cliveowen wrote: post #5

Am I the only one who thinks that we reached a point of nearly maximum efficiency? Think about it, that would explain everything. The article clearly states that employers aren't interested in college graduates that finished two years ago if they didn't gather experience in the meantime. They'll happily hire the new kids straight out of college. If they can afford to pass over to thousands of graduates then it means…

It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less develope…

How much more do you want to produce?

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#12

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:39 PM UTC

cliveowen wrote: post #10

rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less develope…

I would be with you if goods production somehow halted and we weren't able to get our hand on those very goods: less workers->less production->scarcity->unsatisfied demand->soaring prices that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.

I'm not saying that there aren't efficiency improvements happening. The economy is clearly producing as much as it did before with fewer workers. But efficiency improvements reduce production costs, which, in a competitive market, tends to be reflected as reduced prices. But when prices go down, quantity demanded goes up, so efficiency improvements tend to result in more overall production. I.e. the fact that companies need fewer workers per unit produced does not mean that they need fewer workers overall. We're not seeing that in the existing economy. Growth is non-existent, so companies are using efficiency improvements to cut workforces instead of using efficiency improvements to expand production while maintaining or growing the size of their workforces.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#13

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:44 PM UTC

I think the key here is "without taking advantage of other opportunities". If you're unemployed for a couple years and you don't do anything, then you're signaling something very important to an employer: passivity. A fresh grad with no experience has no experience, but there's also no information to indicate that they won't be a good employee. A two-year unemployed worker has no experience and has two years worth of unsuccessful choices. Which would you hire?

The way to beat that cycle is to do something - other than looking for jobs - with that time. I've got gaps of 4 months and 6 months on my resume (actually more like a year and a half if you count a "startup" as unemployment, but I don't), and it's never been a problem - because I was finishing up the rewrite of a 100,000 user website with the first gap, and open-sourcing the remnants of my startup with the second. I've got friends with 2-3 years of funemployment on their resumes, but they did things like starting a non-profit in Vietnam or Peace Corps work in Peru, and ended up at the very tops of their fields. Unemployment by itself doesn't result in poor career prospects, but not going after what you want and seizing the opportunities that are available to you does.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#14

Post by eru » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:46 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #11

rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less develope…

How much more do you want to produce?

Most people don't have everything they want, yet. So the answer is: more.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#15

Post by cliveowen » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:53 PM UTC

kaybe wrote: post #11

rayiner wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less develope…

How much more do you want to produce?

I don't think there's more room for growth. Demand is met, there's no shortage, that's my whole point.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#16

Post by nostrademons » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:56 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #12

cliveowen wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be with you if goods production somehow halted and we weren't able to get our hand on those very goods: less workers->less production->scarcity->unsatisfied demand->soaring prices that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.

I'm not saying that there aren't efficiency improvements happening. The economy is clearly producing as much as it did before with fewer workers. But efficiency improvements reduce production costs, which, in a competitive market, tends to be reflected as reduced prices. But when prices go down, quantity demanded goes up, so efficiency improvements tend to result in more overall production. I.e. the fact that compani…

Part of this is because of wealth distribution, and part of it is because of a lack of imagination.

When businesses use productivity enhancements to cut labor requirements without increasing price or output, then all the money saved by this accumulates to the business. That results in large cash surpluses, which we're seeing right now (Apple has $40B in cash and short-term investments). In order to capture and redistribute that cash, the rest of the population needs to produce products that appeal to the firms who have the cash - but there's relatively little of value that an individual or small business owner can supply to a giant company like Apple.

In theory, cash is non-productive and so companies should have an incentive to re-invest this money into new products to make more cash. However, that requires that they see market opportunities that have a chance of succeeding. Since consumers have so little cash, that's a tough chore right now; the bar for a new consumer product that people will actually spend money on is quite high. And so companies never make the investments that generate employment that give people cash to spend on the products the companies are investing in. Catch-22.

I think that the current seed-funding boom is a symptom of this. Cash piles up in the financial markets, some of it ends up with venture capitalists, they spray it across many little proof-of-concept ventures to figure out what the next big thing is. And ultimately this is a very good thing, because it's typically fear of irrelevancy that makes big companies spend money on investments anyway. It takes a long time to work its way out, though, because you can't just wave a magic wand and have a hit product.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#17

Post by ams6110 » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 5:57 PM UTC

nostrademons wrote: post #13

I think the key here is "without taking advantage of other opportunities". If you're unemployed for a couple years and you don't do anything, then you're signaling something very important to an employer: passivity. A fresh grad with no experience has no experience, but there's also no information to indicate that they won't be a good employee. A two-year unemployed worker has no experience and has two years worth of…

I agree, I didn't sense a big revelation in this piece so I stopped reading after I got this was a sympathy piece about young kids who expect to have a gold-plated career handed to them because they showed up at a college recruiting session.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#18

Post by lsc » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 6:01 PM UTC

>But the end result was disheartening: Mr. Wells was told, he said, that company policy required him to have at least two years of experience in the field before he could be hired.

The interesting bit here is that it's a transparent, obvious lie. If it were the truth, he wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place.

I mean, his lack of experience undoubtedly hurt him, but if you get the interview, (and if a 'high level recruiter' meets you in person, it's an interview.) nothing that is on your resume disqualifies you.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#19

Post by lsc » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 6:08 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #2

One of the things people don't like to talk about is how the economy handles the oversupply of college graduates: use bright line rules to get people out of the job market. Two candidates, a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not. The former has a scarlet letter on his resume, and people with lesser credentials from the next class will be hired over hi…

>If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.

This is not my perception at all.

I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough.

If you are willing to work for retail wages, the standards go way down, and there are more employers than you think who want to hire programmers for little more than retail wages.

The deal is that you work for shit wages for a while; if you are good, you can then take that experience (remember, your title was 'programmer' or something) and use it to get a real job, as now you have X years experience working as a programmer, even if you got paid absolute shit during that time.

Re: Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

#20

Post by ebiester » Sat, Jul 20, 2013, 6:21 PM UTC

chantech wrote: post #3

Article took way too long to get to the crux of the problem: 1. Choose your majors carefully and plan your career early - A degree in communications doesn't really make you employable. . 2. These people aren't willing to relocate to a less than desirable area to get that first opportunity

So, let's say that you're getting poor grades in pre-med. You're already 30,000 in debt. Is it better to continue in a degree where you have no chance of further advancement (no medical school will take you), drop out and have absolutely no career leads and a pile of debt, or get a second rate degree?

This is the problem -- we've raised the bar for failure so high because of the cost of going to college. We've made it so that college degrees of any kind are a requirement to advance into white collar work. What's the solution when someone can't hack it in STEM?