Why Are Harvard Graduates In The Mailroom
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The robots came for the content creators last decade. They're coming for the educators now. They will come for programmers, too, eventually.
Makers are always going to be at the top of the chain.
How many people lay out CPU circuits at Intel any more? Computer (using a CPU) does that.
How many people physically make chips at a foundry? "Robots" do that.
There are a lot of tasks in designing and building computers that can only be done with computers these days. Sure, someone runs them, and someone does some significant level of design, but the final designs and products are no longer possible without the very products that those efforts produce.
Lather, rinse, accelerate.
Now, a lot of modern webdev, on the other hand...
nextBigThing = WebBizFactory.createNewSite(ecommerceSingelton.getInstance().createNewMerchantAccount(), socialMediaFlywheel.getInstance().createSocialAdaptor(SocialAdapter.TWITTER), AWS.getInstance().getKVStoreFlavorOfWeek());
If you are working a 9-5 you are fighting for a 5% raise that just will not have any effect on your life. The "lottery jobs" offer a way out. Of course, it is not a perfect system so if you have any better ideas...
Funny thing is, that seems to be an artifact of my parent's generation, the halcyon days of years past when America was a manufacturing powerhouse that we seem to want to get back to. Work sucks, so put in your time, then get out and start enjoying life. At 60 (if you're lucky) or 65 years old. But who wants to be touring around the world when you're old?
Find something you love to do, and you'll be able to do it successfully until you drop dead. It's not all about wealth.
But his point is still valid...tech people could easily have gone to med school. If they had...they would have had a more solid chance at accumulating that USD10Million than working startup after startup.
Some, but mostly not. The non-tech professions that offer high pay (medicine, law, banking) all have very different barriers to entry than tech. There are a lot of folks who made a ton of money in tech who didn't have the 4.0 + ridiculous extracurriculars to get into med school, or the Ivy-league background to get into a bank. I think those barriers make those professions less meritocratic than tech, don't get me wrong, but they are what they are.
But that's, again, different from STRIKING IT RICH(TM).
Ha ha. No wall street in fact fits this analogy perfectly.
1) The number of "producer" roles vs suport/finance/tech/legal/admin etc is small. 90% of employees are toiling long hours in the hope of making the jump across.
2) And even in "producer" roles you're still playing the lottery system. While grad/starting salaries may seem high - say $120k, do you know how many hours you'll work? Double a regular 9 - 5, and often on the weekends. On an hourly basis it's really not high. And you'll need to put in many years of this to get to a position where you're "winning the lottery". I dare say the few that make it that far feel they deserve it.
The people that do want to do it for life are gambling that by the time they're 30-40, they'll be an actual investment banker with relationship and closing deals. Chances of that are slim these days.
Why not bank the Plan B security money first before launching a startup?
I hate when people make this fallacy. It may be true to some extent for entertainment but there doesn't seem to be any limit to the number of businesses that can be created. As long as people want stuff then there is opportunity.
I think it'll remain true at the higher levels of wealth, though, because if you have a lot of wealth, what it really translates into isn't just material goods (there's diminishing returns on how many of those you really need past a few hundred million $s), but the power to significantly change what a non-trivial number of people work on. You can start a company and hire 5,000 people to work on a project you think should be worked on; you can take a different route by initiating a prize like the X-Prize to encourage people to work on it that way; you can start a foundation or grant program; you can singlehandedly decree that [movie genre] is going to be a significant new segment, by promising to plow $1 billion into it; etc. The main thing huge sums of money buy you, imo, is this relative power in the economy, to push people to work on what you think should be worked on--- which necessarily requires that your wealth has to be large in relative terms, as a fraction of the economy.
If you have the right talents and skills (programming, some design, marketing, market analysis, costumer support, networking...) there is little reasons that you fail your business. There is always some demand in the market, in some field. You have to figure it out and solve the problem.
It's the problem here in Tunisia. We don't have a decent infrastructure (roads, schools, houses...) and we have a huge number of art, language, IT... graduates who can't find a job. They complain about the poor infrastructure, but solving it is actually finding a job, and a new business. There is a demand for workers in that field, and there are people with lots of money despite the country being a poor one.
My central thesis is simply that playing the lottery is foolish because it is completely luck and the odds are against you. Entering the corporate world as a means to success is a reasonable move for many to make. It's not about "perform[ing] well to get ahead", it's about how are you going to make your way in life. You could join a corporation and be a backstabbing prick and perform terribly and still get ahead, and maybe that was your calculation and it worked...
The thing that bugs me about the article is the attitude of throwing up of ones hand and succumbing to fate. There's a difference between acknowledging the chaos in the universe and simply being a loser tossed about by circumstance powerlessly.
There's something about karma and hard work we have to believe in I think but also there are some countries (my impression is that America is especially guilty on this) where people are just too obsessed by what the neighbor has and being the number one etc..
At the end of the day people can work hard and aspire to great things, but remember to live, get by with what you have, stay positive, be happy and have fun!
There were plenty of Ivy League grads in my mailroom class. Even a few MBAs, and a Harvard JD. Landing the mailroom gig at this particular agency was extremely difficult, and the folks playing the "lottery" all could have taken six-figure (or close to it) entry-level jobs elsewhere.
Why did we do it? For no better reason than the fact that "it's always been this way," and "this is the way it is." (Or the more economically rationalized supply/demand explanation: there are 500 bazillion gajillion people lining up at the door to get these jobs, so demand always exceeds supply, and thus wages are low and the work brutal).
For those who really love the entertainment business, and who are ambitious enough to "pay their dues" in the toughest epicenter of it -- the agency world -- it's the best way to get a foot in the door. If you survive the agency meatgrinder, you are highly sought-after among other Hollywood firms: be they studios, networks, production companies, or what have you. It's not unheard of to hit the mailroom at 22, make junior agent by 25 or 26, and be making a very respectable living somewhere by 30. And for those truly ambitious, ruthless souls who go on to be big-time producers or studio heads, you can be making obscene amounts of money in your late-30s to 40s.
It's definitely a "lottery ticket" model, with some echoes of the ancient apprenticeship model thrown in for good measure (all the bigshots in Hollywood were, themselves, in the mailroom back in the day). The model burns out probably greater than 90% of the hopefuls who leap into it. And that seems a pretty inefficient way to find a small handful of Katezenbergs, Geffens, Dillers or Eisners in the haystack.
More important, the model burns through a lot of would-be superstars who simply don't have the tolerance for the indignity, BS, and luck-dependency[1] that comes along with the dues-paying years. These are people who may leave the business and go on to do some pretty amazing things in other industries (tech, for instance). Seems to me that you could still find your Dillers and Katzenbergs in a more tech-style model -- i.e., putting people to work actually making product, rather than answering telephones -- while probably finding a lot more of them in the process.
The problem with the Hollywood hiring model, as it currently exists, is that it selects solely for the most ruthlessly ambitious candidates -- the ones who can survive years of toil in pursuit of a big paycheck. If they are also great thinkers, or innovators, or creative geniuses, that's sort of a secondary consideration. The model gets what it selects for, and often nothing more than that.
[1]Ultimately, what burns out most people isn't the indignity of the work, but the dependency on dumb luck: the fact that there is no guarantee of work in / reward out. You may kick serious ass in your apprenticeship, only to find out that there are simply no spots open at the next level up. (It's understandable that someone who's just spent 4 of the best years of her life as an indentured servant, only to be told that she needs to put in another 4, would opt out altogether.)
Was this type of prestigious degree more or less required? I get that a gajillion people are trying to get these jobs, is this what employers are looking at to differentiate candidates, and is an MBA or JD program the best to prepare for the type of work you'll be doing?
Yes and no. It's kind of funny, actually. My degree certainly helped get me in the door. But once in, I encountered a virulent strain of anti-intellectualism that runs pretty rampant in Hollywood. More often than not, my Ivy degree was viewed with disdain by various bosses and co-workers. Somehow it made me soft, or "entitled." (The latter claim being patently absurd, precisely because I earned entrance to my college by dint of having sacrificed my entire waking life to studying and grinding in high school).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink
But by saying this:
"[1]Ultimately, what burns out most people isn't the indignity of the work, but the dependency on dumb luck: the fact that there is no guarantee of work in / reward out."
Aren't you discounting the future value of making contacts that can be helpful even if you don't land a lottery job?
Plus, as I mentioned, there are the resume benefits that accrue with having done time at an agency. "Agency experience" in Hollywood is a little bit like "McKinsey experience" or "Goldman experience" in other industries. It's highly valued as a general indicator that a) you have a very solid, holistic understanding of how the entire business works, and b) you can handle high-pressure environments (provided you lasted at least a year, and preferably two, at the agency -- ideally with some indication of upward movement while there).
c) You're special and distinctive enough to have landed the opportunity in the first place and impress the gatekeepers.
However, in the case of this article, it's funny that the crappy job is the one that is most sought after.
The author conveyed as much by saying "we have a 'winner takes all economy' which might not be a good thing if employees realize this and lose their interest in working hard."
This example is indeed listed in "Freakonomics" and was contributed to the book by a sociologist called Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh. What this paragraph fails to say, however, is that the chapter in the book makes it clear the "soldiers" slinging on the corners either had the option of taking a minimum wage job working 9-5 plus overtime or taking the minimum wage "job" slinging and have a chance at making it big time PLUS the gang provided certain social services and security to their members and their families - something the minimum wage 9-5 job also did not have to offer. So while they were clearly in a tight spot, they took the more economic of the two options. And the guy leading the gang was described as very capable, social, if I remember correctly he even had finished school or was working on a degree and was capable of handling all financial matters of the gang. So his skills, qualifications and killings got him the job but ultimately his performance kept him there - otherwise he would have been replaced long ago. Clearly he had something more to offer over his soldiers.
A point this chapter was making was that these jobs take practically zero skill, have no entry-level barriers and there is an abundance of people willing to do them who don't have other options - that's why they the pay was so absolutely terrible while the job of being injured or killed on the job was ten-folds more likely than the most dangerous, "regular" job in the States.
He's not an economist: he has a very clear idea of which jobs are useful in a society and which jobs aren't, and no interest at all in what the market has to say.
I'm sure he has useful data, but everything he writes goes through that filter, and there's no way to trust what he says about people dealing drugs, because he makes it so clear that everyone doing anything outside the law is Evil, and so everything they do is tainted.
I guess both (all three) of them are leaning more toward the "infotainment" side of things in those works - after all, they want their books to sell and I wouldn't be surprised if he absolutely had to make that point "it is evil" so often, otherwise the bible thumpers/moralizers might have gotten to him that he promotes gangs? Levitt/Dubner had to go out of their way to make clear they aren't trying to promote abortions in their "legalizing abortions reduced the crime rate" chapter... which I found extremely peculiar, given that it was nothing but an analysis and a convincing theory for the data at hand.
Then they go on to state this will create a situation where people no longer need to be innovative or creative... which these jobs didn't require in the first place.
This article is fluff and full of fallacies.