The irony of the US economy: no jobs and no one to hire

300 resumes arrive in your inbox and you need to narrow those down to a few, since you don't want to spend all your time interviewing. Are you more likely to prefer the ones who have been vetted already? Probably.

> "entitlement filled prima donnas."

Where is this coming from?

Not every imbalance is due to the active discrimination of some powerful class over the "little guy," as popular as it seems to be to scream that whenever imbalances are discovered. The problems are usually not that simple, and attempting to wallpaper over them with simplistic declaration like that people discriminate as an end to unabashed narcissistic bigotry I think gets in the way of really finding our root causes

Here's an alternate perspective on all of this:

There is an underlying cause for that elephant in the room you alude to. The people who find themselves at dead end jobs in their 30's and 40's are not just hapless victims of the system. Some of them started out with a bitter, jaded perspective about their profession and employment, and decided that they'd be stupid to provide anything more than a minimum-effort meeting of requirements. Maybe that would be stupid, but they threw the baby out with the bathwater; they didn't just stagnate in their role, they stagnating in their entire profession. The world did not stand still just because they declared that everything is shit, and all the technological advancement in the world doesn't change that fact. Their job is at a dead end because they themselves are at a dead end.

It does not have to be that way, but the solution is not to prematurely jade the next generation as a means to artificially level the playing field. You complain that the next generation who is willing to work for cheap and demand little in exchange for sacrificing their souls are damaging the industry. That may be, but suggesting they either have to get bitter or get out trades damage for damage. The problem is that these people don't really know the value they'll produce at the organizations they work at, and as a result sell themselves short. Becoming bitter about this only solidifies that stance; you still believe you are in a bad bargaining position, except now you are indignant about it. That doesn't help. You make them feel like they are worthless cogs, and then are surprised when they accept shit wages and shit benefits as a result. This is what a worthless cog does. They are only becoming what you and the rest of the indignent, experienced professional community believe they are, so don't get so pissed off when they undersell you as a result and make things shit for everyone.

Yeah, I'm kind of annoyed with the situation in the CS world as well, but with a very different perspective on causes. I think the typical party line of "screw the management, and the young whipper-snappers who deserve this less than us" is a completely screwed up sentiment. This problem is not going to be solved by chasing all of the youngsters away, and making sweeping generalizations about how everything sucks and we should all simultaneously not put up with anything and accept that we are powerless tools at the bidding of our employers racist and classist impulses.

This does not help, unless your goal is just to make people in our industry angry and hate one another.

Clarification (since I can't edit my comment anymore):

Businesses should foot the cost of job training to prevent supply/demand mismatches where thousands of people spend 4+ years preparing for a job they never get hired for.

Why? A business is much more in tune with market demand than students following the flavor of the year and end up being edged out by 0.1 GPA or being the 101th person in a market that can only sustain 50 new workers a year etc...

I'll make a tangentially related assertion that I think is a bit more defensible: people tend to become increasing resistent to training in new skillsets as a function of their age.

Like you, I think they are perfectly capable; the problem is motivation. The longer someone has been doing something, the more it becomes a comfortable habit. Not just in economic skillsets, but in most everything, people will rabidly defend comfortable habits, to the point of declaring that society should be forced into steady state if that is what will keep them comfortable. Every human interest story we hear of someone who saw their industry vanish out from underneath them, and then they indignantly plant their feet and declare that we must bring their industry back is an example of this.

We become resistant to change, but I do not really believe this is an inevitability of age; I think it is something that we societally accept from older people far more than we do from young people. They've worked hard their whole lives, they deserve us subsidizing the comfort they now deserve as a result. Young people haven't worked hard for long enough yet, and so they not only don't deserve comfort, but we should steal away the comfort they do have to pass to the older generation that has earned their stripes.

Accusations fly in all directions, each group screaming to the other that they are the entitled ones, and that all this group wants is fairness and consideration. It's ridiculous; they are all caught up in a sense of entitlement, and all participate in an economic system that fundamentally doesn't care what they think they deserve. No matter who you are, you will never get what you think you deserve; best leave this sense of deservedness at the door, and realize there is a large random component to all of life's happenings.

You might not deserve, in some existential sense, to lose ten straight poker games holding a flush or better, but the worst thing to do if you do is get indignant and either declare the game is rigged, or try to rig it yourself.

So, agree with Vivtek; people in their 30s are more than capable of learning new things. But capability is orthogonal to willingness, and along that vector I think we have a lot of motivating to do.