Unemployed, a grad student rethinks the world of work
csmonitor.com
csmonitor.com
This isn't some upstart rethinking the way we work. It's an entitled person coming to the realization that they were wrong over the course of a few paragraphs.
120 IQ people should not be doing 80 IQ work. This isn't about "better"; it's about suitability to the work. When the 120-IQ person is doing 80-IQ work, it's an injustice for two reasons. 1) She's bored, miserable, and underpaid relative to what she'd be earning in a functional society. 2) The 80-IQ people who want and enjoy jobs cleaning apartments now have her as competition, and can be paid less and treated worse.
I know someone who was extremely intelligent, way above 120 IQ. She couldn't handle an academic research job because she wasn't self motivated or curious. She couldn't handle a job in finance because of the stress. So she's now teaching calc, a job which is most likely 20-30 IQ points below her, and is reasonably happy doing so.
Intelligence isn't everything.
Is it simply because teaching (like research) is still done by white NYT reading liberals, whereas manual labor can be done by religious mexicans who like to watch cockfights?
As for salary, teaching at university pays less than many lower skilled jobs (e.g., waitress at high end restaurant, plumber, MTA worker).
Socrates also wondered about how best divide labor. He couldn't come up with a good argument, so he proposed to invent a lie:
Citizens, we shall say to them in our tale, you are our brothers, yet God has framed you differently. Some of you have the power of command, and in the composition of these he has mingled gold, wherefore also they have the greatest honor; others he has made of silver, to be auxiliaries; others again who are to be husbandmen and craftsmen he has composed of brass and iron; and the species will generally be preserved in the children. . . . But as all are of the same original stock, a golden parent will sometimes have a silver son, or a silver parent a golden son. . . . if the son of a golden or silver parent has an admixture of brass and iron, then nature orders a transposition of ranks, and the eye of the ruler must not be pitiful towards the child because he has to descend in the scale and become a husbandman or artisan, just as there may be sons of artisans who having an admixture of gold or silver in them are raised to honour, and become guardians or auxiliaries. For an oracle says that when a man of brass or iron guards the state, it will be destroyed. Such is the tale; is there any possibility of making our citizens believe in it?
From: The Republic, Book III.
In the real world this person is probably going to get a writing job eventually and when she does her perspective on life is going to be her most valuable asset. As this article shows that perspective was changed, likely for the better, from the fact that she was forced to clean houses for a while.
You can't plan out people's lives and make everything fair and even-keel. There are going to be bumps in the road like recessions and there's no way you can tell what impact that will have on people and that's exactly why you shouldn't try.
I'm all for society making sure people don't starve to death or go homeless but beyond that you have to let nature run it's course
Probably?
What fraction of folks with that degree ever sell anything that they've written, let alone make a living writing?
A lot of industries claim that they value well-roundedness, but the fact remains that her experience cleaning is going to be valued at zero in determining the jobs and assignments that she gets.
I suspect most other liberal young people are not cleaning kitchen sinks in other people's apartments when they have that revelation, though.
Bad taste - or maybe it is just being honest? It's not as if those people who are not saying it (supposedly showing better taste) are not thinking it.
Isn't the whole point, "I used to think there was a distinction before and I used it to discriminate, but now I realize that I was wrong?" How is that message in bad taste?
{edit} For example, if someone in the 1860s (or even 1960s) said something like : "Black people are just the same as I am. I used to think different and think that they were below me, but now I realize that skin color isn't everything." Your response would be something like: "That comment is in bad taste. You're just trying to emphasize the fact that you're white and not black!" In other words, that 'whoosh' sound you hear is the point of the whole thing going over your head.
That's completely unnecessary and not at all in the spirit of HN.
> How is that message in bad taste?
What about "I'm a really wise person who has come to understand an important truth in the world, that other people are people too." Is that in bad taste? Or "I'm awesome. Really awesome." ? What about "Hey! Approve of me!"
This thread is becoming a bit overly blunt.
If whole thing is a big con then this person is just a victim.
what about all the outreach that (especially public) universities do to encourage middle-class and lower-class americans to all attend a 4-year college? i don't think college in the US is something that's exclusively sold to rich kids
The university system may have lied to them. Their parents may be mistaken, etc. The system may indeed need fundamental reform or it may not. Even if the system needs to be reformed, it may just be impossible for you to agitate change.
Whatever reason for the failure, it's not the end of the world. People need to keep hanging in there, and forge a new path for themselves. If others are coming to help you, that's good. If not, just solider on.
Be attached to nothing. Pick yourself up and move forward. Don't expect other people to help you. If they do, be sure to pay them back in the future.
That's the advice I am taking for myself if things ever go really bad. I decided not to go to college, and will probably be kicked out by my parents for not doing what they asked of me. I don't know how to make a living, much less find a place to live. I probably need health insurance to survive.
It look grim as a situation. I am sure I will figure out something and make it.
You're probably right. There are some poor people who work to send their kids to college thinking that it will solve all their kid's problems. But I think most know better and so I think a lot of that outreach falls on deaf ears.
(Which incidentally isn't to say my parents didn't encourage me to go to college. Because much of society has set "having a degree" up as a litmus test for "is smart enough to have a career". But they made sure I knew enough to learn from my professors expertise while not adopting their flawed valued system)
This is why we need to get busy fixing society.
Upper class starts around $5 million per year and requires extensive family connections. It's probably less than 0.1% of the population. What a lot of people call "upper class" is upper-middle. What is usually called "upper-middle-class" is barely middle. Middle class (bourgeois) means that you can have 3 or 4 kids if you so desire (and afford an appropriate house in a big city), you have sufficient help and amenities not to need to do housework, you can send your kids to whatever schools they desire, and have sufficient connections that they can do pretty much whatever they want for work.
Most people we consider middle-class are actually the high end of the proletariat-- working-class, not middle (but not "underclass" either). They do their own housework, can't afford to send their kids to the top schools, are fucked if their health insurer chooses not to cover an expensive treatment, and only can only vacation occasionally, and never for more than 2 weeks.
Below that are the outright poors, who are probably the majority of American society. This society is pyramid shaped, despite peoples' desires to believe the contrary.
You should visit a country besides the US to discover what "poor" really means. The US poor are overfed and underworked; real poor people are not.
Last I checked, death is much worse than having your debts discharged but losing some of your assets.
A place not worth living in: http://i.pbase.com/o6/54/380754/1/73947048.Hk41wYFV.Bombaysl...
My neighborhood in the USA, which is full of poor people: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Journal_S...
Dude, get a clue.
This is like arguing that, because Northern coal miners in 1840 were treated marginally better than Southern slaves, describing the miners as oppressed and downtrodden would be somehow inaccurate because someone is worse off.
American poverty is physically a lot better than in much of the world, but the ennui and inability to advance are the same, and the conditions for the American poor are getting worse right now and will reach a state of true poverty if we don't intervene.
This is not a life of poverty, it is a life of leisure.
Fun fact: the term "ennui" historically described the boredom suffered by idle women from rich families during Victorian times.
A lot of them aren't working "full time" because, in retail, it's common to have people working 39-hour weeks so they don't receive benefits and can have their hours cut without paperwork.
Their "material needs" aren't met. They can't get education or jobs that will put them forward in society. They can't get health care. If they choose to be lazy and do nothing, that's regrettable but also rational on their part. Since they have no hope of advancement, why should they work?
Their life is not "of leisure" but of despair and barriers.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf
We don't know if they can't get jobs, all we can do is speculate about what might happen if they looked. Health care is also available, it's called medicaid.
So basically, your only correct complaint is that our educational system is broken.
Go with the flow is definitely the better option - I did the degree but then side stepped entirely and worked from the ground up (aka low wage). Admittedly not in a cleaning type job; but certainly not the graduate job I was "supposed" to be aiming for...
Most of my uni friends are stuck for jobs; not because there aren't any but because they are above jobs that are lower status. No compromise, no career.
(also they have no real interest in their career paths [again, choosing the easy career route], all of my peers that have as good a job as mine is becoming are there because they followed their interests and addictions :))
I guess that was her problem; with the career stalled she didn't have the guts to change tack, compromise or whatever to find somewhere she wanted to be that would fit her. I read this as much her rationalisation of having to work as a waitress again as much as a revelation that there is nothing wrong with working as waitress/cleaner etc.
Then again the undertow of the story (which the author is clearly too embarrased to say outright) is that she thought she was better than house cleaners before she became one (and met someone else who thought they were better than her). So I guess there's a certain poetic justice to it.
A few of my friends (more like acquaintances) are going through this type of experience, although unfortunately I doubt they'll learn the lesson that this girl learned because of being propped up by their parents.
This reinforces why places like this community as well as the startup world in general is so great; a sense of entitlement leads to immediate failure. It's a reality check to those who think this way, and they'll either be humbled or get out.
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley."
That's the moral of the story. Whatever you think you know about your future based on your past choices, there's a good chance that you're wrong. There are plenty of people from trade schools and community colleges who bought into the same dream as this woman, so advancement through education isn't exactly an a "hubris" exclusive to the vile, arrogant bourgoise.
In high school, I worked in a library for about min wage + 40% or so. 5 years later, I got turned down for a position with the same township, paying barely above min wage, but they decided to "go with someone with tree-planting experience." The point is, the tagline for higher education has always been "Get a degree, get a better job - people with a college education earn X more in their lifetime" etc.
If college was free, it would be one thing. But it's not. And the truth is, I now have around 15k in student loans, and I'm begging and pleading for jobs that I could have done when I was 16 - and I'm losing those jobs to people with work experience that they got while I was off getting a piece of paper that seems to make me a liability.
Now we're coming back with a newfound respect for the people who were smart enough to see through that load. A high school buddy of mine just got out of the SEAL program and has been unemployed for six months. We're the prodigal sons of the working world, but nobody slaughters the fattened calf when we come crawling back.
If you have obtained a degree that leaves you unable to produce value that can be captured to some degree and paid to you as a salary, then, yes.
I don't know what your personal degree was in. It could well be in such a thing, in which you may need to consider moving to where jobs are. I'm mostly just responding to your first question. Unfortunately, being told all your life that it wasn't entitlement but your due doesn't make it true. Generate value, or expect to have problems standing out in a sea of people who basically can't.
Yes.
What does your advanced degree tell employers about your ability and motivation to solve their problems? (Yes, the answer depends on the employer and your degrees.)
That's the relevant question because employers don't care about your problems. They care about their problems. (Customers are the same way.)
If someone told you that your degree would say something that it isn't saying, you need to talk with them.
For many years that was the point of a degree. It didn't really matter the subject of degree to get a job; people with degrees were seen as more motivated and better problem solvers. And it was probably true: getting a degree was hard, expensive, and very few people did it. It selected you out as someone worth employing.
Of course, because that's true more and more people started to go to school to get degrees. In fact, programs were created so many people could get degrees as possible. High schools dropped shop classes and focused on getting every student into higher education. Higher education itself got a little easier to accommodate these students. The result is that now a large portion of the population go to college and university but the selective nature of higher education no longer exists. It's still being sold to students exactly the same way but the benefit for employers is gone.
It's not whether you want to dream of playing in the NHL. It's whether you enjoy playing hockey enough to play in Rochester for some farm team for a few hundred people a night making $50K.
The fact is that all skills are obsoleted eventually. And eventually comes quicker and quicker these days. I don't claim to know what the answer is but I think looking at the world today and asking what people are paying for can be a difficult strategy to make work.
Now looking at the world today and asking what people will not pay for is somewhat helpful at least. But trying to catch a moving target is fraught with peril.
I think a good piece of advice would be to stay flexible. Flexible in your ability to learn. Flexible in your ability to move. Flexible in your ability to absorb fluctuations in income. I think that in the America of the future workers may need to be flexible, and let a lot of things roll off of them.
If not. I don't know. I could see this whole thing ending badly.
The real world still runs on Java, C++, .NET and PHP. And SQL. Lots and lots of SQL.
The point is that all of the skills you just listed will be obsolete eventually. To say they will not be obsolete is to bury one's head in the sand.
The question is, if all skills will be obsolete then what are people to do except be flexible?
On the other hand, learning to produce journalistic content does become kind of silly when the demand for the entire discipline is decreasing rapidly. It's still possible to adapt to new skills, but it's more difficult because the other skills are further away.
'Eventually' could be 50 years from now. You're making unqualified statements. You also mentioned in your original post that the time between skills being in demand and obsolete is getting smaller and smaller, but you're real-world 'examples' of this don't work.
Maybe it's just me but when you say something like 'smaller and smaller' you imply that soon it will be so small as to be non-existent and the speed at which is shrinking is increasing (i.e. exponentially decreasing interval). If that is what you're implying then I have a hard time seeing how a job market could work where the skills of last year are no longer in demand this year because companies have switch all of their projects over from Java -> Scala and next year they are going to change all their projects from Scala -> SomethingElse.
{edit} You said 'quicker and quicker', so my comments still hold but need to be read with the view of exponentially increasing speed (which implies a 'short and short' time interval between).
seed is interesting, and sounds a lot more like what I was thinking about. thanks for pointing that out.
I think the other message is that you shouldn't wait for something big to happen to start enjoying life.
Many people define themselves through their career and find their sense of self-identity severely damaged if that's taken away from them. And many people don't have the entrepreneurial urge to go an do their own thing if they can't make it happen "in the system".
It's a dangerous place to be, for any society, when a large chunk of its society (particularly middle class, like this girl) feels like their self-identity is crumbling.
There weren't many folks with CS degrees in the 60s. (Stanford's department, which is one of the oldest, started in 65 and didn't do undergrad until the 80s.)
you never know what will be useful.
Yes. Whether French Revolution-style pwnage is in order is a subjective point, but if the country keeps sliding in the direction it has taken since 1980, it's inevitable that something like this, right or wrong, will happen.
(Personally, I think 1793-style pwnage of the actual upper class-- not merely "the rich" or politicians, most of whom are decent people, but the few hundred people who really run the world, e.g. Bilderbergers-- would be in order, but for that the problem with violent revolutions is that blood lust takes over and people kill a bunch of innocents, because the people who actually deserve to die are few and far in between. I'd obviously prefer to see no violence over an inane and unjust slaughter.)
It's not "the recession". This could just have easily been written in 2006. The US is in rapid decline.
She's qualified, but not for anything that anyone needs doing. Do you think a highly qualified one-foot-balancer deserves employment in that pursuit and that it's a shame if he has to wash dishes because no one will pay him $50k a year to balance on one foot all day? I don't see that as a tragedy, and it's an analogue to this situation. Admittedly it's not perfect because there are _no_ jobs in one-foot-balancing and merely few in editing, but it's the same type of thing.
Since you insulted me, I'll allow myself a stylistic criticism. The "you, sir" thing is lame. Drop it.
Before the present fiscal crisis a friend of mine justified the validity of liar loans on the basis that they are an agreement between two consenting parties. Of course an individual has the right to make a bad decision and of course 20 million bad decisions can affect the entire nation.
Would you make the same argument that you made if the underemployment rate for Ph.D.s in electrical engineering was 25%? There is a point where this becomes a big deal. I'm not saying we are at this point but the existence of such a point should not be denied.
It would be a very bad thing for this country if, in general, advanced degrees required too high an opportunity cost.
Probably. I'd say that too many people were getting PhDs in electrical engineering. If possible, we should address the root cause of that.
For example, I suspect there are too many people getting Masters degrees in computer science today. It doesn't show as much because they just go back to the same jobs they had before, but I think it's a big problem that so many people are doing things that don't benefit them and I'd like to see that change. Mandatory outcome reporting in educational institutions might be a good way to combat the problem.
One-foot-balancing is obviously different, in that it doesn't provide anything of value to society. On the other hand, the arts and literature do. There are people who want to provide value to the world in these fields and they can't.
This contradicts your argument that society hasn't failed this woman. I'm pretty sure that cleaning up rental apartments is not what she wanted to do with her life.
We need to restructure the economy and society so that culture rules, so that the resources are made available to pay for culture and the arts-- so we can stop being an artistic and philosophical backwater-- and the uncultured profit-ideologists who've currently infected this country with their adolescent ideology and bankrupt values are utterly disempowered, instead of running the show as they are now.
Sure people need to take responsibility for their own actions, but if someone is trained from birth to believe something, casting that belief aside isn't the same as dropping a piece of trash in the trash can. And those that trained that person to hold that belief share a bit of responsibility. Blaming 'society' as a whole is meaningless, though.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_second_third_worlds_...
Note the amusing parallel between assuming the US is turning into a "third world" country, since the gaps in industrialization worldwide are closing, and the article's original assumption that an educated middle-class girl would never have to do the same work as a Spanish-speaking working-class woman.
Maybe you read a different article, but she was doing the same job as a Spanish-speaking working-class woman. The assumption is that it was just a stepping-stone to bigger and better things, while the 'Spanish-speaking working-class woman' works the job to make ends meet. She may have had some assumptions that as a middle-class girl she wouldn't end up working a waitress job to make ends meet, but there is a large portion of the population that gets sold the promise of "go to school, get educated, get a better job." This isn't just about 4-year degrees from a major university. It's the same with trade-schools, community colleges, 2-year degree programs, online universities, etc. The idea that a 'better job' will necessarily just follow from 'getting an education' is sold all over the place.
I think the US is diverging into two camps: a well-educated, well-off elite, and a permanent underclass. This story is about somebody who always thought of herself as the former, and then found out she was the latter.
My Significant Other just got done creating a plan for the lay-offs of about 5000 highly educated Health Care workers. Outplacement services, severance packages ONLY where legally obligated, others will need approval case by case, flights back to home countries, movers, obtaining extra security etc etc etc. She had to keep a lid on it until recently. AND . . . this is the creamy frosting on the cake . . . they had her include herself.
I think the underclass of the future will probably be just as well educated as the elite. But they probably won't know the right people. It will be very much a sort of 'work from layoff to layoff' kind of existence.
The well-educated paupers will launch a much-needed revolt. Happily, it can be done none-violently with cyberattacks and property damage-- the people involved will be smart enough-- so we can have French Revolution-style pwnage of the upper crust and Glorious Revolution bloodlessness together.
Many people come here for find that the brochures were misleading. I remember reading the a lot of the Indians came here on H1B visas bringing over their wives only to find out that the middle class in America, is not like the middle class in India (i.e. we don't have a caste-system that allows middle-class families to have servants). The article/comment I remember reading seemed to imply that it was the women being brought over as the spouses of the visa-holders that were disappointed that they had to do things for themselves even though they were middle-class (and who then pushed for the both of them to move back to India).
Seriously?
Either he applied for 5 jobs in seven months, or there's something seriously wrong with the guy (horrible personality, horrible grades, can't answer interview questions).
Editor jobs dried up.