Young Americans Have No Interest in the Most In-Demand Jobs, New Data Finds | Hacker News Reader

Young Americans Have No Interest in the Most In-Demand Jobs, New Data Finds

inc.com

35 pointspaulpauper44 comments

  - Retail salespeople     
  - Office clerks    
  - Registered nurses    
  - Customers service reps    
  - Waiters/waitresses    
  - Secretaries and admins   
  - Freight and stock laborers   
  - Janitors    
  - Operations managers   
  - Stock clerks and orders fillers   
  - Truck drivers    
  - Personal care aides    
  - Bookkeepers and accounting clerks    
  - Nursing assistants    
  - Maids and housekeepers    
  - Sales reps wholesales and manufacturing    
  - Maintenance and repair workers    
  - Elementary school teachers    
  - Accountants    
  - Childcare workers    
  - Teacher assistants    
  - Landscapers and groundkeepers    
  - Construction workers    
  - Cooks     
  - Security guards

So jobs difficult physically and/or emotionally, some with long hours and little pay and often portrayed as really boring...

I wonder why they don't want these jobs...

I'm sure someone will tell me it just isn't possible, but it sure does seem to be the case that the economy is miss-pricing labor, badly.

Demand is only so elastic, things can only be mispriced for so long until it corrects. I suspect that it will correct once the stock market stays up for some time and the existing workforce begins to retire.

s/retire/die/ There is no retirement any more.

The harsh truth is that pay, like anything else is a function of supply and demand. The supply of people with no particular marketable skills beyond a pair of hands and the ability to follow directions is huge.

The real nasty element of all these jobs is that they have basically no path for career advancement. Personal development/career advancement is basically a requirement to be happy, so you're basically guaranteed to be miserable in the long run even if for example, you really like cooking or working with children.

Many of the jobs on the list have opportunities for career advancement, but into different jobs, which are more likely to be reported targets of aspirations, even if people are willing to use the listed jobs as stepping stones.

This. Many of those different jobs are not entry level jobs, and you need to wisely pick an entry level job that will best serve as a stepping stone to the work you want to do.

For example, many young people aspire to manage, but you first need understand those jobs and processes you want to manage before you can effectively manage them.

Management is really a separate skill from anything else, you can't learn it by doing non-management jobs. Additionally, the level of competence in a field you need to be able to manage that field is really quite low. For example, something like 8% of college football coaches never played the sport themselves. Even for the coaches that played ball, many of them were bench-warmers at the collegiate level. Assuming you're already a good manager, I think the necessary domain competence required to effectively manage something can easily be picked up fairly quickly with an "assistant manager" apprenticeship under someone with experience managing that area.

> Management is really a separate skill from anything else, you can't learn it by doing non-management jobs.

That's a common viewpoint, though I think its untrue in a number of ways.

First, management is not a skill, its a function which requires a number of skills.

Second, the skills management requires are without exception, or nearly so, not at all unique to management, but each is common to many jobs and non-job tasks humans commonly perform (and, particularly, lots of them are central to many non-management jobs that are analytical and/or administrative in nature.)

Third, actual effective management work requires substantial specialized knowledge of the field being managed, in addition to the skills of general management.

These are all really terrible jobs. Most of them ought to be automated out of existence in the next 10-20 years.

There's got to be something better we can do then bring about a resurrection of the Victorian-era servant class.

Job offers are by definition something someone pays others to do because (1) they don't want to do it themselves; and/or (2) it's not an effective use of their time to do it themselves. Yet, those jobs still need to be done.

Given both (1) and (2), but especially, (1), we likely will always have jobs that people will consider terrible jobs because someone has to do it and the person needing it done has the money to pay for it to be done.

It's great if automation solves some of those needs, but this idea that undesirable jobs simply shouldn't exist strikes me as absurd.

  - Registered nurses    
  - Customer service reps    
  - Personal care aides    
  - Nursing assistants    
  - Elementary school teachers    
  - Childcare workers    
  - Teacher assistants

Something seems more than a tad dystopian about the idea of automating any of these.

The other thing they're missing is: how has this changed over time? I don't think it has much. How many people ever aspired to be a waiter, a customer service rep, an office clerk, a stock clerk, etc.? Zero? People don't aspire to these jobs when they're young and full of hope for their future; they get into these jobs after cold, hard reality hits them and they need a job. Maybe they flunk out of college, or don't get accepted into college, or have to go to work early to support their family, etc.; these are the jobs that people do because they don't have a choice, and need the paycheck. Asking teenagers if they'd love to do these jobs is doing it wrong; it's like asking teenagers if they look forward to going to prison and becoming felons. No one plans for that.

Money is no motive, many may think that is a slight, but it's truth. Personal accomplishment is the best motive. But sometimes people's motives become clouded with things they "want" like the good little consumers they are taught to be.

When success is no longer measured by how many physical items one can collect, and based on the health and happiness of the community around them, then only then might true success be realized.

The entire premise of this article is based on the old fashioned idea that "work" will always be performed by humans and that human labor will always be in demand. I mean, it literally opens up with this:

    "In a decade, who's going to fix your vehicle, deliver your mail or landscape your yard?"

Whoah there! Don't you mean, "what is going to fix your vehicle, deliver your mail, or landscape your yard"?

Now that we've injected some reality into the situation I think the answer is quite straightforward: Robots (and other forms of automation).

Bearing that in mind is it really all that surprising that kids want to go into entertainment in large numbers? Logically, if robots take over all the "physical work" humans have traditionally occupied going into entertainment seems like the perfect solution.

Entertainment can be produced from nothing, can be delivered to a nearly infinite audience size thanks to the Internet, and has no upper bound on how much can be produced or consumed in any given time frame. It seems like the perfect replacement to fill all those gaps in human labor.

Also, with robots replacing so much "work" it should--in theory--free up the time of so many humans that would otherwise be working hard for basically no reason other than to earn some money. That means there's going to be more demand for entertainment as well.

There's always going to be a wide variety of human occupations but it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if 70% or more of the "workforce" is occupied by various forms of entertainment in the future.

"My" vehicle? Who owns a vehicle except crusty old greybeard gear heads?

There is a point that gets most of the time overlooked. Personal vehicles provide the freedom of movement.

I am afraid that by loosing the class of vehicle owners we will loose a large part of our freedom.

I do not like the perspective that most of the transportation would be controlled by few multinational companies.

I don't like that my food, news, healthcare, internet connection and politicians are controlled by a few multinational companies, but thanks to that last one, we're stuck with it.

Shameless plug, but this is one of the reasons why my company makes musical instruments anyone can play. Currently, of the people that know how to play a musical instruments, 91% started before the age of 14. [1] and only 12% of the US population knows how to play a musical instrument [2]. We hope to change that by making music playing more accessible to everyone starting with a guitar.

[1] https://www.dropbox.com/s/qh58bojug92segl/NAMM%202011%20Gall...

[2] https://www.dropbox.com/s/fqmrxdqoz4tjehk/US%20adults%20who%...

It would be a better plug if you linked to your company's blog/website/store than dropbox. ;-)

:) magicinstruments.com

The idea that shiny robots will be landscaping your yard in 10 years is a pipe dream. Show me the robot, even the prototype, that can (for example):

  -identify a tree that needs straightening
  -dig it out without damaging the root system
  -reseat the tree
  -fill in the hole
  -drive stakes in the ground to keep it straight
  -tether the tree to the stakes
  -identify when the tethers are choking the tree and retether
  -identify when the stakes when no longer necessary and remove them

Even the likes of Boston Dynamics can barely make a robot that walks.

Even in sectors like manufacturing, where automation has "almost" taken over and the market massively rewards the elimination of human, labor, you still need people to mollycoddle the machines, people to carry the rejects to the crusher, people to drive the forklifts and load the trucks. I suspect that people that pigeonhole all blue collar jobs into "done by idiots, ergo easily automated", have never worked in such a job. We've had machines for centuries now, and we're only just beginning to tackle the hard problem of making computers flexible enough to handle all the edge cases.

Is this newsworthy? Teens still want to grow up and be rock stars. That dream goes back to the 1950's at least. What would be more interesting to know is if this apparent misalignment is worse than any other time or is this the same-old, same-old misalignment of teenage dreams and reality?

"Hey, Let's Put on a Show": This trope was made popular by Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in the 1930s.

It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in-demand jobs. Many of them are very low paying. If they were actually in-demand, they would pay more. For example,

    - Retail salespeople      
    - Janitors    
    - Personal care aides    
    - Maids and housekeepers    
    - Childcare workers    
    - Teacher assistants       
    - Cooks     
    - Security guards

are all pretty low paying jobs.

> It seems like these are just the most common jobs, not actually the most in-demand jobs

People confuse "demand" with "quantity traded at the current market-clearing price" all the time.

And many of them are jobs where even if you want to be in the general field you probably have your sights set higher. What teenager dreams of being a teacher assistant instead of a teacher? A security guard instead of a cop? Or even a retail Salesperson instead of at least a manager or a car salesperson.

My kids school had a career night where parents from all sorts of different jobs came to answer kid's questions. I was the IT rep and I thought I would be inundated with kids all night. Well, I had 3 kids. 2 were definitely geeks and one was a smart kid who said he would try other jobs before he would think about IT.

I couldn't understand it. Here we have an industry that is full of billionaires and success stories and yet only 3 were interested. I thought maybe they felt is was too boring just staring at a screen all day. Maybe they didn't understand how pervasive software is and how it basically drives everything. Or maybe they have a different definition of happiness which programming seemingly won't give them.

Well, IT and software and engineering are all _hard_ domains where it's well known that it'll be 1) hard work, and 2) hard work, and 3) how likely is it that they'd be able to create the next Google or Facebook. I think between the slope of the skill acquisition curve and the sense that everything's (or will be) done before by these huge success stories, kids just don't see a gap for them to fill there. It's really hard for them to imagine that Google (or any of the current hot properties) will have its day, like IBM or AOL, and then fade into irrelevance. So they can't connect the hard work to making the next big thing.

I generally agree with the sentiment of everyone else in this thread, which is "no one grows up wanting to be a Wholesale Sales Rep". Another "kids these days are coddled" article.

if americans at large had interest in holding these jobs, the market demand would be filled and they wouldn't be in demand.

this statement feels vacuous to me?

Yeah, if they conduct the same survey to adults, the result would be similar I suppose.

I'm a programmer and I daydream about doing landscaping or being a mechanic or renovating houses. I spend the weekends working in the yard or on my cars/motorcycles or my house. There's just not enough pay in something like that, at least in the city. Maybe some day I'll move back to my small hometown and start a business in one of those areas. If I didn't have to make as much money, I'd do a job like that. Physical labor is good for the soul.

I'm in the exact same boat. My parents live on a farm and I dream about going back. Helping my company sell more widgets is crushing my soul

I think you'd be surprised about the pay. Landscaping and renovating can pay very well. The trick is that you need to keep the work coming in. I have lots of friends in the construction industry and they are basically all nerds at heart. They are motivated by the technology and building/fixing things, not dissimilar to a programmer. But with any job you have to move up to management. If you can't exploit technology to do the job then the physical demands can bear down on you.

You've just got to dream bigger. Figure out how to do it better than the traditional model of either 1) doing it all yourself, or 2) hiring cheap labor to do it for you. And got God's sake, hire some analytics help so you understand how much help you need, what you can afford to pay, how much demand you've got (and when), etc. But yeah, I hear you: the six years I worked at the airport back in college were some of the best working days of my life (I worked at a private FBO). You're outside all the time, moving, physical active... You see sunrises and sunsets, work in the rain, snow, and scorching heat. And you mentally and physically feel much better than being chained to a desk.

This article isn't very surprising, of course the kids are going to pick glamorous careers like "musician, athlete or video game designer".

When I was in high school I had to write a paper on what I wanted to be, and I picked video game programmer.

I just can't imagine that very many kids would pick janitor, landscaper, or security guard as dream jobs.

To me this sounds like a list of where the money will be in the future. Be the people who figure out how to solve for the supply issue and you'll be rich. Figure out how to construct houses with less labor, build automated mowers and lawn maintenance equipment, etc.

So in other words, American kids and millenials are lazy, delusional, don't want to work hard and want all the glamor with none of the work. Is this really news?

Interesting that more teens want STEM jobs than actually exist. Somebody slipped up and failed to toe the company line.

Just like how in the 60s more teens wanted to be astronauts than actual space explorer jobs existed, but somehow many of them managed to find good jobs either in aerospace or something else.

Sure. But NASA isn't claiming there's a shortage of astronauts and demanding the government opens the H1B floodgates.

476 teens. Not a big sample.

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