Twenty-something job seekers: Quit whining and get creative
whiletruecode.com
whiletruecode.com
The point isn't to whine and blame. The point is that we have to recognize the structural forces we are up against, or we'll collectively lose the battle (repeating a job search ad nauseum expecting different results).
I have one short response for my unsympathetic self-satisfied elders: you don't come whining to me a few decades from now when you're trying to retire with no pension, no social security, an IRA of confetti, and massive unexpected health costs.
We're in this together, so let's find a way out (self-righteous finger pointing doesn't help). I'll end with Thiel's concluding words, from a recent debate between him and George Gilder on The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth (its on youtube):
... "in a world where there's no growth and everything is zero-sum. There will be a loser for every winner, and the people will start to suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of a racket. That's not the kind of world that I want to live in. I'd like us to find a way out. But if there is going to be a way out of the wilderness we've been wandering in for the last 40 years, we have to start by acknowledging that we're lost in a desert and that we're not in some sort of an enchanted forest. Thank you very much."
As an example, I came out of school with a Mechanical Engineering degree in 1994, in Seattle. The other notable thing about Seattle in 1994 is the Boeing was one of its cyclical "Hey, let's lay off another 10,000-odd engineers and maybe hire them back in a few years" phases. That meant that for every job I'd interview for, the second round would be me and half a dozen Boeing engineers who'd been doing that exact job for ten years but were now willing to take an entry level salary so that the bank didn't take their house. I don't imagine it was a whole lot rosier than the job market you describe today.
After the better part of a year's worth of that same interview a couple times a week, I followed the advice we just read in the article. I found a niche at a place doing something sorta related to my degree (Environmental Engineering), using a tiny sliver of the stuff I'd learned by accident at university to convince them I was worth hiring (Fortran, which their models were written in). Then I learned how to do the stuff I was hired to do. Then I spent 4 years migrating from there to writing their first web apps, and only then did I take off for a software shop and start down the road to where I can now antagonistically respond in a self-satisfied manner.
So yeah, things were (and are, and will continue to be) tough all over. Try not to think you're in some special circumstance where time-tested advice doesn't apply to you.
Those kind of lucky breaks (hire you first and then pay you while you learn?!) just don't come around like they used to. Things were obviously not tough all over, like they are now. There's a mass of empirical evidence to show this. I don't why our elders continue to deny it (to their own future detriment!) other than so they can bask in their own self-satisfaction.
Not to say that time-tested advice doesn't apply. It does, but it just doesn't work like it used to!
Speaking from experience is fine until you start acting like your single experience can be taken as anything more than an interesting anecdote. This presumption is implied when one uses aggressive phrases like "quit whining".
The fact is that no matter how faithfully you reproduce the superstitious rituals of a past lottery winner, your odds will be the same as everyone else's. It is foolish to walk in someone else's footsteps before you assess the odds and find out how much effect the strategy actually has, and that successful person is not who you should talk to to make that assessment.
Winning the lotto is nearly 100% luck.
Changing your strategy because you keep failing over and over until you finally succeed is 90% non-luck.
I'm really tired of people looking at anyone successful and saying that somehow there wasn't nearly as much skill or dedication involved, it MUST be luck.
Well, I should clarify that by "luck" I really mean "anything other than the strategy a person attributes their success to". For example, it seems that Steve Jobs believed very strongly in magical thinking. In the end, it probably cost him his life, but he really seems to have believed that his success was, at least partially, due to his spiritualism. In that sense, even if his success were due to his other skills, I would categorize it as "luck" in the context of discussing the effects of Zen Buddhism. If you took 1,000 other people and had them apply the same spiritual principles to their lives, you would find that Jobs' success was still anomalous and would need some other explanation.
So when I say "luck", I am not making a judgment about whether the person "deserves" their success, or whether there was "skill involved" with their success. Instead, the meaning of "luck" that I am using is more related to the concept of statistical noise. It may seem weird to say "Steve Jobs wasn't successful because of Zen Buddhism; he was just lucky that he happened to have one of the best marketing minds of his generation combined with an excellent understanding of aesthetics and user interface, and an aggressive instinct for competition", but that is what I mean. Admittedly, using the lottery as an analogy may have been distracting.
The fact is, simply becoming successful cannot give you a strong idea of why you were successful. It gives you one data point and no scientific control. You will encounter other successful people, but this is not a random sample, and it only tells you one side of the story. The only way to even begin to figure out what strategies are actually causally related to success would be to analyze a proper random sample of both successful and unsuccessful people and look for correlations.
What is the difference between changing your business strategy and changing your gambling strategy? If you tried lottery tickets and the horse track, then finally hit the jackpot at the slot machines, would you say that 90% of the win was due to your active involvement in choosing the game?
The reason that the younger generation feels entitled is that they were convinced by the older generation to go deeply in debt TO the older generation for an education and a piece of paper that many of them are quickly finding is worthless.
It's like a nationwide, academic version of "oh you'll definitely be a great model, just pay me a few thousand dolars for these head shots and the work will start rolling in!" They got scammed.
I think we've forgotten that higher education is supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career (the return). As a current-student twenty-something, I can remember in high school when the rule was basically: people go to college, losers go to vocational schools, failures go straight to work.
As absurd as it seems now, it's unfortunately what we were fed (though not in so many words). College was never an investment for us, it was just the next phase of school if you weren't so terribly below average that nobody would accept you.
There is a lot of resentment, especially in the liberal arts and sciences type fields, toward higher education. Personally, if I was in charge of any hiring right now, I would look a lot more at practice and experience than at degrees and education. And I don't think I'm alone.
I believe you meant to say that it isn't supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career.
Education, like any other hobby, is an investment in yourself. The return is what you take away in joy from having participated in the activity. Like any hobby, the chances of finding financial rewards are greater by having done said hobby (think of how many have made fortunes by playing in a band, or playing sports, etc.), but the pursuit has always been about more than just money. Monetary returns are a nice bonus when one gets lucky, but it is still worth the cost and effort either way.
One year of post-secondary employment would be an interesting prerequisite for college, as a filter to weed out those who are only there because they believe it is the only path to employment. Unfortunately, it could, under certain circumstances, also keep people who are there for legitimate reasons away.
Yes, a unemployable just-graduated accounting major with no CPA designation and no network can just start his own accounting firm. Stop whining, it's SO easy!(?)
Just on a 'nothing to lose' basis with no expectation of magic. And getting out the house, engaging with people who find keeping their books straight a chore and who perhaps don't have a clear idea what their financial position actually is... that bit where you have to explain the procedures and perhaps adapt them to a specific organisation's needs. Might just give the trainee accountant that edge in the letter writing.
Even if the business is an ultimate failure, the lessons learned through the process are attractive to future employers.
For example, how many 20-somethings stroll down to their local grocer and buy food produced by 50-somethings†, instead of sourcing their food from people their own age? It is difficult to complain about the lack of jobs when you are not willing to support your own peers.
† About forty percent of the farmers in the US are 55 years old or older: http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html
The assertion that young people are "unwilling to support [their] own peers" is comically absurd. How does the demographic of existing farmers support this? What I can see is that young people don't really want to become farmers, or maybe it's just not a promising field to go into (no pun intended) what with factory farms driving the margins down. Consider the converse, young people spontaneously start demanding food from other young people. They go on a hunger strike until all food is sourced directly from young people. But farming isn't enough, they need everything to come from young people. Old people must be sacrificed so that the young can have a vibrant economy. Forget class warfare or racism, now we have institutionalize ageist segregation where there is an economy for young people and an economy for old people.
How is that a solution to anything, and what would cause people to rally behind such an abstract idea?
The point was to just highlight that people don't even think about who they are buying from. The chances of buying from a 55 year old farmer at your grocery store is statistically greater than a 20 year old, making it difficult for 20-year olds to break into the industry.
> Old people must be sacrificed so that the young can have a vibrant economy.
It is not a binary issue. You do not have to stop supporting older people in order to also support the younger people. If you allocate, say, 25% (picked at random) of your food purchases to 20-year olds, you will allow them more room to establish themselves while still leaving room to support the older farmers as well.
It is not just about food. It just seemed like one example that everyone can relate to. It is about spreading the wealth around, instead of everyone buying from a single source. That is, of course, if you care about a vibrant economy for the youth. If you don't, buy from whomever you want.
However, you can blame them for the entitlement almost all of them seem to feel. I say "them" even though I just recently turned 26 and for a long time did have that feeling of entitlement. At the risk of parroting the article, you can't go to college and expect anything, particularly in tech. You've got to be willing to make below-market, almost slave wages in a crappy entry level job or internship.
I changed careers a year and a half after I graduated with a Poli Sci degree in 2008. The first gig I could get was a 6-month internship for $2,000. It's taken me that and consulting quite a few web clients to get the point where I could accept my first entry-level professional (corporate) programming gig less than 4 months ago.
Edit: massive edit
Yes, the economy is bad. You just need to think of ways to differentiate yourself from the thousands of other people trying to get the same position. Will it definitely work? no, but it will give you a better chance at finding a job.
I don't mind that people are so un-creative and entitled. It just gives me a leg-up on the competition.
When I was looking for work, I would tailor my resume to the job. I might only send out 5 resumes/day, but my response rate was many times higher than the machine-gun approach.
If you really want to improve unemployment, make it easier for businesses to survive through something like tax incentives. The businesses are the ones hiring. Most people don't want to hear this. They would rather tax them to death (and then wonder why they are leaving the US or laying off half their staff).
If times are hard, perhaps one should act as if they are. Whining is counter-productive. How many counter-productive things can you afford? Why does whining make that list?
Most universities don't prepare students for the real world, and when we graduate we feel very bitter and abandoned. It's not entitlement, we were raised to believe that going to college meant getting a job, and suddenly when the economy goes bad everyone starts acting high and mighty; "Well, you shouldn't expect a job just because you went to college."
I'm sure you can understand the frustration as you've experienced it yourself. Don't blame the young adults who just graduated, blame the people who told us we would only get a job by going to college who now criticize us for not being able to get jobs after we graduate.
So if everyone took the same steps, no one would be better off?
I know a programmer in Austin who makes his living in FORTRAN. I'd imagine if he loses that job he's pretty much SOL except for a few niche positions which are likely filled already.
But I've never been unemployed for over a year and I have no idea what that does to your confidence.
My way out was voluntary work, lead to engagement with a lot of different people in local voluntary sector, lead to a paid post, which, in turn lead to a teaching job. I could see what Further Education college teaching was like from my work with trainees, and I realised I could do that.
Never been out of work since...
What transferable skills do programmers have that could be used in different fields?
I think the idea that 20 years of experience in mainframe hardware warrants a senior or even mid level web development jobs is just as misguided as the idea that a college degree warrants any job just by virtue of having it.
But this articulate and intelligent job seeker would benefit from asking himself a question: Why am I doggedly pursuing a strategy that is so clearly failing?
I.e: blame the victim.
Or: surely, if something worked for me, the author, it can work for millions of unemployed people. The mass unemployment in the Great Recession was because those people weren't creative enough.
Or: sure, you can find a job, you just have to leave this dignity thing behind, and any sense that any member of society should be able to get a job at his skill level, and jump through hoops like a trained monkey to try to entice potential employers with your wit, determination and willingness to work for less money until they deem it OK to properly hire you (or not). Also: try changing field of work entirely.