1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed • Hacker News Board

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#51

Post by dlmstd00 » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:00 AM UTC

ZephyrP wrote: post #48

magicalist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure. You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without col…

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

Well I guess your anecdote beats statistics, let's all go home now!

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#52

Post by ZephyrP » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:11 AM UTC

dlmstd00 wrote: post #51

ZephyrP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

Well I guess your anecdote beats statistics, let's all go home now!

Come, come. I'm just saying that even if you come from a low-income household, you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#53

Post by RandallBrown » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:24 AM UTC

A bachelors degree is NOT (and should not be) a guarantee you will get a job. Yes, 30 years ago, a bachelors almost guaranteed you a job. That's because nobody else had one.

That's not really the case any more. More and more people are going to college.

Students know their psych degree is worthless when they graduate. They know it 2 years before they actually do graduate. They didn't go to college to become something, they went to college just because that's what people do now.

The people I know from high school that are successful now went to school to become something (doctors, lawyers, software developers, photographers). The ones that are waiters and waitresses just went to college and took classes.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#54

Post by magicalist » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:45 AM UTC

ZephyrP wrote: post #48

magicalist wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure. You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without col…

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

Leaving aside the fact that an ESL teacher even working part time somewhere near mountain view should probably net 25k pretty easily (there's always unemployment to factor in, and I have no interest in going too personal either), do you really see no advantages of attending public school in Mountain View vs a town in, say, Mississippi? Or having a teacher for a mother vs, say, a migrant worker?

It's a pretty fundamental error to assume that you are a good sample for that kind of conclusion. My examples were deliberate. It's nice to think that exercise and eating right can avoid medical issues, and you certainly can influence your chances of needing 20 years of kidney treatments or needing early joint replacement. But the leading causes of death in the US are heart disease and cancer, even amongst the physically fit, and that still doesn't preclude that latent heart condition, or getting hit by a car while on your bike, and suddenly facing hospital bills of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Your life is yours to create in many of the same ways that your startup's success is yours to create. You just have to make sure you define success as including adapting to and (most importantly) living with failure. Meanwhile, don't assume those that are hurting right now didn't dream or work hard enough; far better to start from the assumption that in addition to those qualities you also had good timing and incredible luck.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#55

Post by goblin89 » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:47 AM UTC

dlmstd00 wrote: post #51

ZephyrP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

Well I guess your anecdote beats statistics, let's all go home now!

Statistics is dangerous in the sense that some use it to frame their potential for success, adopting “Well I guess statistics says I won't get a nice job in the current state of economy considering my social position, so why bother doing things”-like attitude.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#56

Post by gexla » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 7:57 AM UTC

I love this. The U.S. is a leader at everything. I live in the Philippines and everyone is crazy about getting cars. People in the U.S. now hate their cars. Countries such as China and India are churning out gobs of college graduates while people in the U.S. are beginning to question the value of a college education.

Anyone who sends out 4 resumes a day is obviously doing something wrong. As a web developer, I probably couldn't expect to land anything if I were to apply for 4 gigs every day. The problem with learning marketable skills in college is that apparently college students aren't learning how to market.

Get yourself out there, talk to people, network, make friends, build things! All these activities increase your surface luck area. Sending out resumes is doesn't really help with any of the above, though it probably doesn't hurt to send one out every once in a while if you are more targeted with it than sending out 4 a day.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#57

Post by ZephyrP » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 8:15 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #54

ZephyrP wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL. My insistenc…

Leaving aside the fact that an ESL teacher even working part time somewhere near mountain view should probably net 25k pretty easily (there's always unemployment to factor in, and I have no interest in going too personal either), do you really see no advantages of attending public school in Mountain View vs a town in, say, Mississippi? Or having a teacher for a mother vs, say, a migrant worker? It's a pretty fundamen…

Whew, quick assumptions -- That would be Mountain View Trailer Park in lovely, rural, Durango Colorado [ http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=37.229004,-107.8021... ] (Although in that shot you can't see the sign, I assure you it's called Mountain View Trailer Park, because of the view of the Mountains )

However, I spent the majority of my youth in New Mexico, with close to the lowest public education ratings in the country.

Outside of that, I guess we're simply in fundamental disagreement about the nature of success. Sure, doing groundbreaking work might be impossible or at least very unlikely for the average person, but I believe that anyone can be successful (in a pragmatic sense) for the same reason I believe in the central limit theorem. The most successful scientists are not necessarily the smartest, but the ones who publish the most -- the same can be said of any discipline. In short, unrelenting persistence is key, and depth always beats breadth.

I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm young and dumb and haven't been jaded by the world yet. Maybe I'm Malcom Gladwelling myself into thinking that there's some rhyme or reason behind the (personally qualified) success I feel I've achieved. Still, I am of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, it will spread from your life into your work. There are no real limitations to what you can do. There may be temporary periods of plateaus or even deep valleys, but you can transcend them. I have seen this too many times to declare our ultimate fate and legacy of our work entirely accidental.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#58

Post by kabuks » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 8:17 AM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #10

YuriNiyazov wrote: post #3

They should learn Ruby on Rails. * Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.

They should. They'll also find it helpful to learn what a command line is and how to operate it. Oh, and HTML -- got to know HTML. And Javascript seems to be pretty popular these days... at least enough to operate jQuery. Then there's SQL, because even Rails developers will get their hands dirty at some point. Of course, we wouldn't want to start them with data programming because they've got imperative programming,…

I just taught 20 people ror. It took 8 weeks. They worked their butts off, and now two thirds of them have entry level dev jobs.

The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#59

Post by drivebyacct2 » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 8:22 AM UTC

rudiger wrote: post #23

ZephyrP wrote: post #13

This is interesting to me. I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more t…

Can you elaborate on how video games are more detrimental to human wellness than certain drugs?

What a weird and incredibly false dichotomy. I smoke a bunch of pot, play a bunch of Halo, have had internships with 3 major corporations, worked as an independent contractor last summer and have a 6-figure job lined up when I graduate. On top of working 12 hours a week with 15-18 credit hours during my Junior and Senior year, I also have 5 side projects that will either make nice additions to my open source portfolio or could potentially become products if I gave them the attention they need.

I think ZephyrP is blinded by his good fortune to not understand that: one, software developers are in crazy demand compared to, for example, "creative writers"; and two, that the economy IS quite bad right now and that this is a generalized extension of the unemployment problems across the country.

That having been said, when it comes to things like video games and drugs, I think Zephyr's point about "you have to make your own luck" logic is right (granted I have no idea why there is a pot-shot in there about video games). A person's work ethic is the root cause and "video games" and "drugs" are silly remarks for people that don't understand or see that there are plenty of us who can indulge and still live perfectly productive lives.

Further, I don't know of any indication that "video game" playing is trading off with employment. At all. On the other hand, there are probably thousands of statisticians and economists who could give you very specific reasons for the downturn in employment and show a trend that will probably make it's way across all segments of society including college grads.

Also, people need to understand that they need marketable degrees and they need to understand that employers are learning that all degrees are not equal and you ABSOLUTELY MUST have the skills that your degree assert and you must be able to communicate well and articulate why you deserve a job.

Re: 1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed

#60

Post by ZephyrP » Mon, Apr 23, 2012, 8:47 AM UTC

drivebyacct2 wrote: post #59

rudiger wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on how video games are more detrimental to human wellness than certain drugs?

What a weird and incredibly false dichotomy. I smoke a bunch of pot, play a bunch of Halo, have had internships with 3 major corporations, worked as an independent contractor last summer and have a 6-figure job lined up when I graduate. On top of working 12 hours a week with 15-18 credit hours during my Junior and Senior year, I also have 5 side projects that will either make nice additions to my open source portfoli…

You're right, it's somewhat unfair of me to demonize video games. I most certainly did not mean to demonize drugs, our society places an unfair stigma on them that is entirely a result of some rather ancient belief systems.

To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers, filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything they can give the world and themselves by spending their lives in front of video games. Video games are not bad, they are an interesting artform and provide unique cultural dialog. They are however something that people have moved beyond using to relax, contemplate or fill the boring spaces in their life, it becomes them.

As the other poster stated, because of their reward systems they can suck very intelligent people incredibly deep into what amounts to a terrible vice.