1 in 2 new college graduates are jobless or underemployed
finance.yahoo.com
finance.yahoo.com
I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more than enough to not be considered underemployed.
I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
I'm afraid young people of today are losing the real virtues of life like living with passion and taking responsibility for who you are. The ability to make something out of yourself and feeling joy in life is more alive today than in any other point in human history.
I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games (which, incidentally, I think could be argued as more detrimental to human wellness than even the most societally hated and destructive addictive stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine)
This is really a shame, as one thing that comes out of hacker culture is a feeling of a real kind of exuberance about your work. Your work is yours to create. I've read the college labor statistics with some interest, even fear. But when I read them, I can't help but think that something essential about our generation and present technological zeitgeist is being left out. As if somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control, framing college graduates as fragmented or marginalized which opens up a world of excuses.
From Chaitin to Stallman, when hackers talk about the meaning of work, they're not talking about abstract decisions, they're talking about doing something that has concrete consequences. It may be true that there are seven billion people on the planet, never the less, your work matters in material terms.
In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we do with our lives.
You are wise. Please write a book for our generation.
The non-creators, or the creators-in-high-entry-fields, are the ones losing jobs and opportunities. So yeah, if you have a CS-related degree and a passion for programming, you have amazing opportunities that should not be wasted.
Even still, maybe not everyone is a creator, but we are the result of 6 billion years of evolution -- act like it.
I think ZephyrP is blinded by his good fortune to not understand that: one, software developers are in crazy demand compared to, for example, "creative writers"; and two, that the economy IS quite bad right now and that this is a generalized extension of the unemployment problems across the country.
That having been said, when it comes to things like video games and drugs, I think Zephyr's point about "you have to make your own luck" logic is right (granted I have no idea why there is a pot-shot in there about video games). A person's work ethic is the root cause and "video games" and "drugs" are silly remarks for people that don't understand or see that there are plenty of us who can indulge and still live perfectly productive lives.
Further, I don't know of any indication that "video game" playing is trading off with employment. At all. On the other hand, there are probably thousands of statisticians and economists who could give you very specific reasons for the downturn in employment and show a trend that will probably make it's way across all segments of society including college grads.
Also, people need to understand that they need marketable degrees and they need to understand that employers are learning that all degrees are not equal and you ABSOLUTELY MUST have the skills that your degree assert and you must be able to communicate well and articulate why you deserve a job.
To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers, filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything they can give the world and themselves by spending their lives in front of video games. Video games are not bad, they are an interesting artform and provide unique cultural dialog. They are however something that people have moved beyond using to relax, contemplate or fill the boring spaces in their life, it becomes them.
As the other poster stated, because of their reward systems they can suck very intelligent people incredibly deep into what amounts to a terrible vice.
I have some friends that are extremely intelligent that fall into "addictive ruts" that I think cater to their ADD. In my opinion, it's embarrassing for them (the ones I have in mind) because they run their mouths about these big ideas and then play "Tiny Tower" on their iPad (which I suppose qualifies as a video game) and don't really excel as much as they could. I mean, they're doing fine for themselves but I'm floored at how I can write 500 lines of code for something and they've not moved from their chair/iPad.
At the end of it all though, I still don't see anything to make me believe that this is unique to our generation. Anything can and often is a distraction, whether it's video games, drinking, being out doors. I know people that fail classes they were more interested in their rec football game than studying. I don't think these things account for this enormous gap in employment.
I'm just imagining the line-graph of "overall unemployment in the US", on top of the linge-graph of "job availability in the US". I'm sure if you placed the graph of "college grads with jobs exiting college" you would find a very large correlation between these three graphs.
I'd be interested in reading this argument.
You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without college (or high school) degrees, meanwhile in many places there was barely a recession in the tech sector, and if there was, it was over very quickly.
I feel like every HN thread about a successful startup, or a reminder of the excellent salaries we get for doing things that we love, should include someone behind us, whispering in our ear that the majority of bankruptcies are from people with unexpected medical problems, 75% of whom had insurance, and that last year 20% of children in the US grew up in households making less than $22,000 for a family of four.
My insistence on refusing to believe that you are the result of forces beyond your control perhaps comes directly from this experience. Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible because of the various capitalist systems of control, yet here I am today, hobnobbing with high HN society (kidding).
I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.
It's a pretty fundamental error to assume that you are a good sample for that kind of conclusion. My examples were deliberate. It's nice to think that exercise and eating right can avoid medical issues, and you certainly can influence your chances of needing 20 years of kidney treatments or needing early joint replacement. But the leading causes of death in the US are heart disease and cancer, even amongst the physically fit, and that still doesn't preclude that latent heart condition, or getting hit by a car while on your bike, and suddenly facing hospital bills of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Your life is yours to create in many of the same ways that your startup's success is yours to create. You just have to make sure you define success as including adapting to and (most importantly) living with failure. Meanwhile, don't assume those that are hurting right now didn't dream or work hard enough; far better to start from the assumption that in addition to those qualities you also had good timing and incredible luck.
However, I spent the majority of my youth in New Mexico, with close to the lowest public education ratings in the country.
Outside of that, I guess we're simply in fundamental disagreement about the nature of success. Sure, doing groundbreaking work might be impossible or at least very unlikely for the average person, but I believe that anyone can be successful (in a pragmatic sense) for the same reason I believe in the central limit theorem. The most successful scientists are not necessarily the smartest, but the ones who publish the most -- the same can be said of any discipline. In short, unrelenting persistence is key, and depth always beats breadth.
I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm young and dumb and haven't been jaded by the world yet. Maybe I'm Malcom Gladwelling myself into thinking that there's some rhyme or reason behind the (personally qualified) success I feel I've achieved. Still, I am of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, it will spread from your life into your work. There are no real limitations to what you can do. There may be temporary periods of plateaus or even deep valleys, but you can transcend them. I have seen this too many times to declare our ultimate fate and legacy of our work entirely accidental.
Then those people are idiots. However, the statistics don't lie. It is very, very difficult. It's called a cycle of poverty for a reason. Having said that, I commend your passion and attitude as someone who came from a family of four well below the poverty line. It really is key to getting anywhere.
> I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
This is true, but it's only in the US where medical crises lead to financial ruin, increasingly so with the revised (personal) Bankruptcy laws of the last few years. Personal responsibility is something I think everyone can get behind, but the system is plain broken, and that is the far bigger problem.
> I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.
I fundamentally agree with this, but it dangerously ignores certain realities and systemic problems in our society. Be very careful of adopting the attitude "well I made it, so therefore everyone should be able to." Everyone's individual circumstances are different and there's more random luck involved then anyone cares to admit.
It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests.
If anything I think people get stuck because they don't follow their interests strongly enough.
Amen. Almost all the programmers I know (myself included) chose it as a career choice primarily because they found it interesting, not because the money was good. It just so turned out that what I (and probably a lot of other people here) wanted to do because they liked it also turns out to be a great career choice. We of all trades are the ones who should definitely not be telling people they need to make the tradeoff between doing something they love and something that will get them a job just because we happen to work in the intersection of both. That I get paid well to do something I love is truly amazing luck, and I (and, it seems, a good portion of the industry) tend to forget that all too often.
Social anthropology was interesting to study, but at some point I realized that actually embarking on a career as a social anthropologist would have been terrible for me. I like learning about different cultures, not studying a few scientifically. I can do that as an amateur.
When I sat down to decide what to do instead, I thought, a) I like making ASP pages for our newspaper, b) you can go into a lot of fields with a CS degree, and c) there is a clear path for making a tangible impact on society. It turns out, that was pretty sound reasoning (despite ASP pages being entirely different from CS): I've worked at Microsoft, in computational biology, and now at a publishing startup. I've never lacked for engagement (except toward the end of my time at MSFT), and the problems I'm able to solve in our economy are a larger part of that than the practice of the discipline itself.
Do they like it more than they'd like waiting tables or serving coffee?
"It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests."
I don't think anybody is telling them not to follow their interests. But if they're going to do that they should realize and accept that doing what they love may not pay well.
b) I never said CS didn't interest me — that "study what interests you" is bad advice doesn't mean to do the opposite. See my reply above for more explanation and a short description of my thought process.
Honestly, I think a lot of good would be accomplished by simply abolishing Bachelors degrees in subjects like these. You want to enter school to study anthropology? Great. Get ready to work your ass off for the next 8-12 years (and then struggle through the world of post-doc appointments and tenure track for the next 9-15 years after that). Oh, suddenly that doesn't sound so appealing? Well then, lets see what other major you might pick that will give you marketable skills after 4-5 years.
Young folks also take bigger risks, like doing music or art in the hope that they can make it. Add in an education system that rarely considers humility a value and realistic assessment of your skills and that's why people don't have marketable skills.
Mind you, there are places like the School of Music near me where for every incoming class they tell them that they won't get a job and most of them will not make it. It's really honest, but on wildly optimistic 18 year olds it doesn't have much impact.
If you feel the deep passion and need for bringing your ideas into the world, you will be successful.
The issue is motivation, you're either working towards doing great work or you aren't.
Most people aren't.
If you are passionate about being a screenplay writer, your talent will be drowned out in the deluge of other passionate and hardworking people also trying to be screenplay writers. For the vast majority of people, that kind of pursuit is better left as a hobby.
I think you (and I, and most of us here in HN) should count ourselves lucky that we happen to be passionate about programming. It's a tool that allows us to bring out ideas to life - anything from games to Mars rovers to businesses. People passionate about 19th century Russian literature don't have the luxury that we do because that's not going to earn them a living, no matter how great their passion may be.
This "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" notion is a little misguided, IMO. Instead, I'd say the screenplay writer should see if she can get herself to be at least passably comfortable in a marketable field, while leaving the writing for the weekends.
"About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields."
Headline in 2000: "Even with incredible economic performance, nearly 1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed"
Not to get in the way of the AP's narrative and everyone's self-congratulations for picking a profitable major.
* Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.
If the only demand right now was for people that could play a mean game of pick-up basketball, I'd be the one serving latte's.
Edit: You are right though. My little cousins that are coming up, even the ones that might not love programming, I am encouraging to learn what they can. Just be able to do the basics and it probably increases your worth as an employee by a large factor.
Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out back-end APIs to support these applications. Rails is great because it can get your product out the door and expose what kinds of difficulties you'll have scaling it by providing real-world data on how it's used. It's fast to ship and an essential first step.
Most people without this background are starting from scratch, and if they have no determination, are soon lost.
After they get through that a quick course in Linux system administration with a refresher on the file system metaphor ("Its like Facebook... actually, no, it is wholly unique to your experience and every person you'll be working with has forgotten that twenty years ago it confused them, too, so expect not-so-good natured ribbing when you ask questions."), and how to use Google, StackOverflow, Github, and a version control system designed by a supergenius who doesn't care what your fingers think about getting bitten.
Sweet, that gets us to Hello World.
OK, now let's start doing useful work: meet your new friends, the letters A, P, I and the number "countless." Here's the Stripe API, go charge credit cards. Ugh, wait, you set the name value of the credit card text field in your HTML, which results in the credit card number getting written to production.log, thus causing us to fail PCI compliance. Don't you know anything?
Seriously: I think young college graduates would be very, very well served by skilling up on things that are commercially valuable rather than the blather that comprises a lot of what passes for education. That said, "just learn Ruby on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of commercially valuable work.
I agree. On the other hand, that's a relatively easy gap to fill.
A recent example: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/20/smoopa-state-trooper-ios-de...
The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.
1. Before living your dream or doing "something you love", you have to make your survival income: the first $1500 for food, shelter, transportation. So where does this steady $1500 come from, and is working the necessary hours to make $1500 going to leave you with enough time to invest in that "dream"?
2. So before graduation, have you established your fall back $1500 contingency plan? Do you have a skill (vocational or otherwise) that you KNOW will bring you that monthly $1500? Step TWO is where I believe high school counseling has failed America's youth. Everybody should leave high school with a $1500 skill, whether that be bookeeping, welding, sales, waiting tables, cashier, etc. It is imperative that upon graduating high school, you are able to count on having survival wage skills.
3. Does your college major allow you to skip step two because it is in such demand that the employment rate for your industry is healthy? Back in the early 90's, CS graduates were not having an easy time and were considered the bottom of the totem pole among engineering majors (in my school they weren't even considered engineers, but rather a soft science more akin to biology, insultingly enough). Again, this is the fault of high school counselors who fail to make foresight an essential part of the planning process - this whole "major in what you love" crap just leaves graduates with a sense of disappointment when they are unemployable. Always temper "major in what you love" with the caveat "as long as you already have a skill to pay for food/shelter/travel".
4. What's your exit strategy from your survival job? Plan this every day as you're waiting tables (bartending, welding, dancing,...).
4. Knowing that high schools (both public and private) are too highbrow to ever consider vocational training for their top students, it's up to parents to fully prepare their children. When my son is old enough, his summers will be spent honing a vocational skill so that he will have an employable skill that any society will find useful such that if he wishes to travel the world, he can always pick up a local job should the circumstances demand it. Two come to mind: welding (easier and ubiquitously needed) or electrician (harder, but more lucrative).
This long rant is a part of my disatisfaction with the high school paradigm as currently constituted. The current paradigm is a crapshoot that ill prepares students for the rigors and realities of survival in a world that could care less if they were once a valedictorian or All-State track star. I have known many former high school heroes turned zeroes after college, and it's a fall from grace that their parents have never ever prepared them for because in their world, their kids will always be special.
The problem is that everyone has natural competencies, personalities and cognitive methods and only a relatively small sliver have the type that will fit software development. If you think I'm saying were special, I am not. Every discipline has a relatively small sliver of people who will be naturally inclined to do it and enjoy it.
The real problem is us... meaning society. We currently aren't culturally organized in a manner to take advantage of everyone's abilities and part of the main reasoning I'd say is a lack of diversity in terms of what is appreciated and rewarded. From my limited perspective our culture seems to have a maniacal focus on money and a growing monoculture that is focused on how to become a millionaire at whatever cost. Right now software development seems to be a good way to get rich partly due to our monoculture's love of video games, apps, business processes etc. so our industry gets green lit for now so to say.
The problem is that there is a lot of important stuff to us humans all living a better life that the majority falsely considers unimportant and lowly for the most part because of its current low correlation to the almighty profit ... things like culture, art, anthropology, farming, geology, architecture, care-taking, etc etc The sad thing is that we have swaths of people with great skills and inclinations that should be going into these different segments but essentially can't because we collectively don't appreciate people doing these things.
In other words if you ask me our real jobs problem is that we don't have diverse enough "consumers" who appreciate the interesting niches different humans fill.
That's not really the case any more. More and more people are going to college.
Students know their psych degree is worthless when they graduate. They know it 2 years before they actually do graduate. They didn't go to college to become something, they went to college just because that's what people do now.
The people I know from high school that are successful now went to school to become something (doctors, lawyers, software developers, photographers). The ones that are waiters and waitresses just went to college and took classes.
Ebay used to do the same thing when it would report that x00,000 people sold on Ebay "full time or part time". Kind of a big difference so not that meaningful a stat.
"After grad job slump, big hiring is back at U.S. colleges"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/us-economy-hiring-...
Anyone who sends out 4 resumes a day is obviously doing something wrong. As a web developer, I probably couldn't expect to land anything if I were to apply for 4 gigs every day. The problem with learning marketable skills in college is that apparently college students aren't learning how to market.
Get yourself out there, talk to people, network, make friends, build things! All these activities increase your surface luck area. Sending out resumes is doesn't really help with any of the above, though it probably doesn't hurt to send one out every once in a while if you are more targeted with it than sending out 4 a day.
Presumably that ended with the G.I. bill, but no one particularly minded because factory jobs were plentiful.
So when baby boomers of yesteryear look back at their college experience, and try and figure out what they got out of it, can they point to stellar education that they use every day? If they majored in Communications, probably not. Do their jobs require collegiate-level knowledge or skills? If they're in marketing or sales, probably not.
So they remember that they smoked their first joint there, and met that one foreign kid from Uzbekistan, and throw in the first awakenings of independent thought that come from living on one's lonesome for the first time, and call it a "cultural experience of self-discovery."
I malign communications and the so-called liberal arts a bit, but that's not completely deserved. If done right, they actually seem about on par with mathematics in terms of usefulness---abstract and useless at first, but a fantastic base for further study, providing that that further study occurs.
How many dev jobs do you think require, say, integrals or compiler design?