Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out | Hacker News Reader

Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out

nytimes.com

This is no different than "generation X" in the early 90's. We were called "slackers" then. Lots of well-educated folks with no real job prospects and no money. I made $8/hour performing science demonstrations for children!

That's OK though, I think it was normal then and it is normal now. A life of seamless transitions from school to successively higher prestige jobs is a myth and probably always has been.

This is no different than "generation X" in the early 90's. We were called "slackers" then.

Indeed. But I don't quite agree it is normal. Well it is "normal" if you happen to be in a great recession. And I believe prior to this one, the early 90s recession had been the worst since WWII.

So Gen X and Gen Y (or Z?) have that in common.

Some generations get lucky and enter the job market during a long running boom. But yes, if your coming of age happens to coincide with a recession, your generation will be accused of being slackers.

Now, what I want to know is, are we going to get some good music out of this recession/generation, like we did in the early 90s?

A lot of the people who might have gone into music are doing blogs, books, and things like that.

> And I believe prior to this one, the early 90s recession had been the worst since WWII.

I disagree: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unite...

The three recessions immediately preceding the early 90s recession (73-75, 80, 81-82) all had either higher unemployment, a larger GDP reduction, or both.

I stand corrected.

It's worse now than it was for generation X. The 90s were still cheap.

“We did everything we were supposed to”

Did you do anything you weren't? I think that's the fundamental difference when it comes to the entrepreneurial mindset. A willingness to question the status quo and a willingness to bet you can do more.

I don't have a college degree, but I build, market and maintain web sites and applications used by millions of people every year. It's very gratifying.

I was just going to comment on that exact quote. Sounds like a rallying cry for the Coddled Generation.

http://johnnybtruant.com/disobey/

One of my favorite posts. I have a degree, but I use it to do things unrelated to the subject of the degree. Graduating in the middle of an economic collapse was unnerving. No jobs, and not much in the way of prospects. It took two more years to shake it off.

I was fortunate because the degree was paid for by a scholarship. I feel bad for people with thousands in debt and no sense of what to do.

The NYT has taken to churning out one of these predictable trend pieces about once every two months or so because they know the predictable ire and outrage it will spark. No matter how good or bad an economy, you can always cobble together 4 or 5 anecdotes to generate predictable outrage. Notice that every time, there's a notable absence of any kind of hard statistical data.

The truth is, unemployment among college graduates currently is at 4.3% (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm) which is historically high but not overtly so.

Your link seems to present the unemployment rate of all college graduates, regardless of graduation year. The article talks about recent graduates, which are not singled out in the referenced statistics, so I think it's not entirely applicable.

I do agree that the some hard data would make a nice addition to the article, though.

Well, good news then, here's a paragraph from the article:

"The numbers are not encouraging. About 14 percent of those who graduated from college between 2006 and 2010 are looking for full-time jobs, either because they are unemployed or have only part-time jobs, according to a survey of 571 recent college graduates released in May by the Heldrich Center at Rutgers."

That number is pretty meaningless without a comparison to what the number used to be.

The link also only counts the population aged 25 years and older. I don't know about most, but I was 21 when I graduated with a bachelor's degree. So if I was unemployed for a few years after graduation, I wouldn't have been counted on that list.

There's also a difference between being employed and being employed doing a task you trained for. Flipping burgers for $9/hr means employed, even if you have a college degree that trained you to program computers.

"degree in English Literature" ... "hopes of working in the arts" ... and working in McD's / coffee shops / bars. Looks like not much has changed.

Yeah, that caught my eye too. I was waiting to see if there was any engineering or science degrees in the group they selected but nope. All BAs.

And hopefully something will, soon. We can't build or maintain a country with our history degrees, and my generation has yet to realize it. Say what you will about the value of the humanities, but I can't help but suppress a "you fool!" every time I hear one of my friends talking about their english, or poli sci, or art history degrees.

Don't get me wrong - I have a degree in philosophy myself. But I recognized that it would get me nowhere, so I picked up programming. I'm now looking forward to making recruiters drool. However, independent self-improvement is not the trend among my peers, as far as I can tell.

tangent: is $2.17 an hour really typical pay for waiting tables in the states? In Australia, minimum wage is around $15 (I think). No wonder tipping is so important in the US.

Their total compensation must be at least minimum wage to comply with the law. Tipping is very common, so you could probably pay wait staff $0/hr legally.

"tipped labor must be paid a minimum of $2.13 per hour, as long as the hourly wage plus tipped income result in a minimum of $7.25 per hour." [1]

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Minimum_wage_...

Guess what happens to those that the employer has to pay to make up the difference?

The same thing that happens to a salesperson that doesn't sell enough to justify their (usually small) salary.

Yeah, minimum wage for non-tipping jobs is $7.25 where I live, and somewhere around $2 for jobs that rely on tips. Since a 10 - 20% tip is the norm, a server only needs to serve maybe $40 of food every hour to hit that minimum wage. For the sake of reference, most meals are around $6 on the cheap end, and $10 - $15 is common at a nicer-but-affordable place.

So, yeah, it's low, but as long as the server is doing a decent job, people will tip, and at a decent restaurant, they can actually do better than the (honestly pretty low) normal minimum wage.

If I were already in debt from going to college, I wouldn't compound the problem by going to law school. Practicing law is not as lucrative as people think, every new attorney doesn't start off making a lot, and whatever they do make is blood money. Most law firms are sweatshops if you're an associate, and these days, partners don't have it so great either. Instead of piling on more debt, maybe that young woman from Dartmouth needs to stick with the paralegal job to pay the bills and start working in the arts on the side. At least then she'd be spending some of her time doing what she really wants to do. And who knows what could come of it?

Sounds like their only problem is expecting to find a job solely based on a college degree. They should have taken into account the value of there career path before blindly perusing it. While it may be enjoyable to major in English Literature it probably doesn't guarantee you an instant career. As someone from this generation I can tell you not enough emphasis is put on career development beyond a college. I haven't finished college yet and I consider myself to be fairly successful. It's a different world now college isn't always necessary to succeed and it defiantly doesn't guarantee success.

I got a laugh out of the guy who wanted to be a consultant fresh out of school.

You can't make things happen in your own life, but you want my money so you can tell me how to do things?

Why do people think they deserve a consulting gig just because they went to school? sigh Just another case of the "we got a trophy for everything, why doesn't real life work like that?" syndrome.

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