Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street | Hacker News Reader

Young, Unemployed and Living on the Street

nytimes.com

218 pointskunle231 comments

It took quite a lot of courage to write this post, but here goes:

I spent a large portion of the past 9 months sleeping rough, maybe 1 in 10 days in total.

I was living in Spain and moved back on my own at the age of 19, with no job to come to, the promise of a house to stay at for a month and £1,200.

This was no grand entrepreneurial dream, it was simply trying against everything which told me it was stupid to improve the quality of my life, see the woman I left behind in the UK and find work within the tech industry.

People these days are too quick to criticize the youth of today for not having jobs or sponging off their parents but in my opinion, even when you have a large skill set and are willing to do anything, it isn't easy to find work. I went to 41 interviews in everything from cleaning to PHP programming before I was finally accepted on a job.

Even once I found a job, the pay was piss poor and I was living in sheltered accommodation (a step up from the bedsits and alley ways I never told any of my friends or families I was 'sleeping' in) to keep a roof over my head, all the time only being able to afford to eat one meal per day (on a good week!)

Now, 9 months later, I am living in a home which I find adequate, I have a new, new job which pays me £13,000 per year (almost 3 times what I got paid at my first job) and my relationship with my girlfriend is stronger than ever. But more importantly, I feel more happy and more empowered than ever before in my entire life.

The point of this post is really this: If you are in this situation, you can make it out, it won't be easy, but it isn't impossible.

The area is totally different, but if you are currently homeless, or in danger of being homeless, or really just in any kind of trouble in the north of England, you can find my email address on my profile here, fire a message off to me and I will see what I can do. Somebody helped me out when I was at the darkest point, it's only fitting I do the same - no one wants to be alone at Christmas.

Also, on a side note, the day I created my HN account on here I was sleeping rough, sat in the middle of a public park with just a backpack and a laptop, but dreaming of a better life, just wanted to thank all the people on here for showing me the better side of humanity when all hope seemed lost

Sincerely, thank you for sharing. (both your story and your generosity)

It's really nothing, what might be something small to me now, like a food parcel costing a few pounds, could make a difference to someone else. It would be ungrateful and irresponsible of me not to want to help.

I am however off to sleep now, but I will be awake again by 7am.

My offer still stands to all who need it.

I'm in america and feel like I just want to spend xmas with you! God bless. You're a good person. Kick some ass.

Thanks a lot Tyrant - I just looked through my old posts on here and saw I posted that I will be alone for Christmas, I just wanted to say that I now won't be. I managed to collect a small group of like minded people for this Christmas and I truly can't wait to properly celebrate the first major holiday since moving back to the UK with them.

As for my being a good person, I don't entirely agree, we all make stupid mistakes and do bad things in our life (unless of course you live the life of a saint) but it is our actions when we have the chance to do good which define this. Come back in a couple of years once I've helped a few more people and we will see if I consider myself a good person yet!

Seconding this! haha. Have a good holiday, both of you.

I sincerely wish you the best, in both your personal life and your career, but "when you have a large skill set and are willing to do anything" you DO find work.

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

That being said, however being in a weak position is a self reinforcing spiral where you get fewer and fewer opportunities and become less productive. And small hits take a tremendous toll - one who has not experienced what you have should at least read Scalzi's "On being poor" - http://whatever.scalzi.com/2005/09/03/being-poor/

Yet for some reason you found the strength to get back on your feet. Once again, I sincerely wish you the best, and hope you can give a hand to other people. We all need help at one time or the other, and it's better when you are on the giving end :-)

but "when you have a large skill set and are willing to do anything" you DO find work.

I think that's the point he's making. HN has a can-do, make your own opportunities mindset that can often lead to us forget that we are living in deep recession. Depending on where you are in the world it is still extremely hard to find work, no matter how clever or willing you are.

True, which is why I'm happy to be at a point in life where 'making my own opportunities' includes packing my bags and leaving for greener pastures. I truly feel for those who don't have that option, and are in the wrong place at the wrong time.

You really shouldn't read Scalzi's "On being poor" - it's not particularly informative. The typical poor American is vastly better off than what Scalzi describes.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1713461

The "typical poor" American may be. That does not make it either uninformative or--unbelievably!--not worth reading. I know, personally, numerous people who have mentioned either in passing or in detail stories that would not be out of place in what Scalzi (or many of the comments) wrote. Who am I--or who are you--to dismiss them because the teller may be worse off than your declared "typical poor"?

I am fortunate to not be among those with stories like that. So regardless of whether it is the "typical poor American", I suspect that it is quite informative for me, and I would hazard a guess for many others, to read it and remain cognizant of it.

if the economy is restructuring itself to provide work only to people who are "damn good at what they do", it makes it all the more imperative to have alternative means of providing for the remaining people.

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

Not everyone in the world who's good at something gets paid for it.

And while it's great that you got rewarded for being productive, that doesn't mean it will always happen for everyone else.

The dark side to "Make your own success" is that "You're on your own."

viz., http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4940848

And when you are damn good at what you do and productive - more productive than the "average" mediocre default - you DO get rewarded.

Yes, yes, yes. We've heard this before. For some X, the top X% of society by skill/productivity/motivation will always be able to find remunerative work.

The question is: what's the value of X? For some fields it has always been very small, like in philosophy.

However, our entire notion of "democratic capitalism" has always depended on the notion that over all fields and the entire population taken as a whole, the value of X would be a fairly large majority. There has always been some notion that the bottom Y%, where Y = 100-X, will inevitably have trouble finding jobs, but nobody outside the radical Left has ever really faced up to the notion that at some point Y might range between 20%-50%.

If you are in this situation, you can make it out, it won't be easy, but it isn't impossible.

That is an important message for people who in this kind of situation and need to keep persevering to get out. Thanks.

But I would want to caution others looking from the outside not to take the statement as "nothing to worry about, the good people will be OK, move along...".

If we think of the condition of young-adult homeless as stochastic process, it shouldn't surprise us that people get out of it. But the question and the potential problem is if more people are getting into it than get out it. Society as a system, has to consider this.

I think part of the problem is that it's hard to discuss the problem and solution in a way that is both descriptive and productive. I think these are a some of other issues:

1. I think too many people attend college (in the US at least). College is expensive, and the ease with which students can attain loans to attend has made it something that people probably take too lightly. There's still a perception that if you go to college and study "something," when you graduate you'll get a job from the magically place where jobs come from. This perception is being challenged, but it's a barrier.

2. The fields of study that tend to lead to higher paying roles also tend to be more challenging. The difficulty and popularity is somewhat "priced in" in the microeconomic sense. For instance, I think our society romanticized the humanities and arts, despite the harsh reality that these programs leave students with few concrete/marketable skills. And while I'm not saying that we should gut arts and humanities programs, I would argue that right now that skill-set is in low demand. Statistically speaking, the chances of success are low and the roles of distinction are scarce, leading to higher unemployment rate for certain fields of study. Add to that the general scarcity of good jobs, and an increasingly competitive economy as developing countries rise out of poverty and converge to the developed ones.

So what do we do? 1. I think our society should better educate it's citizens on these issues (what are the value propositions of certain fields of study, what can people do to be more successful, etc). I think we could also use some gov't coordination to ensure that the skills being learned match the desired skills of the market. Anecdotally I know of many firms that are hiring, but feel there's a mismatch between the skills available and those desired.

2. I think we should find some way to provide employment for at least some of these un/underemployed youths. The Civilian Conservation Corps from the Depression Era U.S. comes to mind. Basically, citizens were given the option to work on gov't infrastructure projects as an employment option. I like this because it both provides assistance to the unemployed and allows society to recover some of the cost of helping its citizens.

And congratulations, shanelja. The situation among some of my friends has been pretty bleak... It's always nice to hear an uplifting story...

Lets be frank here, 'Follow your dreams' isn't a very good advice for most people. Given the economic reality that poets, artists, philosophers alike aren't going to paid very well, its actually foolish to think otherwise.

Unless you are sure you have a good story to narrate, something that has best seller material- training to be novelist is an utter waste of your time. And taking big loans to do it is financial suicide. The net result is you ending up being a junior editor of sorts working for some portal trying to correct spelling mistake in news articles submitted, sincerely hoping automation doesn't take over your job.

'Making a living' is a very different thing, and frankly kids need to be taught its one thing to be passionate about something, and totally an another thing to monetize it. Your passion might not even be in demand to the common masses, you can't blame them for it. I for once never felt the need to listen to poetry. On the other hand I love listening to songs. Its not the worlds mistake to not want what you like doing. And moreover its not necessary your passion must always overlap with your day job. You can try towards doing that. But don't bet your whole life and financial security on it.

Next comes, a realization that needs to get into young people early on. Unless you are super lucky, big money will come only with big work. Studying history or philosophy is not very valuable to the world, or at least there isn't a pressing demand for it.

When you look at all this things at once. People need to make pragmatic choices in life. Choices which make sense. Again you can point out examples of people who have made it big doing something non-mainstream, but I promise they will be so few you can count such people on your fingers.

I agree with your observation. What I find interesting is that most people I know don't actually 'follow their dreams'. They do apply the principle on a surface level, but in actually just kind of stumble through life, often unhappy that they didn't quite 'realize' these vague non-specific dreams.

On the other hand, I have a number of friends who did follow their dreams. Their dreams often changed, were often crazy, but they had them, and worked relentlessly toward them. And they achieved a lot.

And finally I have friends who don't really have much of a dream that they want to follow, and they seem pretty happy too.

The problem is that many people apply a watered down version of 'follow your dream' that really is nothing more than 'do what you like'. Those are two different things.

I personally feel that it is possible to follow your dream, if you have one, but only if you realize that you might not make a living, you might be unhappy for long stretches of time, and it will cost. But I've seen so many people who went through hell following some crazy dream, but even in the process, and especially if their dream led them somewhere, they seemed somehow happier. Including the homeless broke ones.

>>The problem is that many people apply a watered down version of 'follow your dream' that really is nothing more than 'do what you like'

In many cases passion simply refers to a person's, least area of incompetence.

This is discussing strawmen though.

If you look at the original article its clear that there are CPAs who are out of jobs.

Given just the collapse of the bubble along with the addition of new people into the market; there are now many people who aren't holding a job, while people are holding jobs they are overqualified for while crowding out others.

The article may focus on the homeless, but as has been mentioned its part of a larger problem in America, which consists of cold macroeconomic factors that care little if your dream was to do finance, be a lawyer or write a novel.

Why strawmen, exactly? I'm not disagreeing with you; it's true that following your passion is often difficult, or even impossible.

I was just interested in discussing the passion angle of this story, because passion, in the strongest sense of the word, is a fascinating variable in this context. Passion can make a person content (to a degree) despite being dirt-poor, and passion can even bring a person out of squalor. And for some, not everyone, taking that passion seriously can be quite beneficial.

You might disagree, or consider the topic irrelevant, but how are we discussing strawmen?

I tend to think that 'Follow your dreams' is a good advice, but at the same time I also realize that I have to work (a non-dream job) to be able to do so! Many probably don't take into account that following one's dreams doesn't come for free.

For example if my dream was to write novels, I wouldn't take a loan and just write with hope to hit the jackpot but I would have to do some regular work to support my dream: writing.

This topic is always such a tiring minefield to navigate.

Expanding on point 2 - It should be noted that several students and workers in hitherto "hard" areas, such as finance and law, are also struggling today. Finance is yet to, recover its pre collapse heights.

So these industries are dealing with a glut of candidates to pick from, AND at the same time, many of the routine low mindfulness tasks, are open to outsourcing.

So even in the non Liberal Arts world, the landscape is fundamentally changed.

As someone said on the NYT boards - there will be no more isolated islands of prosperity.

I live in Seattle and here the only island of prosperity seems to be software development. Almost everyone I know under the age of 40 who I would consider successful in their career and finances, or "upper-middle class," is in the software/IT field.

The troubles of the financial sector are well known. Law used to be a safe bet, but the current glut of law graduates now means it's no longer a sure-fire ticket to upper-middle class life. Medicine is still, but only because so few people are allowed into medical school. It's such a high barrier to entry. Since you don't need a specific degree or license to be a dev, software's barrier to entry is only in the difficulty of acquiring the knowledge and experience itself, not in acquiring certification.

Even though I personally dislike most of Microsoft's products, I shudder to think what would happen if the wheels came off that bus, and the region were suddenly flooded with experienced software developers seeking employment.

Finance and law were producing little actual value, and so their salaries and growth trends were completely unsustainable. We're just seeing the inevitable realization of that fact.

How are employment prospects in fields that are actually productive, like, say, software?

I want to say something about problem (2).

The deeper issue than the mere popularity of college majors is that their popularity already includes a certain level of weeding-out. Graduating classes in engineering and computer-science are not small because people are too foolish to go into engineering but but because, by and large, people lack the talent and capability for engineering.

And even worse! If we somehow made every college student into a competent software engineer, it would only glut the market for software engineers.

The notion that an economy will naturally come to an equilibrium of full employment at livable wages, and that poverty is thus a failure to adhere to the will of the market, has simply proven itself empirically false. It's a falsified hypothesis, and we have to throw it out and deal with the consequences of its falsity in a sane way.

There simply may not be good jobs for everyone, and any anti-poverty policies we want to make need to start from that as their basis.

Living in Spain at the age of 19 with no college degree, no matter how sharp your skills are, is truly a pain in the ass. It sounds like your parents were able to support you, did you never consider to move back with them then figure out your job prospects in the UK? I'm just imagining you're the son of one of the many British expats that live on the Canary Islands/Andalusian/Valencia coast. There aren't many tech jobs around there but I saw a few companies started by people in these typical expat areas that might be willing to take people like you (given you like Spain enough to stay in). Did you ever consider to stay with your family in Spain and try to get a college degree in there? In any case, glad to see it's working out so far. The best thing when you're in a hole is there's a lot of room for improvement.

Before I reply, I will give some back story: I lived with my mother and sister in the UK and wasn't working, my skills with the Spanish language were poor to say the least and finding a job was proving near impossible.

I moved back to the UK to widen my prospects and it worked to be honest, even without a college degree I managed to find work, I did look in Spain, don't get me wrong, but there was nothing which resonated with me and I became disillusioned with the country and the idea of living there.

I did consider moving back to live with my mother, but the harder my situation became, the more focused I became on succeeding, if I moved back I would have given up a big part of me, my drive and passion for my work and my love for my girlfriend, there was no tangential course which I could myself being willing to give those up.

As for your last statement, I couldn't agree more, the lower you sink, the more scope there is for climbing. Every time I get kicked down, I feel more empowered, safe in the knowledge that I've been through worse things and I always found a way to make them better.

Of course, I couldn't have done it without the support of my friends or girlfriend, I can't thank them enough for the help I've had.

I moved back to the UK after spending 3 years in Gibraltar, my girlfriend who lived across the border in Spain followed me. Places like Spain is where people go when they've already made it (or run away to when they've made it illegaly), it rarely the place where you make it. I found it easy to get work in London, apart from work being abundant here I also genuinely know how to work the jobs market here, and hence helped my girlfriend to land work quickly. I keep moving back to London because the exposure to culture and work experience here is second to none. However, it's a tough place. Very unforgiving, and everything apart from culture and work is a lot harder to deal with here. It was the third time I moved here and by this time I had the right connections to have somewhere reasonable to stay. Very much unlike my first time, so I can relate.

I'm really glad things are better for you. I hope they continue to improve.

This has scared me for quite some time: http://i.imgur.com/ZxBWh.png

and: http://i.imgur.com/u6aU2.gif

With a plausible explanation: http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2012/04/the...

The only explanation I can come up with is that this happened because it could. Because money is self-reinforcing, and breeds power, which allows control.

But I don't think it's sustainable, and I think it's one of the largest, if not the largest problems with our society today.

1. I am not an economist. Is this view in any way valid? Am I seeing the right things?

2. What are the other causes? Surely the economy is complex and there are multiple driving factors.

3. What can we do?

Help us all if this can't be resolved. Because that graph is very, very scary and I see this going downhill fast if something doesn't change.

I think it may have everything to do with how we're measuring productivity. The world in 1975 is obviously not the world today. The biggest difference being the personal computer and by extension the internet. How much of productivity gains are due to computers? Email can be near-instantaneous and although the paperless office is probably a pipe dream, filing and paper work have become less plentiful and are taking less time. Not to mention the advances in software which improve productivity. Of course, this is just in offices. You can go ahead and look at factories which are becoming more computerized and I'm sure the primary sector has benefited from computers too.

So, although workers of today are more productive - per dollar paid per hour/month/year, is it possible that people haven't actually been working harder but rather machines have been doing more work? Is it possible that these productivity gains represent value provided by giving every office an IT department rather than people working better (or harder or smarter)?

I think it is possible, but I don't think it is a satisfactory explanation. It could simply be the effects of supply and demand on the marketplace. Beyond a certain point, money doesn't buy happiness so I see no reason why the upper end of salaries would increase other than pure greed (which is consistent with lots and lots of increases in executive pay) and unskilled labour provides minimal value so why would machines making one interchangeable labourer able to do the work of two or three interchangeable labourers lead to an increase in the pay of interchangeable labourers?

One way to look at it: years ago, we dreamed that all of the menial tasks that we do would be done by robots, and that we could enjoy endless leisure while our robot servants labored under us. The first half of this dream is coming true. Unfortunately, the second half is not, and consequently we wind up with robots (or IT) doing the menial work instead of us while we sit unemployed.

Well the fantasy was that we could go through this transition without a period of displacement and upheaval. That much is inevitable. Hopefully we can find a path through the increasing reality of technology unemployment that could reduce the stress on those at the edges of it.

Who will get paid when robots can do all of the work? Should robots get paychecks? Are people who use robots stealing from poor people since the robot is stealing the poor person's job? These are the questions we must answer before the robots take over hr and accounting.

Why would anyone need to get paid if robots are doing all the work? And if no one needs to be paid, why does anything need to cost?

Capitalism is nothing more than a system for allocating finite resources. If, for all practical intents and purposes, nothing is finite anymore then there's no reason to keep around a finite resources system.

i was reading this http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

its an interesting book about this very topic.

Economically, there's no real difference between productivity rising for different reasons. However, people "working more" has nothing to do with any of them - productivity measures value produced per time worked, and so rising productivity by definition means that people produce more with the same amount of time working. From this perspective, there's no reason why a productivity rise due to computers in the 2000s should be any different from a productivity rise due to better factory equipment or production processes in the 70s.

If I may provide some help, economical theory has some explanations, including the Stopler Samuelson conclusion in the HO model for international commerce : in an economy focusing on the export of highly technical outputs, the best qualified have their "salary" go up, while the least qualified have their salary go down (leaving aside the fact that physical capital is responsible from most of the productivity gains, an explain Marx dislike since according to him it's all about how labor use and create physical capital)

You can get such a divergence if you have fewer qualified people than less qualified people. Wrong conclusion like the one mentioned in the blog post can be reached when using a representative agent approach, while the actual population follows an (at least) bimodal distribution.

In the end, there still is a divergence, but it doesn't have to be resolved - people either have to learn more and become more qualified and productive, accept their reducing wage, or move to another country (Mundell conclusion in the HO model IIRC)

There is no reason why someone should commend a higher salary than someone else, just for having won the birth lottery ie being born in a reach country. If someone from say India is more productive than me, I see no reason why I should get more money than them.

A free market would help out some here; maybe its the lack of a global free market that is causing the disparity. In which case, being born in the wrong place would definitely put you at a disadvantage.

Marx considered a decline in real wages, even with increased productivity, to be an inherent feature of capitalism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immiseration_thesis

Also related is the capitalist crisis, which tends to destroy the accumulated wealth of workers in recurring boom-bust cycles.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_theory

From one person who understands Marx to another, expect to get heavily downvoted around here.

Every once in a while it's okay, but this isn't exactly a place that's friendly to criticisms of capitalism.

A lot of libertarians respect Marx. In general, he had a good understanding of the problems of a capitalist society and bad solutions to those problems.

If you are talking about his vision and insights, like oscilloscope, you get respect. If you espouse socialism, you don't.

You must talk to different libertarians than I. Most of them haven't read him.

Marx actually did not espouse 'socialism.' He referred to an 'lower stage of communism,' and was incredibly critical of the utopian socialists of his time.

Sorry but communism is badly flawed in its very design. It discourages hard working people and encourages lazy people by its very core philosophy. Nobody who is hard working will ever have an incentive when told he and the guy sitting next to him will get the same reward. And no lazy guy will ever work if he is told, regardless he will get the same as the guy who works hard.

People in capitalists countries by and large are over a degree of measure living in better conditions than those living in communist countries.

And people messing up their financial lives by reckless borrowing, debt and bad decisions[like taking loans to study humanities] is not the fault of capitalism.

That's the strawmanning I expect from this place!

('communism' explicitly does not 'give everyone the same reward.' Read more, try again please.)

Are you referring to this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...

The problem with Marx, for me, is that he relied on the growth of industry to create an abundance of wealth that would satisfy everyone's needs, but he did not take into account that some resources are not material in nature, such as time and social status. Capitalism can quantify abstracts into material representations (money -> time and social status), whereas Marx had no way, as far as I'm aware, of creating an abundance of intangible satisfactions. In fact, that may be impossible where the desires are hierarchical in nature, since there can never be an abundance of top performers due to the relative nature of the rankings.

> Are you referring to this?

Among other things, yes. That's just a slogan, but it's based in the rest of Marx's theories, obviously.

> but he did not take into account that some resources are not material in nature, such as time and social status.

These things would factor into the 'socially necessary' aspect of 'socially necessary labor time,' I'd imagine, but what I will say is that thinkers who have built on top of Marx absolutely address these issues. Debord, for example, with his 'society of the spectacle,' which specifically address social status (see aphorisms 60 and 61) and time (the entirety of part 5).

Marx considered capitalism to be a necessary phase of human development. That's where the abundance comes from.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_history#The_...

>>Read more, try again please.

I don't have to read more. I have been through a communist set up myself(India), And I don't want to try. You can bring it in your country and enjoy it as much as you want. As far as I'm concerned I am glad my country is rapidly getting rid of last vestiges of communist policies we have.

Now coming to your point. Contrary to whatever you have 'read'(looks like all you have done is 'read' about it), or whatever you will read, the ground reality faced by people under a communist regime is vastly more different. No progress is ever allowed to happen under the name of 'protecting the poor', whatever progress you would have seen in a country like India is only because of some competitive pressure, our immediate neighbors have posed. It was very common in my country pre-1990's free market reforms to see the best hard working talent leave. There was no individual incentive to do anything special. And the environment(movies, media, drama shows, stories you name it) depicted rich as some form of evil entity bent destroying humanity. Even today the states ruled by communist governments(West Bengal and Kerala) see the largest group of youth moving out of those state to work in cities like Bangalore. The conditions are so horrible, there are bandhs, strikes, shutdowns by unions and communist groups ever other day. No productive work ever happens. Investors are shit scared to invest or set up any long term ventures in those states. And by and large in the name of protecting poor, the poor are always ensured they remain poor.

You will not believe the height of problems communist policies had caused in India. Around late 80's we had nation wide strikes when our Prime minister announced computers will be introduced in the country. That is the degree to which progress was blocked by communist groups. Even today we continue to see pockets of communist feelings around. A national policy on foreign direct investment in retail sector is being blocked and opposed currently.

Go to any communist nation you want. And see for yourself the kind of miserable conditions communist policies have bought upon those people.

Just in case you didn't know in India there is a terrorist groups based on principles of communism called 'maoists', which is by far considered biggest threat to internal security of our country.

> I have been through a communist set up myself(India)

Which period of India would you consider communist? The 'late 80s' period you reference later? I don't know nearly enough about India's history, and understand that geographic regions are very important.

> the ground reality faced by people under a communist regime is vastly more different.

Just like the reality on the ground in a capitalist country is very, very different than what the theory says. How many Native Americans did my country kill again? How many dead children are in Iraq and Afghanistan? Why do we have more empty houses than we do homeless people?

No social system is a magical cure.

> And see for yourself the kind of miserable conditions communist policies have bought upon those people.

You will not see me apologize for Stalin, for example, but what I will say is that Russia went from an agrarian nation to putting a man in space and becoming the #2 world superpower in what, 75 years? That's pretty damn impressive. The soviet experiment failed for good reasons, though.

> Just in case you didn't know in India there is a terrorist groups based on principles of communism called 'maoists', which is by far considered biggest threat to internal security of our country.

I am actually aware, it is quite interesting.

>>Which period of India would you consider communist? The 'late 80s' period you reference later? I don't know nearly enough about India's history, and understand that geographic regions are very important.

India never explicitly stated its a communist country. But most of its policies were communist based for a large part of its post independent history. State controlled industries, tightly regimented license system for anything private, unions etc.

Marx theory is really deeply flawed, because he regards masses as controlling units of society. But in real world, who controls masses? Some individuals because masses can not decide for themselves without individuals deciding for themselves. The idea of masses act as single unity without influence of only few gifted individuals does not stand.

And it's utopia to think that gifted individuals are always nice people, which reality proved many times.

You have very serious misconceptions about Marxism.

> The idea of masses act as single unity without influence of only few gifted individuals does not stand.

This is not true.

> And it's utopia to think that gifted individuals are always nice people, which reality proved many times.

Marxism does not make ethical assertions about people and their actions. Marx takes great pains in Capital to divorce his theories from ethics, though occasionally he uses some metaphors that imply a personal ethics.

No, fortunately I don't. The concept of masses as ruling body is flawed because individuals constituted masses and masses are moved by only few individuals at the end as was proved by history and as it was objected before it was taken seriously. It's a naive concept. Tell me, how in the real world does masses actually decide correctly without being first constituted by rational individuals? And if you put individual before masses, you are not talking about Marxism.

Fewer downvotes if oscilloscope can explain why "capitalism" (or specifically let's say the US implementation) raised median wages for a period and then, didn't.

I haven't read Marx, but if you two have, then maybe you can explain what feature of the Immiseration thesis is acting here, what changed when in the economic or political landscape, etc., in order to correspond with the evidence.

On the broad whole, over multiple generations, "capitalism" seems to have been good for workers: http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzdx1tJidd1qc38e9o2_500.pn... (via @delong)

---------

As far as the crisis theory goes: is it true that workers' wealth was destroyed more than let's say upper-middle-class to upper class wealth? Stock prices declined a lot more than home prices in 2009. (Important because the medium and lower quantiles' wealth is mostly the house—but higher quantiles own liquid assets like stock shares. Some of the lower quantiles also have pensions coming to them; pension funds invest in equities and bonds and CDO's and other things. I don't know if pension funds experienced a greater hit than, let's say, hedge funds (which only take top-quantile money).) So in order to justify that "the workers" lost more wealth than "the rich" (who, obviously, have more to lose)—I'd want to see some numbers on decline in home values versus other assets, as a start.

> I haven't read Marx,

If you haven't read Marx, then I'm not interested in having this discussion with you, sorry. It'd take far too long to even get basic terminology straight. Here is a copy of the "Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie" which introduced this theory: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/

Or maybe Capital I, which develops it (and the rest of Marx's ideas and provides his critique of capitalism) here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ David Harvey's lectures are a great guide if you decide to give it a read: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/

Plenty of online forums are more than happy to provide you with a basic outline of Marx's theories, including /r/communism101 and /r/debatecommunism.

> is it true that workers' wealth was destroyed more than let's say upper-middle-class to upper class wealth?

I will point this out though: this question does not make sense in a Marxist analysis. There is no 'middle class' or even 'upper class,' these are vulgar economists' terms.

if you haven't read…

Surely you can answer my question why the wages went up and then down.

oscilloscope posted a part of Marx's theory that's hopefully topical and has some insight to share with those of us who haven't yet set aside the time to read something long. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me to want to discuss that.

harvey

Thanks for the references, I will keep them in mind. I love video lectures.

There is no 'middle class' or even 'upper class,' these are vulgar economists' terms.

OK, all I intended was rough percentiles. Let's say the 30th–60th percentiles are "all house", 60th–99th are "house and equities", and >99th may be invested in a hedge fund. Speaking of the USA.

I don't mean to imply some unified psychology to a social class, or anything like that.

> Surely you can answer my question why the wages went up and then down.

You wouldn't even understand an answer I'd give you, because it'd be in Marxist terminology.

Maybe Oscilliscope will be willing to explain their comment, I don't care to at this time.

> Thanks for the references, I will keep them in mind for the future.

No problem. Glad to be of help. I think that understanding Marx is really important, but I don't think that he has correct answers for today, exactly.

> all I intended was rough percentiles.

Right, this is fundamentally wrong. The only thing that matters is your relationship to the means of production: 'middle class' people are proletariat just like 'lower class' people are. It has absolutely nothing to do with your positioning in the table of income.

This is an example of the terminology issue. It's common to most philosophers.

The only thing that matters is your relationship to the means of production: 'middle class' people are proletariat just like 'lower class' people are. It has absolutely nothing to do with your positioning in the table of income.

I understand what you mean. I can see how that relationship might be important to the theory. But what I said about "classes" (bad word: s/classes/quantiles/) is actually true. So if we're going to discuss whether, in fact, workers lost more wealth than capitalists (or, s/capitalists/correct terminology/), those empirical issues should still be addressed.

For example, I may be a "worker bee" consultant at IBM, but holding stock factually altered my exposure to wealth shocks.

You wouldn't even understand an answer I'd give you, because it'd be in Marxist terminology. Maybe Oscilliscope will be willing to explain their comment, I don't care to at this time.

Fair enough.

> But what I said about "classes" (bad word, s/classes/quantiles/) is actually true.

It is true within the framework you have set up to analyze the situation. One of Marx's theses is that that analysis is not adequate to explain capitalism's tendancy towards crisis, the falling rate of profit, the alienation of the worker, and many of its other features.

You're saying "but no, it's true that you can measure things in degrees" and Marx is saying "my theories and equations are all using radians."

I don't understand your radians/degrees analogy. I'm saying that richer people hold more equity. It has nothing to do with a framework of analysis.

Right, but you have a chart that only takes into account wages which ignores things like 'wars' and 'embargoes' and 'happiness index' and doesn't even cite its numbers, and a vague hunch about relative values of securities. Really, all of this is far too muddy on both of our sides, combined with said terminology gap.

I really should be coding, not typing on HN, so I'm going to gracefully bow out of this conversation, but thank you for continuing it, you've been great. Two thoughts as I leave you: 1. the fact that many people have things like stocks in their 401Ks is one of the reasons that I think Marxist theories need updated, though I think of them as generally sound. Luckily, many people have since Marx's time (First Lenin, then Mao, and many, many others) and 2. Marxism is really about a methodology than a strict set of answers: you use the tools of dialectics and historical materialism to produce a scientific analysis. That applies to Marxism itself as well, and like any science, its theories will come and go, be made stronger or weaker as history marches on. That's not a flaw, it's a strength, and it's why Marxist analyses have been used across a variety of fields, not just economics.

Thank you for this break as I work on the documentation for the impending Rails 4 release.

=) You're welcome. Have fun and I'll get back to work as well. I agree that stocks and mortgages don't capture happiness, wars, and so on.

For anyone who cares to pick up the thread, steveklabnik has left you with:

Marxism is really about a methodology than a strict set of answers: you use the tools of dialectics and historical materialism to produce a scientific analysis

>Right, this is fundamentally wrong. The only thing that matters is your relationship to the means of production: 'middle class' people are proletariat just like 'lower class' people are. It has absolutely nothing to do with your positioning in the table of income.

I do think it's interesting to look at class from the Marxist perspective, but eh, the Marxist terminology I know is sloppy and inexact at the intersections of class; where a whole lot of the action happens.

Petite bourgeoisie refers both to me, the owner-operator of capital goods who must add his labour in order for those capital goods to produce value, as well as to those who own nothing but manage everything; managers of large companies who might not own any stock at all except for the options given as payment, people employed by the capitalist class to do the actual work of managing capital (and yes, it is complex and difficult (difficult in the sense of difficult to get right, not difficult in the sense of physical difficulty) work.)

I can not imagine two classes of people who are more different. I mean, your owner-operators? The means of production we own? we know intimately and control absolutely. Sure, we might take on apprentices from time to time, and we might delegate some of the less critical work, but room for delegation is limited, mostly because any mistake or misfortune that decreases the value of the capital good we operate generally harms us directly. I still assemble all my servers, because nobody else cares about 1 in 10 or 1 in 100 errors introduced by improper ESD control. But me? I care because I'm the one who has to get up at 4am and deal with the problem. I'm the one who has to make apologies to the customers, and I'm the one who gets to watch my customer base shrink when those sorts of problems happen. So yeah; I'm sure I could pay some kid ten bucks an hour to assemble servers... but generally speaking? I don't. I have people I trust with root that I won't let touch hardware. It's better, sometimes, to do some things yourself.

Your managers? Generally, they have much broader and shallower knowledge. They are all about delegation; not only delegating the decisions, and the work, but also delegating the risk. If a manager screws up, the worst thing that might happen is that they lose their job and any future compensation, usually not even that.

Managers? Managers control the largest corporations around. Owner-operators, usually, control very small operations.

Moreover, the Manager's customers are the owners. Really, the Manager only needs to be perceived as compitent by the capitalists that own the company; the perceptions of the employees and customers don't matter except in how they change the perceptions of the capitalist-class owners of the company.

Personally, I would argue that this manager class; those hired by the owners to manage what the owners have no time, ability, or interest in managing, are now a more powerful class than the actual owners. Mutual funds and index funds are very popular. How many here actually vote the stock they own? Not many, I'd wager. The Managers control most corporations, really, to a greater extent than the owners do. I mean, yeah, every now and again, one of the capitalists tries to fight the managers; even when the capitalist is clearly right he often loses to the manager.

> the Marxist terminology I know is sloppy and inexact at the intersections of class;

I would say that your definition of 'sloppy and inexact' is sloppy and inexact. ;) But that's slightly trolling. The definitions are pretty simple, I'd argue that you're meaning to say that you don't feel they map to today's class structure cleanly.

> I can not imagine two classes of people who are more different.

There's two things about this: 1, in Marx's time, this was generally much simpler. Things were more clear then. 2, the idea is that your incentives are the same: you'll be upholding bourgeoisie society. The whole point of the 'petite bourgeois' designation refers to the awkwardness of a group of people who _should_ be proletariat, but have juuuust enough incentive to act against that interest, because they're almost bourgeoise.

That said, point #1 is why I prefer to talk about later thinkers who have modified and extended Marxism over the years, rather than stick to Marx's teachings only.

>2, the idea is that your incentives are the same: you'll be upholding bourgeoisie society. The whole point of the 'petite bourgeois' designation refers to the awkwardness of a group of people who _should_ be proletariat, but have juuuust enough incentive to act against that interest, because they're almost bourgeoise

It's more complex than that. And the explanation I always got was that the petit bourgeois acted against their own interest because they aspired to be and thought of themselves as likely to become part of the capitalist class, not that they shared real interest with the capitalist class.

Management actively steals from the capitalist class. The last thing that management wants, for instance, is shareholder rights. In fact, they side with labour more often than they side with capital, as far as I can see. Look at Yahoo in 2008. Any fool could have seen that the Microsoft buyout offer was the best yahoo could do. And Yahoo shareholders clamoured to make the deal. But management killed the deal, siding with the employees, and destroying a great deal of value for the capitalists.

One can argue, in fact, that labour rights (which is to say, making it more complex and legally dangerous to hire or fire someone) is in the best interest of management, as it means that a Capitalist would have to learn significantly more before they could take an active role in managing what they own.

Owner-operators... culturally, you see that same aspiring up against our own interest. Our interests are aligned with the capitalists on labour issues, certainly; Much like the capitalists and unlike management, we want to be able to hire and fire without complexity, and as a class, we generally don't value job security, or really even comprehend why job security is such a huge deal to the workers. But otherwise? We have radically different interests. Owner operators are just as likely, if not more likely to need 'safety net' type social services than similarly skilled workers. One can make a good argument that owner-operators benefited more than any other class from the affordable care act.

In fact, on one of the biggest issues of the day, owner-operators have interests aligned with the workers against the capitalists: Capital gains taxes. Nearly all owner operators, outside of real-estate, pay full income taxes on most of their income; We'd be better off if the government taxed all income as income and just lowered the income tax rate to make up for it. And the difference in what you pay is huge. Like more than 50%. This is the primary reason why everyone thinks that an exit strategy is so important; building up a company that can be sold to a capitalist is the most realistic way for an owner operator to pay that lower capital gains rate. It's hugely damaging, too; it makes us act like management; like our customers are the capitalists rather than the people who buy our products or services.

Capitalists and management (through stock grants/options) get to pay the (much lower) capital gains rate on most of their income.

I agree with what you have written, and shouldn't have simplified after reading your first post. Thank you for correcting me.

"Surely you can answer my question why the wages went up and then down."

Pretty funny - explain some complicated topic that scientists have probably been debating for decades in a HN comment. While you're at it, could you also explain Quantum Mechanics to me, I always wanted to understand how that works.

I will point this out though: this question does not make sense in a Marxist analysis. There is no 'middle class' or even 'upper class,' these are vulgar economists' terms.

Not quite true. I would label the middle class as the portion of the proletariat or petit bourgeoisie with some savings or even investment income to keep them afloat.

The issue being that the middle class and the "poor" proletariat have different relations to swings in currency and investment values. Inflation, for example, is good or neutral for the portion of the population who live month to month or remain consistently in debt. But the middle class have net savings, which inflation destroys. Likewise, low inflation or even slight deflation is good for the middle class, who have savings and small investments, but strong deflation is good only for the "true" capitalist class.

In the period 1947-1970 where wages were increasing, I don't know. Perhaps it had to do with legislation like the G.I. Bill, which increased human capital during that period and could have helped trend wages upward:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gi_bill

America is not a pure capitalist society. We have free public education, for instance. Capitalism also has obviously good effects, such as increased productivity and relatively efficient distribution of goods and services without central control. Profits from these effects can be distributed in the form of wages, if that's what employers choose to do.

In terms of the crisis, again I'm not sure. You'd have to consider not only the losses of the crisis, but the gains of the boom. Who benefited from the boom, and did those gains survive the bust?

19th century Marxist theory doesn't have the answer, but it frames these issues in an important way. Rather than crises and falling wages as abberations from normal steady growth, they are considered part of the capitalist system.

For a more modern perspective in the Marxist tradition, check out Max Weber or Georg Simmel. There are even radical, almost psychadelic strains of Marxism like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari.

> America is not a pure capitalist society. We have free public education, for instance.

Surely Marx would still say that, because the means of production are privately owned, resource allocation is provided through a market, and wage labor is dominiant, that the states would be still absolutely captialist, no? "Free public education" doesn't really matter.

> Capitalism also has obviously good effects,

Certainly, and I think this is something that we should keep repeating to people who don't know Marx.

> There are even radical, almost psychadelic strains of Marxism like Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari.

Are the means of production privately owned? It seems to me that one of the most important means of production in the 21st century is computing.

Computational power is cheaply available and open-source software is free (as in freedom). With the internet, anyone can acquire knowledge, distribute a good, or work remotely.

Google, for example, has some of the largest computing clusters on the planet. This entire website is dedicated towards creating a vision of computing that is privately owned and used by capitalists to extract surplus value. Not to mention most of the backbones and actual physical wires.

I think there are gray areas, for sure, but the factories, the land, much of the computing, most of the telecommunications infrastructure, etc are all privately owned. The vast, vast majority is.

America is not a pure capitalist society.

Of course. That's why I used the word "implementation". But I thought you had some kind of Marxist critique in mind that relates to some of the capitalistic aspects of the USA. (Since that is what this article is about.)

19th century Marxist theory doesn't have the answer, but it frames these issues in an important way.

Can you describe how you think it frames the present topic?

Some more graphs to look at:

Total compensation (including non-wage benefits): http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/RCPHBS

Cost index (attempts to control for composition changes): http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM

Employers have shifted compensation from wages to benefits.

In answer to your question of what to do about it, very simple - eliminate the tax advantages of assorted non-wage benefits (e.g., treat employer-provided health insurance, 401k matchin, etc as income).

very simple - eliminate the tax advantages of assorted non-wage benefits

yummyfajitas, that may shift compensation more towards wage/salary rather than benefits. What is it going to do about the unemployed youth?

You're losing the thread. There was a claim that capitalism was failing as a desirable economic system because median real wage growth slowed or stopped. I've always found this presentation of 1975 America as the height of the golden age before the fall to be transparently silly. Who'd rather be the median worker in 1975, and miss out on three+ decades of very nice quality of life improvements, even if their wages in real terms were the same?

But yummyfajitas helpfully pointed out that the median worker continues to see compensation gains, just tilted toward ones that take a tax-advantaged form.

Remember all wage comparisons over time are basically useless unless you are comparing total compensation. You have huge costs that change over time such as federal employment taxes, unemployment insurance, workman's comp, 401k, and especially health insurance. These all eat into a persons hourly wage.

money is self-reinforcing, and breeds power, which allows control. ... I don't think it's sustainable

It sure sounds sustainable.

I am not an economist. Is this view in any way valid?

But you're quoting an economist.

Am I seeing the right things?… What are the other causes? What can we do?

I don't know if you remember the standard US economist's story for rising wage inequality in the late 90's and early 00's. It was "skill-biased technological change" or "perhaps trade". (I translate that as "No f___ing clue.")

If any economists have figured out why wage:GDP ratios are dropping, I haven't heard that explanation.

(Actually I have heard one but haven't thoroughly looked into it: declining union membership rates roughly anti correlate with the http://i.imgur.com/u6aU2.gif.)

It sure sounds sustainable.

It is sustainable up until the point where the guillotines are sharpened and the pitchforks come out. So probably about 10-15 more years on our current course.

Possible cause could be the rise of debt (the absolute total value of debt) as a major tool in fiscal policy and as a speculative financial instrument. The date where the two lines split on the first chart roughly coincides with the rise of hedge fund industry (see "More money than God" book for reference).

I'm not criticising hedge funds per se, but the trend they created in financial instutions at large.

I'm out of my element here, but isn't the stagnation in wages counterbalanced by the availability of cheap goods and services? Sure, wages may not have gone up over the past 50 years, but your dollar can buy a heck of a lot more now than it could 50 years ago, thanks to cheap overseas labor, automation, technological innovations, etc.

It makes sense that wages would reflect this, too. People agree to work for a wage that will let them afford the quality of life they are comfortable with. If you can live as comfortably as you could 50 years ago at roughly the same wages, then there's no reason they would need to rise.

The final point is that the labor pool has roughly doubled since 1950 because women entered the work force. It's now more common to have two incomes per home than one, and it's only natural that wages would decrease accordingly. Again, it's because workers set a bar for themselves in terms of quality of life, and they simply want to reach that bar. If it can be done with two salaries buying cheap goods and services, then wages don't need to rise.

Has the Consumer Price Index gone down?

> it's because workers set a bar for themselves in terms of quality of life, and they simply want to reach that bar. If it can be done with two salaries buying cheap goods and services, then wages don't need to rise.

thats a post facto explanation, which i don't believe can be used to make predictions. I mean, will wages rise if suddenly, due to post peak oil, that cost of living suddenly became high?

I think the real reason wages didn't rise is because it didn't have to (from the point of view of the employer) - there are people willing to keep the same wage. In other words, people are becoming more and more worthless, especially unskilled workers (automation and robotics etc). Its a sad fact, but its true, and its a problem that needs fixing. Probably only fixable by better gov't policies on education.

I'm torn whenever I hear stuff like this about my high-functioning (non-mentally handicapped) peers struggling out there.

Half of me thinks: How weak.

Don't they get it? It's not about "money" or "jobs". Those are abstractions. You have to create value. What do YOU do that's valuable? Why should someone hire you? Why should someone pay you?

Can't they see? Quit blaming the economy. Quit waiting to be hired. Bring the locus of control inside. Put in on you. Go to the public library and start learning. Make yourself valuable. With enough determination and will, you will find a way. Or you will make one. Less fortunate people than you have done it. Dumber people than you have done it.

That half of me recognizes that the hard work, the learning, the hours I've put in to get traction on a strong path of entrepreneurship wasn't handed to me. It wasn't intuitive. I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work. Why can't they?

The other half of me wonders: Why do I realize all that? It's a rather meta though. But... I can't tell you honestly why my life fell into place so that I would be so driven. Why my life fell just so, so I would be curious enough to seek out the books, essays, podcasts, and blog posts that have shaped my entrepreneurial character.

Why was I drawn towards the heroes and role models that I was - business and technology leaders, instead of rock-stars or athletes - who inspired me towards a particular path?

Sure, it has taken talent, drive, hard work, and sacrifice to capitalize on the opportunity presented to me. But perhaps it was the greatest luck of all - the lottery of birth - that gave me those gifts in the first place.

I know how you feel. I count my lucky stars that I consider Elon Musk a role model and Kim Kardashian a fat-assed clown.

This is so well put and exactly how I feel.

The only issue I have with your first argument is that the majority of the people doing the hiring have no idea how to readily determine someones value. Often times they fall back on the easily quantifiable such as school, employment, and in our industry technical qualifications. Even at that few are able to administer even the barest of sniff tests to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Otherwise I don't really disagree with you.

You will discover a wealth of wisdom when you get the answer to this question: "Don't they get it?"

Of all the things I have chosen to do in my life, by far the most challenging has been raising kids. I cannot tell you how many times I wished I had some super power like telepathy to convey a concept directly into their brains because words just weren't cutting it. The whole idea of taking the locus of control and bringing it inside (love that btw) is what I wanted to teach, and sometimes it gets lost in the "You could make this happen, why don't you?!" Your kids have to be confident enough to know that their failures aren't a reflection on their worth, but not so confident that they push the failure outside and into a place where they can deny an ability to change it.

Once it 'clicks' the world changes, before it clicks you're adrift in the white water rapids of life. Once you 'get it' you realize you don't have to stop the river you just have to exert the necessary force to navigate around the hazards, before that all you can think is that "nothing can stop this river, its going to kill me!"

I haven't a freakin' clue how to teach that.

I'm still single, and not kids.

Will it work if kids are given some lesson by sending through hard experience?

Lets say I tell the kid I will give him a buck extra for a buck he saves. How would the kid go about it?

I've always tried to give my kids as many different experiences as I can, when they were young I tried to set things up so that we could fail together at things, and then work through them. It was important that they learn that failure is a way to learn how to not fail. Ignorance is just a signal that there is something else to learn. Pain is nature's way of saying "Hey, reconsider carefully what you are doing or just did."

But every kid is different, so the only advice I can really give is this; Understand that your kids are learning all the time, be mindful and deliberate in your interactions.

Agreed. I have an eleven year old daughter, and I'm constantly quoting the movie version of Alfred Pennyworth to her, in the perennial hope that some day it will just click.

"And why do we fall Master Bruce?" "So we can learn to pick ourselves up."

I like to think that I've done well, letting her get into programs that she finds worthwhile, hoping that she'll apply herself in a way I never did at her age. It's painful watching children fall in and out of like with things when they realize how much work is involved, but having given her exposure to enough things, I've found that when she can grasp onto the kernel of something she truly enjoys, it's a lot easier for her to overlook the effort involved.

It doesn't fix the fact that some things aren't worth trying for (especially eating her Spinach, though that one's obviously not crucial), but then you have to overlook that y'know, she's eleven, and if I'm honest with myself, she's a million times better at applying herself than I ever was at her age.

The only thing I've found that works is when there are crises, we try to collectively break down the problem into its smallest component parts, and deal with them in very small chunks. Another very useful tool has been the "Destination Imagination" program -- I don't know how old your kids are, or whether the program is available in your school district, but it is, specifically, an unstructured lesson in getting kids to learn creative problem solving through small, focused problems that they are challenged to solve (like how to most efficiently roll golf balls into a bucket on the other side of the room using a broom, two chairs, a pack of bendy straws, etc.)

Having been a judge for DI, I can assure you that the children came up with a variety of solutions I never would have fathomed, to varying (but often impressive) degrees of success.

You think about them: "How weak." They think about you: "How lucky." You're both somewhere between half correct and entirely correct.

> Quit blaming the economy.

> With enough determination and will, you will find a way. Or you will make one.

You seem awfully certain of that. I can't help but wonder if this view derives primarily from confirmation bias or if it represents an accurate appraisal of the market. I think your conclusion holds with regard to the tech sector (most of us probably do) but I'm much less convinced that it generalizes. There's no cosmic entity guaranteeing that "a way" is present, only the economy. It's pointless to argue over the particular combination of self-reliant traits and opportunity that leads to success, but ignoring the correlation between the economy, opportunity, and success, is obnoxious and leads to short-sighted and self-serving policy positions.

> it has taken talent, drive, hard work, and sacrifice to capitalize on the opportunity presented to me.

See, here's the problem: there's a positive feedback loop between opportunity and success and down at the "no success" (poor) end of the spectrum the availability of opportunity is strongly determined by the economy. Talent takes time and resources to develop, drive takes resources to exploit, and hard work has no inherent value. You can't capitalize on something you you don't have. For the poor, acquiring resources means having a job, and it's possible for the conditions around that to be shitty enough to inhibit progress along self-determined directions even for the most driven of individuals. Nobody would argue that Chinese wage-slaves or starving African children are simply failing to capitalize on readily available opportunities. For less extreme examples of opportunity deprivation, less extreme conclusions still hold.

Just because the tech sector is in a fairly rosy position right now doesn't mean we should bury our heads in the sand and pretend like our victories are due to "superiority of drive" or "understanding of value". We should fight to increase the amount of opportunity available to society's poorest members. Sometimes this means offering resources necessary for "bootstrapping". Other times it means chopping down barriers to entry by punishing anti-competitive and monopolistic behavior. I don't believe our society does nearly enough of either.

I know that your post wasn't advocating a political position and was instead observing that a certain attitude is best for self-development. HOWEVER, I see way too many people who get drunk on the combination of this attitude with confirmation bias and then proceed to take the short-sighted and self-serving policy positions I mentioned earlier. End rant.

I apologize in advance, but I mean every word.

What kind of entitled bullshit is this?

> Quit blaming the economy.

The simple truth is that it's difficult to get money in this economy without either an established job, and established home, or a reserve of cash from which to build something. Just because the tech sector is doing well doesn't mean that all sectors are doing well.

> Quit waiting to be hired.

What do you suggest? He build a company from the public library, while living out of a homeless shelter and eating in soup kitchens?

> Bring the locus of control inside. Put in on you.

I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like something you'd hear at a bad self-help seminar.

> Go to the public library and start learning.

The man in this story was trying to get a degree (granted, humanities isn't one of the more employable degrees). He couldn't afford it; a public library is a poor substitute to a school.

> Make yourself valuable.

With what? He is lacking in resources from which to build his future.

> I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work. Why can't they?

What makes you think they are not? Would you have been able to make it if you had been dropped from college halfway through your bachelors degree with no money? Would you have been able to get VC funding without the contacts you made in college, or even a home address?

Why do you think you're smarter than he is, and not just luckier?

i could not have said it better myself. even if he is smarter and not just luckier, so what? the fact of the matter is, in sheer production terms it's becoming increasingly unnecessary for everyone to have a job; it's just that the "working and 'making your own way' is the only right/moral/ethical/deserving way to live" mentality is so deeply ingrained in people that they are unwilling to face up to the fact.

I am in this exact age group, and my circumstances are almost similar. I got lucky, my family is very close knit so I'm able to live with my mother, and up to 3 relatives have given me opportunities to move in if my mother couldn't handle me playing parasite.

I made the dumb mistake of going to a small private college for CS. There were only 2 professors in the department and at most around 8 seniors, so we had an insanely good professor to student ratio. Problem is, the career center had no connections in the tech industry and as a result I have been trying to solo my way into a software job having graduated in 3 years with my bachelors with a 3.3 gpa and no internships since the year I was planning to have one in the summer, I found out I could graduate early so I took the chance.

Then I found out almost every intern opportunity requires an active .edu email or some other validation to show you are an active student. So I'm in the awkward position where I'm working on FOSS projects whenever I can, while playing homemaker for my mother to "earn my keep", and trying to get a leg in.

But the real getter is that I am not some rock star coder. I'm not really good at it, at all. I don't have great recall of the myriad of algorithms (I know what A* is, but would have to Google a proper implementation). Same with with a spline or a rope. If I write software, I usually end up spending a few hours on ~300 lines just debugging it into a working state with a standard library reference open the whole time. I understand the languages I use - I can write regexes, I know locks, etc, but I usually just hit some gap in my knowledge snag that gets me caught up for a while. For example, I was trying to use Python subprocess to do some calls into nvidia-settings and various other fan controllers(I was writing a script to intelligently control my machines fans since the default Linux fan controls kind of suck). Took me 3 hours to figure out that the best way to get standard out was to use subprocess.check_output because temp files as pipes didn't work (at least for me).

So all my interviews so far have basically gone the same way - I don't produce perfect code from memory, and as a result I don't get consideration (there are more reasons than that, but I get the impression), especially without any past employment experience and only 2 personal projects (which are really just scripts) across github and gitorious. I also have an awful personality most people can't relate to - I'm an introverted cynic. Even if I can try to fake behavior around others I always crack and act like myself again at some point. I have a really hard time making small talk and being chummy, for example.

So I can relate to the large portion of the population that isn't an Elon Musk super-genius entrepreneur or some John Carmack coding god whose every line of code reads like prose that five hundred years from now professors will read off to CS students like Shakespeare. I'm not even particularly average, because I have very little concrete experience - I just have a gigabyte of source files for homework and projects from school, a few commits to various FOSS projects that changed a line or two. I'm trying to make something I can show off but I lack the imagination to come up with something novel that I can realistically build by myself in a month or two (since I'm always worried I might end up just like the kids in this article, out on the street).

Sorry for the rant, I just feel like the guy two posts up is kind of lucky to be talented.

I'm in the same boat. 2 yr degree and 3 yrs experience (one employer). Reading through your comment I imagine that many people are in this boat. The part that is most frustrating around HN is it seems like everyone has ideas and is a rock star and many successes and jobs are falling from the sky.

It can be discouraging when you have none of that. Most discouraging is when people say things like "Just move here and you'll have jobs flung at you daily!" Relocating isn't something I can do on a whim.

I know that given the chance I can excel but no employers want to give it. It seems almost like a fix when the same positions are left open week after week but you've already been turned down (with and/or without an interview).

For me ideas are hard to come by so what I've been doing is finding things that annoy me as I do them. Can I do anything about that? Most of the time I can't but recently I've stumbled onto a couple ideas that I can.

So this post is slightly relevant: I believe many people, including some of the ones that seem to have it all figured out, are just like us. Continuing to learn and having to research to get things to work; not machines.

Edit: nobody here has said this but many times it's the tone I read it in.

3 years experince sounds like a lot from this side of the fence. Every rejection letter mentions the lack of any industry experience.

> It seems almost like a fix when the same positions are left open week after week but you've already been turned down (with and/or without an interview).

I have gotten the impression after about a hundred cover letters that a lot of these open positions are not meant to be filled by candidates fit for them, but they exist as HR's always available gap for the rock star with 10 years experience in every language to come and apply for so they can get a third the salary they can get elsewhere. Like they just leave positions open in case a genius feels dumb enough to take it.

> For me ideas are hard to come by so what I've been doing is finding things that annoy me as I do them. Can I do anything about that? Most of the time I can't but recently I've stumbled onto a couple ideas that I can.

I mentioned in another post but I do the same. Currently am implementing desktop keybinds in Firefox Mobile if you have a hardware keyboard connected, since I use my tablet + keyboard a lot and having no ctrl-t, ctrl-w, etc is annoying. Started today on that project :)

I agree 3 years is more than many. A pitfall is it was with a small company so everything I learned (I learned a lot on the job) was the way they ran things and going from what the more experienced programmers said a lot of that was not how things ran elsewhere.

Even with 3 years though it seems that companies now want 5+ or more (it always seems out of reach).

Good luck with your project! What you described is completely foreign to me and I would feel much more lost than you I'm sure (more of a web but not mobile yet guy).

I wouldn't worry too much about web vs mobile. Give it 5 years and mobile browsers (on Android at least, the other two platforms are in lockdown) will be beefy enough to run webgl + html5 applications so I imagine a lot of people will start switching from apps to bookmarks of their favorite games.

Especially if internet service (and in particular the wireless) in the US gets less shitty.

"It seems almost like a fix when the same positions are left open week after week but you've already been turned down (with and/or without an interview)."

I've heard that some companies even post fake job offerings because it makes them look good economically (look, we are growing and can't hire fast enough).

What about going to networking events and user groups and reaching out there?

I've heard that a lot of it has to do with "We have to advertise the position but someone on the inside is moving up." or something like that.

I've been meaning to look into meetups but haven't had much success in finding anything in my area. I did find a Ruby one recently that I could go to but I know nothing about it. Where I live it doesn't seem there are many (if any) for developers. Starting my own is just my idea of a worst nightmare.

When I get done with the projects I've picked up lately I will look into it some more as a lot of times it isn't about how well you could do the job but who you know that can get you the job.

Why even bother with internship? I think this kind of system where you have to work for free just sucks...

Also it sounds to me as if you are actually a pretty good programmer. Not many people would be able to stand debugging their code for hours. And frankly, I think it is normal that it takes this long to get a complex algorithm running. That is why in most programmer jobs, you don't implement any fancy algorithms at all. You use libraries for that, and only do primitive CRUD operations using some framework.

Personally I would have to Google A* again, too, and I have never heard of "rope". Spline only rings a bell, I think it is used in graphics programming, but I wouldn't know what algorithm is behind it.

Reading further, I think you are also picking tasks that are too hard, like hacking around with NVidia device drivers? Why not experiment with a nicer and cleaner environment like HTML5? I must admit your choosing NVidia device drivers would seem a bit like a red flag to me, like a failure of judgement - why would you pick something horrible like that. Which is of course a bit insane, because we need mad hackers to drive forward technology. I am just saying...

But I think you underestimate your coding skill by a wide, wide stretch. Most people couldn't even begin to hack on NVidia device drivers. (Or maybe not device drivers - not sure what you were trying to do, but it sounds like low level stuff).

Wondering what you would charge for implementing a small project?

`nvidia-settings` is a commandline utility to control graphic card configuration. It's used to set things like SyncToVBlank, FSAA level, Vibrance, multihead positioning, and even GPU and Fan speed, since you can also query temperature.

Hacking the original nvidia drivers is pretty much impossible, they are closed source after all :)

One of the first things I've implmeented when I learned programming was mapping ACPI events of multimedia buttons to various calls to XMMS. Having something physical to relate to while coding is a big help for me, and makes a lot of sense. I assume that's one of the reasons a lot of people get arduino, rPi, beagleboard, etc... If it moves or interacts with the environment, it's easier to wrap your head around it, and more rewarding when you get it to behave as you want it to.

> Hacking the original nvidia drivers is pretty much impossible, they are closed source after all :)

You don't just open binaries in hex readers and see the program running before you like Neo in the Matrix? :P

> But I think you underestimate your coding skill by a wide, wide stretch. Most people couldn't even begin to hack on NVidia device drivers. (Or maybe not device drivers - not sure what you were trying to do, but it sounds like low level stuff).

It isn't hacking device drivers, its just using the binds to control the fans and monitor temperatures on gpus from nvidia-settings. It is the nvidia frontend configurator for the proprietary driver. That is why I brought it up, it really is just these two lines:

nvidia-settings -q gpucoretemp nvidia-settings -a [gpu:0]/GPUFanControlState=1 -a [fan:0]/GPUCurrentFanSpeed={}

But they weren't even the problem, I'm talking about a python standard library implementation of what is effectively execVP in Python. I tried a half dozen ways to get standard out from that thing. Makes me feel dumb.

> Why not experiment with a nicer and cleaner environment like HTML5?

I struggle a lot with CSS for one. I can't remember all the different modifiers on tags, I don't remember hex colors, and I keep messing up ids, selectors, and classes syntax when I try it. I'd get to know Bootstrap if push came to shove on that front. I'm pretty fine with html, understand the syntax enough that the Mozilla Developer Pages + a lot of Google lets me structure a web page well enough. I've done some Django to try to build up my resume, but never built anything real serious on it besides tutorials mainly due to that lack of imagination for the "what novel thing can I make that is really useful?" problem. Worst of all is the most I've done in Javascript was the Code Academy track and the Jquery track. So I can read JSON and do the most basic JS stuff, but my interactions in a web app barely go beyond GetElementByID.

> Wondering what you would charge for implementing a small project?

I have no idea. I currently make some side cash just playing tech support in my town. I have never even tried contract work, mainly on the basis I have no portfolio of real serious projects besides school ones. I've only been out of school for a few months, and usually spent my summers taking classes to graduate early (I did try applying for Summer of Code my Sophomore year, but I can't blame my applicantee for thinking rewriting a garbage collector in a new language might be a little much for someone who had less than 6 months experience with C).

One problem is that my tools experience is practically non-existent. I know and have read lots of books, read some code samples and projects, read a lot of dev blogs, on a lot of languages - mainly because I like all the different paradigms. So I can look at C, C++, D, Python, C#, Java, Javascript, Bash, Regexes, SQL, and even a smidgen of Perl and Haskell, and understand what is going on, write something easy. But since I haven't landed a job yet in any major discipline, and because I am mainly interested in the lower level stuff, I haven't really specialized enough to tackle contract work. I imagine I'm around a hundred or so development hours away in any one language from being able to truly sell myself as a candidate for such.

I'm currently implementing keyboard shortcuts in Firefox Mobile for hardware keyboards, if you want an example of what I'm doing. I use my TF700 a lot on the go, and with the keyboard dock it is annoying not to have a lot of the desktop shortcut functionality. I just started today though, but I found the implementation of keybinds from desktop Firefox, and once I find the skeleton keybinds they already have in mobile (they do have a few) I'll just port over the major ones that are missing, with a check to only use them when a physical keyboard is in use. But that might take a week to flesh out, commit, etc. And when you are an unemployed college graduate, a week is a lot, and that is small!

"I tried a half dozen ways to get standard out from that thing. Makes me feel dumb."

Sometimes real world programming is annoying like that. I still stand by my point: you seem to be able to autonomously dig through API documentations and look up algorithms on Google. That makes you a good programmer.

"I can't remember all the different modifiers on tags, I don't remember hex colors, and I keep messing up ids, selectors, and classes syntax when I try it."

All these things can be looked up, also I think it is good to keep CSS hacking to a minimum (don't apply too many tricks). Using something like Bootstrap should eliminate most of the need for that?

I think we will wake up in some time and realize that with CSS we have created on of the most unwieldy programming constructs ever. Once they'll introduce scripting (which is planned I think), it will be real hell. The problem is that everything has so many intractable side effects.

As for contracting: I know the feeling of not knowing anything well enough to sell yourself as a specialist. I think the solution could be to just take on a small project (like a web site) and not be too specific about the technology.

Firefox Mobile keyboard: see, most people wouldn't even know how to start doing that kind of thing.

I'll echo other people's sentiment in that it sounds like you actually probably are a very good programmer, but just a very harsh critic of yourself. That can be a good thing because it can vault you ahead of other people who have falsely inflated opinions of themselves, but it can also be a bad thing because it will prevent you from putting yourself out there.

On waiting to be hired: if market doesn't need my skills I can either wait for market to change... or I can work on my skills.

If you have no other options, learning in public library will get you much further than doing nothing and pitying yourself.

Parent post concludes with similar thought as yours: maybe he was just luckier at birth. Being better educated, feeling smarter and more driven might all be consequence of that.

> On waiting to be hired: if market doesn't need my skills I can either wait for market to change... or I can work on my skills.

True. However, it is impractical to learn many valuable skills from a library (particularly a busy library where regular access to a computer is unlikely). A library is really good at one thing in particular - teaching you to think. It's not so good at teaching you to weld, to be an EMT, a dental assistant, or even to be a secretary. All of things require either a employer willing to teach you as they pay you (which is sadly uncommon anymore), or some form of formal education (which costs money).

I'm not saying that you should give up and not work on your skills, I'm just pointing out that it's not that easy.

> Parent post concludes with similar thought as yours: maybe he was just luckier at birth. Being better educated, feeling smarter and more driven might all be consequence of that.

It probably doesn't hurt. It's also easy to look on hardships you have not personally endured and say "If you only did this..."

I grew up in a developing country in a small town, I had to drop out of high school since it was becoming unaffordable, with access to a small library where most of the books weren't even in English. I learned electronics from those books, but most of it covered PNP transistors which were rare instead of NPN transistors which I could easily strip from old broken radios. I learned about computers from those books, and taught myself programming, where the books were mostly about the Commodore 64 and I was learning BASIC while the world out there was using PCs with C and Pascal. I taught myself enough to assemble my first PC from broken parts, and developed enough skills to allow me to move to a city, then to move to the UK, and other countries.

Was I lucky, or better educated? I also have that question of why do people who live in developed first world countries with free high school education and large libraries (containing books in the best language for information, and computers) don't see themselves as extremely lucky already. Why, with the massive head start they have that I didn't have, don't they go and make something of themselves and their lives?

Because they don't have destitution motivating them to grab on by the skin of your teeth to any income whatsoever.

But, I want to note, that's a good thing. One of my college classmates is a severely messed-up person from being raised by abusively money-hungry and careerist upwardly-mobile parents from India. Having the fire of destitution in your belly is how you breed Goldman Sachs investment bankers, not good citizens of a developed society.

I agree that it can be a really bad thing. Just as your upbringing can influence you to become curious, willing to learn and self-motivated, it can also teach you the wrong kind of motivation. I have seen people come from a background where wealth was considered more important than anything, where opportunism and exploitation are acceptable means to a materialist goal, and saw these people turn out as criminals and con men.

> Having the fire of destitution in your belly is how you breed Goldman Sachs investment bankers, not good citizens of a developed society.

no way. Its greed and not destitution that breeds these investment bankers to exploit whatever they can to make money.

But that's the issue. People who grow up poor learn to be greedy.

It's the AVTizzle's that make things difficult for the young people in the article. He's right about one thing: it's not about money or jobs. It's about attitude.

The top poster has the right attitude.

But many people who are in a position to help others cannot because, while they may be able to manage many things, they cannot manage to adopt the right attitude. They will never be generous. They will never help the less fortunate.

I don't know how to define success in the general sense that it is often used in the context of careers (As the great New Orleans songwriter Allen Toussaint asked: What is Success?), but in my view generous people are successful. They have succeeded in adopting the right attitude.

Who are you to define the "right" attitude? And how do you know that AVTizzle isn't a generous person who doesn't help the less fortunate?

_“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” ― Aristotle_

Considering your place in the world, why you are more/less fortunate then others and your purpose in life is as natural as breathing for people. To be able to see validity in both sides of the coin signals to me that AVTizzle is likely an individual who is very generous in life. I don't know him/her personally but your assertions sound completely misplaced and simply projections of what you think someone is like onto AVTizzle.

The "right" attitude is an expression, a figure of speech. There is no universal definition. It is a way of stating an opinion of approval. But many people might agree on a similar definition based on a set of facts. Some might disagree. It's up to you, not me.

As for AVTizzle, you could be right. Then again you could be wrong. He wrote what he wrote. He chose a certain tone. I interpreted what he wrote. And I drew conclusions about his attitude.

As one would do with any comment, such as the top one.

You can either agree or disagree with my conclusions. As I can with yours.

Regardless of whether my mind is educated, I've followed Aristotle's idea. I've entertained the thoughts in your comment, however I do not accept them.

> I don't even know what this is supposed to mean. It sounds like something you'd hear at a bad self-help seminar.

The locus of control is a psychology term[0]: "referring to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them."

I've had many peers growing up who had an entirely different attitude from me regarding what was within an individual's control and what was not. Many people hide behind the circumstances that they have been dealt without acknowledging that it is possible to change them. They simply give up and choose to see no path forward.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control

But do you realize that this (subjective) locus of control is also, at least to a degree, part of your skill set. I have problems with statements like 'they give up and choose to see no path forward', because it seems to imply that somehow they're lazy, or dumb, or whatever. It's a step away from 'poor people are poor because they're lazy'.

I am very 'entrepreneurially-inclined', but I have no illusion that this is all my choice or doing. I just happened to have certain personality traits, and the right ones have been developed through my unconventional upbringing and schooling.

I understand what you are saying, but for some people pointing this out doesn't do much. They need to be taught and encouraged to understand that they have more control than they think.

Why do you think you're smarter than he is, and not just luckier?

Did you read his entire comment? Assuming he didn't edit it after your post (and it appears he didn't, since he starts off admitting that half of him feels that way,) he concludes that "maybe I was just luckier."

He admits being torn on the subject, but that doesn't change that many able-bodied, mentally sound people can do more than they're necessarily capable of realizing while in the throes of despair.

"Pick yourself up by your own bootstraps" may not be the sort of advice that someone is able to grasp while depressed, but on the off chance they are able to hear it, it's sound advice. There's little doubt that many people, if not most people in the world could be trying harder than they do. It's also easy to get carried away with being down on your luck.

I don't disagree with many of the points you've made, but they also don't necessarily discount the points of the poster you responded to either. Self-teaching from a library might be a poor substitute for a proper university, but it's still miles and away better than sitting on your ass waiting for your situation to change.

Anyway, I'll apologize as well, because your knee-jerk reaction spurred one of my own, and I don't mean to seem harsh, but I think the criticism to the parent was unnecessary, and I feel like perhaps you missed the part where he bares empathy.

Edit: I completely blew my cool there. I don't think my narrative-voice was yelling, but it was definitely speaking in harsher tones than I like to, and for that, I owe you another apology.

I think I'm generally fed up with how unnecessarily mean HN has become lately, and how knee-jerk everything seems to be. This is me adding on to that, and for that I am genuinely sorry. I would like to ask though (of myself as well), in the future, if you could take 10 seconds and re-read a post before blasting its author, it would make a huge difference over all.

Saying that "maybe I was just luckier" at the end is a pretty lame cop-out after spending the remaining 90% of the comment belittling the person for not being so lucky.

Personally, I see someone who is constantly applying to jobs and working as much as they can in the jobs they are able to get as having hoisted their bootstraps as high as they can reach.

Frankly, if you're looking for mean posts, look at those belittling people in dire straits before blasting those that have the temerity to rise to defend them.

I'm not AVTizzle, and can't speak for the tone and timbre of his post, but I feel like you took it completely out of context, as he appears to question his own feelings on the matter.

Regardless, I was acting out of frustration, and you're of course welcome to read it however you like, however wrong I might feel that it is.

AVTizzle's post was, to me, so ignorant it was bordering on bigotry. So it's not just falcolas who was offended by it.

I tried hard not to respond to it as the hateful screed I felt it was. I had to cut lots from my post before I felt comfortable sending it. But, really, come on. Anyone posting paragraphs of "they just don't work hard enough" and "I took control" in response to personal stories of homelessness is going to get posts from people with different life experiences saying just how wrong that post is.

Re-reading AVTizzle's post now I am still angered by it, but I don't think it's hateful. Just ignorant.

{META} I agree that HN can be needlessly harsh, and I welcome people who work to avoid that. Normal advice is to save a post to drafts and go back to it later for sending. That's not easy on HN - there isn't any save to drafts (unless you use a script or weird text editor interface) and there's pretty big time pressure on posting. The guidelines are a good start to describing acceptable behaviour. I'm not sure about a good way to remind people of them. And recently there have been many 'hot button' ('shallowly, but intensely, interesting') topics, so maybe some over-enthusiastic posting has carried over from those.

Bigoted against what?

Against the homeless. I'm not sure what your question is.

So nobody can criticize people who are homeless without being labeled a bigot? That doesn't seem productive.

"a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bigot)

You can criticize the poor and homeless, but too many completely reject the idea that their struggles can be something other than self-imposed. That rejection turns criticism into bigotry.

I didn't get that sense from the OP at all. In fact, they even mentioned that it may be related to luck after all. I'd be more careful about throwing the term "bigot" around in the future if I were you.

I'd be more careful about checking that the person you're replying to said the thing you're replying to. I was offering a definition and a criteria for distinguishing between criticism of the poor and bigotry against the poor. I haven't called anyone a bigot.

Sorry, my mistake. I'd be more careful about defending someone's poor use of the word "bigot".

I wasn't defending it.

Upon re-reading your post I take back what I said. I was really taking issue with the user who originally called the OP a bigot. Sorry bout that.

All is forgiven.

About luck: in the final sentence, they mention luck. But even that is just I'm lucky I'm not lazy, I'm lucky I was born with the gift of hard-work and determination, rather than I'm lucky I've avoided the external forces that send people homeless.

They write a long post about how people who are homeless "don't get it".

They say things like "go to the public library", and "quit blaming the economy".

They say things like "I make sacrifices, I toil, I struggle, but I make it work."

I've edited the OP a bit - maybe this explains the bits I concentrated on.

"I can't tell you honestly why [...] I would be so driven. Why [...] I would be curious enough to seek out the books, essays, podcasts, and blog posts that have shaped my entrepreneurial character.

Why was I drawn towards the heroes and role models that I was - business and technology leaders, instead of rock-stars or athletes - who inspired me towards a particular path?"

It feels to me like it's hateful, obnoxious, vile writing. (Other people disagree, and that's fine.) People who are homeless do not have entrepreneurs as role models? People who are homeless do not have intellectual curiosity? The economy has no affect upon a person's ability to gain employment? People who are homeless did not struggle hard to make things work before the rug was pulled?

I sincerely wish AVTizzle never has to experience homelessness. But perhaps they should temper their remarks about homeless people until s/he's met a few or been in that situation.

Well, it seems like a nuanced issue. There are both homeless people who are lazy and unlucky and rich people who are lazy but lucky. I think the OP has a general disdain for lazy people, regardless whether they are rich or homeless. I rather doubt he'd be praising some trust fund baby who's also lazy.

We're all walking the tightrope. Its an important part of our mental gymnastics that we regard those who fall as 'deserving it' or at least that its their own fault, that we'll avoid their error. Otherwise we'd all clutch and panic.

No, I think it's far more honest to just clutch and panic.

No, you can criticise people who are homeless.

What you can't do is use your lucky situation to cast all homeless people as feckless, lazy, stupid, inflexible people who deserve to be homeless because they just don't make enough effort.

And in all fairness, I think that the tone of your response was a hundred times less inflammatory than the post I responded to (and sadly, far less inflammatory than the post of mine you are responding to).

In an ideal world, more HNers would temper their reactions to start crying 'bullshit' and put more effort into treating each other like human beings. If more did exactly as you'd done, HN would be a far better place than it currently is.

AVTizzle's post may or may not meet that definition, as he hasn't responded to clarify his position, but he also isn't speaking directly about a particular person in general, rather, he's speaking about his own mindset about a group of people, and he's been blasted for it.

Thanks for the extra data point -- I'm a little amazed that we interpret the reference post so differently, but I thank you for clarifying.

Regarding the harshness, I didn't mean to imply that I felt this was a very recent phenomenon. And in fact, the HN of many years ago had perhaps far more in the way of pissing matches, but they were more academic in tone. I think it's that precedent that encourages the head-butting we see now, but either because people have 'settled in', or the community standards have lowered, there are less people who can say "No, I think that you're wrong -- here's why," without resorting to pejoratives and insults. I realize how potentially futile change is, but the idealist in me hopes it isn't.

What would you self-teach yourself at a library that would land you a job later? It might work for programming, but not for that much else? "Hi I'm your new physician, I learnt how to operate reading books in the library" :-)

Carpentry? Sewing?

Carpentry learned in a library! Wow, no wonder that people make ignorant "just pick yourself up by your bootstraps"-type comments. Complete and utter disconnection from reality.

Tell us, what are the things you could learn at a library that could translate into earning income?

I don't recall saying there was anything that you could learn in a library that would translate into earning income. Though if I were in a situation where that was my only option, I'd personally pick web programming. That probably has the lowest barrier to entry of anything you could actually learn by just reading a book.

Is sewing still a viable source of income? There are a few shops where I live, but they all seem to be run by old people with immigrant background (no offense, it just might indicate that they are willing to work for little money).

Carpentry takes years to learn the official way where I live. And you need tools.

Would you hire a carpenter who had 0 experience but had read a lot of books at the library when you could alternatively hire a carpenter with actual experience?

Could pickup some more standard IT skills which would help you doing admin type work?

Since you asked, there are a variety of jobs that fit the criteria of not requiring a college degree and that are learnable from books, practice and practical experience alone.

Sales, Software Development, Blogger, Author, Administrative Assistant, Fire fighter, Telecom engineer, (think Comcast/Verizon installers) Appliance Repair, Personal Trainer, Dietary Advisor, etc.

None of these may be a person's 'ideal' job, but the majority of them pay well and can be gotten with learnable education, practice, or a good interview.

Blogger, author, and administrative assistant do not pay well in the vast majority of cases and cannot be gotten easily -- decently-paid positions in those fields are very competitive.

Sales is usually commission-based.

Fire-fighter requires physical fitness. Appliance repair requires appliances. Personal trainer and dietary advisor... are those even real jobs outside the tiny enclaves of the very rich?

They are. Personal trainers typically work at gyms and are 'for hire'. Dietary advisors are probably less common, but I was just looking for a few example fields for things you could learn from the library, for which I think that fits the bill.

You're not wrong that there are barriers to these jobs, but that's true of anything. As IT professionals, we're used to seeing "minimum 10 years practical experience + portfolio + FizzBuzz tests" as job requirements, but almost every job has some barrier to entry, whether it be related experience, references or what have you.

Construction jobs (in boom times) are more plentiful, but require physical fitness, tools and the ability to be handy. Pizza delivery generally requires a vehicle, insurance, a clean driving record, etc.

There is no magical place that people can go to become employed, but I tried to pick fields that had learnable skill sets or (in the case of the first few, definitely sales) jobs where one's pluck and enthusiasm could go a long way towards landing. I've worked with a LOT of salespeople over the years, and it's all personality-based at the entry levels, if you can convince the person to give you the job, you can get the job. It isn't until one tries to progress in sales that past performance even becomes that big a deal.

Wow. Not to get personal, but you're a douchebag.

No offense taken.

Sometimes I think like the first half of what you describe. Surely, if you really want something and have a decent head on your shoulders, you can obtain it.

The problem is, sometimes you just don't understand. I have no concept of hard work, having largely coasted through high school and even maybe even more so in college. Were I homeless, I wouldn't know where to begin "creating value".

Fortunately, I'm employed as a software developer now. I stopped coasting and take my job seriously. Were I driven, I bet I would be an employer (or self-employed) rather than an employee. But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money.

Just to push a point about the effect of luck:

> But then I also could make my savings work to avoid becoming homeless when not earning much money.

You've taken reasonable steps to avoid homelessness.

What happens if someone pushes a software bug out to your bank?

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...)

(http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northe...)

It's easy to think "I would cope if I had no access to my bank accounts for three weeks" but until you've faced it it's hard to understand how tough it can be.

And for some people the consequences were a few extra days in jail:

(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18589280)

How weak.

Of course, the weak are to be looked down upon!

May John Galt bless the boot of your heel as you crush those idiots who haven't figured out what DO they do that's valuable.

I'll be thinking of you next time I toss a Rails book at a homeless person and tell them to stop whining.

For anyone in the Rand camp (I know I was), realize that even if people wanted to become the future workhorses of the World, a good quarter of us are ill either physically or at various parts of our lives mentally. It is a bit unreasonable to demand that people not be human...

Tell me about your life. Supportive parents? Good school? College paid for? I can't imagine anyone other than a person who's definition of adversity includes "having to study really hard" making a post so sickeningly lacking in basic human empathy.

Honestly, I often think the same sort of way. Blaming the economy doesn't do anything useful, even if it is at fault. The thing you can control most is yourself, so often you whip that. It does seem really strange to me sometimes when I see people having trouble finding work, but they won't relocate or other things that are simply meaningless to me. They do often have less resources to make themselves valuable, though. I had a computer and lots of free time to program constantly my whole life. Someone working fastfood who likes to socialize and smoke in their free time would have to give a lot up, or not even be able to afford to spend time learning even if they wanted to. Most of them don't want to give up their going out at night, or watching TV or whatever anyway. Oh, well, everyone has their own values. You can try to explain to them that they have extra variables and knobs they can spin when they get desperate enough to want to change at least.

"With enough determination and will, you will find a way"

This line of thinking is very dangerous and patently false. You need to bone up on how much one's socioeconomic class affect your chances at doing anything. Besides which, your suggestion does nothing about addressing how to enable people to be productive, it just says that you try and be better than those around you, which even if that works, still leaves all the people you beat to suffer and become a drag on society as a whole. It also completely avoids answering the question of why this is even happening in the first place.

Let me ask you this, would you have the same suggestion to someone who is homeless in India? If you've been to India you'd see how ignorant your thinking is. Why do you people think that the US is some magical place where dreams and wishes come true if you just work hard enough? It's the bullshit the politicians feed us to make you all think we're all millionaires in waiting. This is why we're all going to hell in a hand basket. You need to start taking more responsibility for our fellow citizens. You want to live a place where it's just up to the individual to "make it", go to the developing world and see how much you like it. The reason it's better in the West is because we all share, or at least used to, a similar standard of living. This homelessness in the youth affects you whether you like it or not. You won't like it very much when your town is crawling with them and unemployment is double digits. I can tell you now that your shitty advice and self aggrandizing will be of no help.

"I can't tell you honestly why my life fell into place so that I would be so driven"

Your arrogance is breathtaking. Maybe if the street people start sucking Steve Job's cock the way you do they'll get a clue and start really sacrificing so they too can get ahead.

My best wish for you is that you fail miserably at everything you do so you'll get the chance to put your money where your mouth is, and work your way up to the top as you eat out of a garbage can and sleep under a bridge. When you do that, come back and I'll issue an apology.

Wow, why don't you eat shit? His entire post was lamenting the fact that he is ignorant, why do you have to berate him over it?

> But perhaps it was the greatest luck of all

It's a shame you buried this at the end of your post. It's also a shame that you don't appear to recognise that a life, any life, perhaps your life, can be destroyed by that same luck.

It takes surprisingly little to make a person homeless. Until someone's been in that situation they find it hard to understand why it's so hard.

It's not a given that there is always something valuable to do. And even if you start some venture, success is not a given either. I agree with not giving up, but what if you need money right now, to eat and get a roof above your head? Starting some venture that creates value might take a while, too, and require some capital which you don't have.

I think some people take AVTizzles comment or, as I see it, flow of thought too harshly. My interpretation of his comment is that he is not giving a statement or preaching about the true way (tm) of doing things Right.

I feel that he did a honest attempt to understand why it is so that at the same time there is capable young people sleeping on the streets and capable young people donating $500 million to charity? Why this world is like that? Some people seem to get angry when someone is trying to find out the reason why as if they'd have the answers. We all know that shooting the messenger does not help. Is is some kind of self-blame in works what drives people to a sort of resentment presented in some of the replies?

Thank you for understanding.

I'm with you on this. I dropped out of high school because it was becoming hard for my parents to support me, and there was certainly never going to be any money for university education. This is in a developing country, where English wasn't even my first language. Yet, I've always had this curiosity that made me want to learn, and want to better myself and my life. I've moved between countries and started from scratch a few times, having to make opportunities for myself. I think I've been lucky to not be stupid, but I'm also wondering if my upbringing didn't help a lot more than I thought. My mother took me to the library a lot as a kid, and my father was never good with money or appeared hard working or ambitious, but he was always knowledgeable or able to explain things very well and a rational manner. I was left to my own devices and guided to take responsibility for my own well being and figure things out for myself. Maybe that was it, I don't know.

You got the "luck" part right. The rest, the "other half" you spoke of first, is solid gold bullshit.

We can talk about hard work and smarts all you want. You can even bring up outliers—cases where people have pulled themselves up from hardship and succeeded anyway. But they are not statistically supported. The truth is that the better upbringing you've had, the more opportunities you have had to improve yourself and your abilities, and the larger support network you have, the more likely it is you will succeed.

It really is that simple. It is situational. Purge your mind of the bullshit, because it is incorrect flawed logic.

I see you've never heard the term overproduction before.

I'm 33 and remember when I was in high school, there was a trend growing in the grades below me to reward all students, no matter whether they achieved anything or not. "Participation awards" became the hot new thing. I honestly wonder if this has had an impact on that generation just after me.

Two months ago, Mr. Tano gave up an apartment in his native Dallas after losing his job. He sold his Toyota and sought opportunities in the Pacific Northwest.

He rented a room and set out with his résumé (expertise: fund-raising). But when his $2,000 in savings withered to nothing, "I ended up sleeping on the street for the first time in my life," he said. "I just kind of had to walk around and try to stay warm."

I'm very hesitant to critique someone who is making what he or she perceives as the best choice, especially as a mostly-anonymous commenter on the wild Internet, so I'll frame this as general advice that I think really needs to get out on the general Internet: Do a little research before making a move like this. Dallas is one of the lowest-cost large cities in the country. $2,000 would pay for three months of rent and utilities in several areas of the Metroplex. Denton is cheap, if you like public transit, even to Dallas or Fort Worth, and being in a college town; virtually anywhere in the Mid-Cities is also cheap but lacks transit. And, as the news will tell you, jobs are booming down there. Seattle, on the other hand, is one of the most expensive places to live outside of California or New York. $2k will last a month or two, tops, even down in Rainier Beach or Othello. Yes, Seattle is a virtual dream land of fairly nice people, decent weather (it doesn't rain _that_ much), and a different brand of politics, but at least someone in this situation can still eat in Dallas. Young wanderer, if you're ever in this boat and still feel the yearning to move, try Austin.

(I moved from Dallas to Seattle with a very good paying job and relocation benefits. My wallet still hurts every month. I can't imagine what it would be like for someone in these straits to do the same.)

This. In high school I was forced to take AP Human Geography (I was meeting a requirement) and I was genuinely shocked to discover just how much geography mattered.

Cost of living, cost of health care, job availability, industrial economics, EVERYTHING is a function of geography. Not in a subtle way, either: economic metrics that I thought would vary merely by 5% or 10% often varied by factors of 2 or 3 (health care) or 10 (for industry). If you are willing to optimize the geography function but haven't computed the value of doing so, you're missing out big time.

Perhaps Americans can take some cues from more collectivist, family oriented cultures now. In my culture, sleeping on the street when your sister has her own place and a couch would be unheard of. I don't care how imposing it would be or how small my own home is, I wouldn't let my brother sleep on the streets. And what about parents? Uncles?

I do respect the struggle and pull yourself up mentality, but that's a lot easier to do when you have an address, a safe place to sleep and a shower. We have to face the reality that there are economic factors at play here, and it's not always someone's own fault if they are down on their luck in finding work.

yeah, that kind of shocked me too. no matter how poor i was, if i had a roof over my head and one of my relatives did not, i'd find a way for them to stay with me.

Even if they were a convicted pedophile and you had small children in the house? That was a situation a friend of mine faced recently. Oddly enough, it was similar to a situation another friend's family faced 20 years ago (minus the conviction).

that's definitely a hard situation to be in, but it's an outlier.

Most people in this country agree with you and probably even have somebody to lean on in a situation like this however most does not mean everyone. The person in the article probably did not want to get into the real reason which is why his explanation seems strange. I feel really bad for this person and hope he at least finds a way off the streets.

One of the NYTimes commenters made a good counterpoint to this: just because you have family with a home does not mean moving in with them is a viable option -- said family may be drug addicts, violent, mentally ill, abusive, or manipulative.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/19/us/since-recession-more-yo...

As someone with an older sibling who meets 4 of the 5 aforementioned criteria I can confirm that no it is not always that easy. Giving him a place on my floor wouldn't really do anything to improve his circumstances or outcome. What makes me the saddest is the realization that more than likely I will end up burying him in less than 5 to 10 years time. That sounds like a rather callous thing to say, but after watching my parents spend upwards of $100k on treatment program after treatment program it seems like there isn't any other choice but let him figure it out on his own. He's pissed away every opportunity he's had his entire life and it's time for him to take ownership of his own life. Not expect someone to always come running with an open checkbook.

I think that commenter meant that the family members with the home were the ones who had those problems (I've edited my comment to be clearer) -- but you raise a good point: sheltering a homeless family member with such problems wouldn't necessarily help them, and it may be significantly detrimental to your own situation.

The vast majority of people living on the streets have terrible mental illnesses and/or chemical dependencies. Please don't confuse storytime with data.

Chiming in here, I'd never let my brother or any family member or friend sleep on the street or in a shelter. I think there are so many people in the US who agree with you.

Part of it true, there is a broken culture here where the wrong things are valued. But there are islands of virtue we cling to.

There are a lot of very entitled comments to this post. I have a feeling that many of those commenters have never experience true hardship. It's easy for such a person to overlook the myriad of advantages they have and have no conception of the difficulties faced by people without them.

Before making the typical ignorant "you have the power to change your life" or "stop being lazy" comment ask yourself how much do you really know about what the bottom 10% of society life is like. This question itself has issues of course, one of which is that many people do not know how little they know. Spend some time ding a little research online. Several interesting stories came out during the run up to last US election. Typically of conservatives whose idealogical world view proved inadequate when they ran into real people with real problems.

"Duane Taylor was studying the humanities in community college and living in his own place when he lost his job in a round of layoffs"

Read - this guy was not only studying something with a very questionable market value, but paying through the nose and going in debt for that, when the actual objective truth reminded everyone that indeed was the truth and that there was no way around it.

I'm sad for the suffering he incurred, but it was logical and likely.

My initial reaction was similar, but, upon further reading, it appears that his only family, his mother, was in similarly dire straits, and thus the option of commuting from home to save money was not available.

While humanities majors are on the lower end of salary scales, there are plenty of assumptions that you made there. For one, "paying through the nose" is unlikely -- one term at Seattle area community college is about $1,300.

A tenth of that pays for a full year in the FWI, and leaves enough for ~ 3 month of housing. And there are other countries in the world - you don't have to study in the same place.

So I repeat myself - paying through the nose. Unless these things he did want to learn were so secret there was no public course online and no information on the internet, I fail to understand what kind of RoI this education would make during an education bubble.

I'm sorry he wasn't in a position to do something stupid (and something many people also did while managing to escape the consequences of their acts) but it was totally predictable.

I think you're being a bit harsh. He's partially to blame, but everybody makes mistakes. I think there's a slight lag in what people educate themselves in. For the longest time, only a minority went to college. When few go to college, having a degree at all meant you could get a job, so there was this culture of "study what you're passionate about, it'll be alright". This is unfortunately not true anymore, but this is what the older generations are telling us young people, because they haven't realized that things have changed. Today, you have to be able to make a life determining decision right out of high-school, with limited and outdated information and years of the older generations giving you an incorrect view. Soon we'll probably get an over correction with nobody going into humanities and loads of people going into engineering and computer science.

What's really needed is mandatory statistics for every degree and school on the form "1 year after graduation 70% of graduates was able to find jobs, 40% related to their degree, 30% with salaries of $50k+, do you still want to apply?". That's what's needed to even remotely be able to make a rational choice. If you're great at humanities and you love it, it might be worth the chance, but for us average people, we're better off with something that gives us a better chance of success.

No, I would say you have to super dumb if you 'chose' to study something that doesn't have much value or doesn't pay well. Its your life and you have to make smart decisions. Its not a game, where you can just shrug it off as a mistake, blame the government and then expect something miraculous to happen.

Looking back, I can tell you about my own experiences here in India. When I opted to study engineering and before that science for my pre-university college, there were a lot of friends of mine who wanted to study history or commerce because it was 'easy'. Really, you have whole life to live on that and you take a wrong decision just because you want it easy for the next 4 years?

Now after 4-5 years when we were all looking for jobs, the very same people who consciously studied history and commerce complained that either had no jobs or jobs that payed very poorly. Most of them either ended either being clerks(where their jobs are constantly threatened by automation) or working at call enters. And again you see the same government blaming. How can the government or people around you help if you make wrong decisions all over the years?

And not surprisingly it turns out most of such people are generally the kind of guys who don't very hard and are always looking for short cuts. One fine day you suddenly wake up and realize its not that easy after all.

Hah, it is the same here in the USA. The people who studied the easy stuff don't have jobs, and if they do they are low-paid and don't offer much security. The sciences don't even pay that well, although they can if you try hard and schmooze.

100% of the people that I know who studied CS or Engineering (Chemical/Mechanical) _have jobs_ that are well paid, have nice benefits, and are able to live in nice areas of the country and if they want to raise a family. The liberal arts kids, not so much. There is no way of saying it nicely, but for the next 10 years of their lives, they're fucked.

It is IMO hugely unethical for the educational system to shove 'you can be whatever you want to be' down everyone's throats during HS, then expect the Liberal arts to actually be able to find a job, earn enough money to pay off student loans, save $ for a house down payment, pay for health/car/etc insurance, and be able to save for retirement. I am never reproducing (yay childfree), but I shudder to think how my peers with children are managing to pay for for childcare. Oh, and don't forget those who do did not finish college, yet still have $20k of loans collecting interest.

Would you write a check for $150k to a 18 year old kid and let them go party in NYC/LA/Paris for 4 years? Replace Paris with college and that's what college is like, unless you study engineering or maybe medicine.

The old joke is that because of the downturn in the airline industry, the largest employer of aeronautical engineers is McDonalds. These are 4 year college degree graduates, not aviation mechanics, which go to trade school.

Just like being in the group "college educated" is not a free ticket to a successful career, being in the group "engineer" is not a free ticket to a successful career.

Is a college educated person in a better position to have a successful career? Of course. Is an engineer in a better position to have a successful career? Of course.

The only difference between an engineer in the wrong discipline and a college graduate with the wrong degree is magnitude.

If only those disciplines would not be shifting. Being in my mid 40s now I have seen shifts to and from mechanical/electrical engineering, physics, biology, chemistry, computer science, business or law degrees and many more.

Actually when I graduated from high school the safest and easiest path to employment that was recommended to us was to study a humanity and become a teacher (teachers here - Central Europe - are much better paid than in the US) or get a business degree and work for a bank or insurance company. Both of these paths seem ridiculously risky now (or at least last time I checked).

As a conclusion I would argue that there is no such thing as a "free ticket to a successful career". Chances are high that at one point or another there will be a surplus of people in everyones profession and almost everyone will experience unemployment or need to shift careers.

That would be a rather poor joke, though, since it's probably not true, and the demand for them (as engineers) was still strong when I left the field. (I left because I like programming more, not because I was worried about my job.)

Tell that to the pile of people with masters and phDs in pharma that have lost their jobs in the last 5-10 years.

10x harder than CS, less job security.

Education and the surrounding social structure is basically a bioreactor for ideas. I know this is HN, but the blatant disregard for how the humanities effect the enjoyability of your life is vulgar.

Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies? Why should we look down at those whose studies may inspire the simstim visions of our great-grand-children?

Society is creating enough wealth to ensure the pursuit of knowledge for those who wish to undertake it. And pursuit of knowledge is a more driving force for economic growth than any subsidy, any tariff.

"The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed."

Perhaps they could profess that devotion without taking out student loans and drowning in debt? Like, you know, by checking out books on historical studies at their local libraries, and enjoying them every evening?

Perhaps it would be best if it were unnecessary to go into crippling debt to gain a higher education?

>>I know this is HN, but the blatant disregard for how the humanities effect the enjoyability of your life is vulgar.

I am not disregarding humanities or history. But it makes more sense to read them when you have no other better work to do. Sorry for putting it bluntly, but you should have better work to do than studying philosophy and arcane trivia about the past.

>>Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies?

Because they don't pay well. And sometimes don't pay at all. Nobody is going to pay you for just knowing 1000 things that happened some hundreds of years back. Such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently.

>>Society is creating enough wealth to ensure the pursuit of knowledge for those who wish to undertake it. And pursuit of knowledge is a more driving force for economic growth than any subsidy, any tariff.

Which knowledge, not all forms of knowledge are same. Are they?

And ironically, while you have a degree and express your opinions about education, your wording makes you sound like you are in high school. While I agree with the sentiment that there are other more in demand degrees, calling humanity studies 'arcane trivia about the past' or saying that 'such knowledge is not useful to solving any pressing problems that exist currently' reminds me of all those people for whom news are dumbed down to a 14yr old level because they don't understand any context anyway. To add more to the irony, AFAIK your country is quite overflowed with IT graduates who end up in call centers or other technological slave labor just like their buddies from commerce. So in the end, your enlightening gospel kind of invalidates itself.

Are you seriously suggesting the people continue to study things which don't pay them well or don't pay them at all?

And if that happens, they follow their passion and when they come out of college and don't find jobs who should they blame? How is the system's mistake that your passion is not in demand and doesn't pay well?

Look I'm not saying you should study philosophy at college. But at the same time you shouldn't look too surprised if with that degree you don't get a job that pays well.

I said none of those things and I won't explain what's already written in front of you (talk about understanding context). Just keep in mind that excess of labor force in a sector leads to decrease in wages and increasing demand in neglected markets. Between 'we demand jobs for philosophers' and 'everybody should just study IT' there are more balanced scenarios. Trends don't change in one year cycles - when you notice that something went wrong it's already too late and it takes long years to fill the gap, and only assuming a too agressive correction doesn't happen.

"I am not disregarding humanities or history. But it makes more sense to read them when you have no other better work to do."

How is this not disregarding? Just to put things a little bit into perspective. I have an advanced degree in physics and a minor degree in maths. The most part of my professional career have I spend in various IT related positions, running my own businesses for the last 15 years. I am making enough money to lead a comfortable life. But if basically the only even remotely relevant thing (by other measures than monetary, i.e. improving the lives of anybody else) I have ever done was build a website for a global NGO and a mobile app for a local opera house. If anything I have worked for companies whose success might quite likely have made that world a worse place.

Last year I accidentally ran into a girl I knew back in college. She was majoring in sociology. She is my age(40-50), still living in a shared apartment and currently working for close to minimum wage for a local non profit that helps fugitives and illegal immigrants to get legal support and generally help them in their daily struggles.

My point is: Yes I make more money, but I have an immense respect for people like her who sacrifice this for ideals and actually improve peoples live on a regular basis. And in this regard your attitude (like "but you should have better work to do than studying philosophy and arcane trivia about the past") is not only disregarding but insulting and quite frankly shortsighted and ignorant.

You really should read your Marx. We're in an overproduction crisis: the world's most pressing problem is its lack of problems to solve.

"Why should we not allow people to devote their life to historical studies?" (or any other thing that won't pay well)

Well, we should allow them, and in fact encourage them if a) it's their passion b) it's on THEIR dime, not mine - ie they are rich or very aware of the consequences.

No need to bankroll economically stupid negation that will result in their employment.

> Education and the surrounding social structure is basically a bioreactor for ideas.

In theory, yes. In reality, I sense is that this was destroyed in many places by the manic push to make everyone go to college. I went to an engineering college, and while I did meet brilliant people there, the "bio-reactor" was severely diluted by a large body of students who basically treated it like high school year 5-8.

Like Kamaal, I've met many students who chose "high school year 5-8" based on what is easy, commerce and humanities, so I wouldn't be surprised if many of these places were even more diluted.

I have no problem with people studying humanities and commerce, I even have little problem paying for it. I do have a problem with a candidate leaving with a humanities degree and them complaining that it's hard to get a job in her or her field. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that there is a limited demand for pure literature degrees. In a way engineers don't have to as much, people with "soft" degrees need to articulate much more clearly how they're going to add value in a job - and that's hard, and it's not my impression it's taught in these programs.

> For the longest time, only a minority went to college. When few go to college, having a degree at all meant you could get a job, so there was this culture of "study what you're passionate about, it'll be alright". This is unfortunately not true anymore, but this is what the older generations are telling us young people, because they haven't realized that things have changed.

So true. We're currently suffering badly a similar effect in Poland. My generation and current graduates were raised in the belief that you got to have a diploma to find yourself in the market. That led to a crisis of vocationale schools and an overflow of private colleges offering the wackiest fields to graduate in. Now we have waitresses and mcdonalds cashiers with degrees, and employees facing hiring problems because of unskilled labor. Of course all those "educated" youngsters are frustrated, they were told if they study they'll get a career other than salting fries. Only recently our education system started slowly recovering from this madness.

"Today, you have to be able to make a life determining decision right out of high-school, with limited and outdated information and years of the older generations giving you an incorrect view."

I remember being terrified in 11th grade - all my friends were doing college applications, and it all felt permanent. I remember crying in the counselor's office one day, and she didn't understand the pressure.

"I'm being told I have to choose 'a major' in a college, which is going to determine the rest of my life, and I can't even drive yet". "Oh, don't worry, you can always change it later!" (She was nicer than that, but that was the gist).

You can change it later, it just takes a long time to realize it, at a huge financial cost. I chose wrong, but I was lucky that I realized it so soon, after only 6 months. It was a decision made out of laziness as much as anything. I realized that the one programming class I took was way more easy and fun than anything else. I should've gone into CS right away, but for some reason I thought I was way behind the "nerds" who would go to CS, the people who had been coding since they were 6. I thought that I would have no chance in that environment.

That said, not everybody wants to, or can become an engineer or scientist, and they shouldn't. If the choice for a person is between not going to college at all, and going for a humanities education, I vastly prefer they go for the education. I think people getting educated and pursuing their passions are a good thing for society as a whole, if we can afford it.

What I don't understand is, why weren't more people able to make the inference I did: "If a college education doesn't actually make you better at performing a job, then there's nothing to sustain the trend of employers from hiring you simply because you have one -- they could just quit doing it one day, and I'd be out in the cold. So I should take a major that is actually needed for certain jobs."

Or, to put it another way, "College doesn't actually make you a better worker for most majors, so hiring based on it is stupid -- that trend can't continue."

If I could see it long before applying for college, why couldn't others? Yet I was continually seeing many, many people around me taking majors with no clue as to how that would make them substantively employable.

>>Read - this guy was not only studying something with a very questionable market value

One thing that a person must almost remember before doing anything(apart from recreational and entertainment stuff) is to immediately question the 'worth' of what he/she is doing.

So it goes like this. A couple of days back my manager spots a architect during lunch and starts talking about how great the architect is. The conversation over the lunch table descends down to my manager just showering praise on the architect about how much the architect knows. It went on for like 20 minutes and then at the end I just asked him- 'So, what is all that worth?', and then there was like dead silence after that.

Most of the problems exists because people do not understand how much they know or how intelligent they are is irrelevant to people around them. If you are wondering why the cab driver who drives you back home, or the guy who sells candy in the subway is financially worth more than you. You still haven't figured the mere basic fundamentals of the demand-supply problem. You have to sell/do/provide some product/activity/service which people need. It can be painful for you to know while you can architect a complex system, a intern who just arrived can make more money by selling a simple game on the android market.

Add to this class problems. People have a difficult time digesting that a cab drivers kid can go get a engineering degree while a clerk's kid can't. You also have to be ready to do something small time, or things that don't attract respect or jobs that don't command much self respect.

And lastly. Please save money, that's important. Theory say you can earn endless money. But if you are from the middle class, face the hard fact now. There is only X amount of money you will ever earn. So learning how to get rid of debts, savings and investments are crucial for your financial well being. If you are in financial mess because you have badly managed money- You can blame nobody else.

Hindsight is 20/20. Besides, we don't know the whole story. His rationale might have been perfectly understandable.

Ask any STEM undergrad what they think about the job prospects of their humanities peers.

This isn't a something that is really up in the air until you go through it and see how it worked out. Employment statistics are easy to find and are practically shoved down your throat when applying to colleges. Jokes about art students and coffee shops are now so strongly a part of popular culture that we see them in television advertisements.

There is a very large portion of the population that seems to have pretty crystal clear forward-looking vision with these things, and that's not a matter of luck but rather awareness.

In some situations the decision will only clearly bad in hindsight. Perhaps people looking to be lawyers or teachers a few years ago got legitimately blindsided. I think these cases are the exceptions that prove the rule though.

Yeah, problem is, not everyone can be a STEM major. Comp Sci degrees would be worthless everyone who failed to understand integrals in Calc 2 could get one.

When somebody is employed and supporting themselves, it's pretty harsh to fault them for what they study in their free time. Plus, it's a community college. Studying the humanities is a good way to get practice and competent feedback on your writing, which has a crucial impact on how you're perceived professionally.

No one should be penalized for pursuing education.

In the US that's a broad term. People go to a university to "pursue education" by throwing a leather ball to a guy dressed in tight spandex pants.

People who know the best technique of tossing a leather ball to another guy are currently the most valued education professionals in university system: http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/

Would you say the same of an education that did not come from a western university? What if instead of studying the arts in a school in Kansas, it is my burning life desire to hitchhike around southeast asia for five years. Should I not be "penalized" (read: not be in demand) for making that decision?

This isn't a silly exaggerated hypothetical either. It is exactly what I would have done if I had not valued career prospects so highly nearing the end of highschool.

True. Still, I found independent reading from library books to be much more informative than the liberal arts electives I was forced to take (and pay for) as GEC reqs on the exact same subjects.

Penalized for pursuing education, no. Penalized for making extremely poor life choices? Probably. But it's not really so much a penalty as an easily predicted result that people are steadfastly intent on ignoring, because that way they get four years of fun instead of work.

No one should be homeless and we should take steps to fix the hideously large gaping holes in our social safety net, stop charging $80,000 to attend even a state school, etc. Until it happens though, I think it's good to encourage an attitude of fiscal responsibility which is currently desperately lacking in many of those in my age group. So many have no idea how to budget their money because they live at home with their parents and have never had to pay for any living expenses.

I was really glad to see this article, though--I'm one of those people who don't have any family they can move in with, and I've come desperately close to being unable to afford housing in the past. Stressful times.

I spent three years studying whatever at community college, fulltime, while figuring out what I wanted to do. That's one of the best things about community college - you don't pay through the nose, you can learn for 'cheap' while you figure out what you really want to do. Then you can choose a university and go from there.

If he was doing this studying in a community college, he was likely not paying through the nose - Community Colleges are a type of two-year institution in the States that are supported by local government, usually charge per course rather than per semester, and rarely cost more than $1000 a year.

The newspapers cherry-pick stories whose situations sound "rightful". There are plenty of unemployed accountants, lawyers, engineers, IT support workers and, yes, programmers.

I've recently arrived to NYC with Green Card (permanent residence program), I'm from Uzbekistan I've worked in my country as Web Designer, I've applied to more than 100 Web related jobs, in NY I but no result. since November 20th (my arrival date) I've done almost all jobs, moving helper, Dunkin' Donuts baker, Delivery helper at supermarket, Busboy at restaurant (all part time jobs). Nobody gonna hire me. I feel myself lost in the big NYC. I hope 'll find a job I want.

Welcome to NYC, and I hope you end up doing something you love and that pays you well for it.

I'm curious -- how are things here compared to back home? Are you earning more in your part-time jobs here than you did back home? I know it's only been a month, but I'm just curious about your perspective.

I ask because I've heard a lot of stories from a lot of immigrants and they cover a HUGE range. I've had some guys tell me that they're thrilled to be earning $7/hour, that they love living in a home with 10 other people, and that they're happier than they've ever been because compared to back home, they're earning 10x as much, living with heat, hot water, eat well every day (McDonalds is well for them), and are _still_ sending money home.

So it's a matter of perspective -- just curious to hear your story...

A link to your portfolio or some of your work on your profile would always help ;)

You'll get better results if you spend more time introducing yourself at tech meetups, and less time browsing monster.com A lot of those job sites are black holes as far as resumes are concerned. I don't know all get-togethers in NY, but meetup.com is a good place to start.

Puts a whole different light on the glamorization of couch-surfing and minimalist lifestyles.

What do couch surfing and being minimalist have to do with earning a living?

I wrote a blog post not too long ago about my experience moving to a city with no job or apartment. I detail what my "unfair advantages" were and what the emotional impact was like. I think my experience would most likely to apply to young people from middle to upper middle class backgrounds.

The most surprising part to me was how little I got done with my side projects, especially considering all the free time I had. You get into a funk and you just really don't want to do anything. Small wins make you really happy, but the rest of your free time is spent in this kind of depressed funk.

Here's the link if you care to read it:

http://dalethoughts.com/2012/11/what-its-like-to-move-to-a-c...

It was quite a shock the first time I saw a homeless person who was younger then me. Until then I had been able to rationalize them away as the responsibility of the previous generation, but no longer.

It is difficult to imagine the plight. Is there a way, some of us could join hands and create a fund to help the needy.Perhaps create a micro financing system,that can help some of them who could get a job and pay back or if they are entrepreneurial and they could attempt and succeed.

There are jobs outside the US,I have met youngsters from the UK and US who work here in India in the IT and Financial companies for reasons such as this. perhaps the qualified can temporarily get a reprieve until the economy becomes better, make sure there is a predictable job and earnings.

Some or many of us could join hands to explore how we could help and if there is a possibility act on it.

All these may be wild thoughts, but a lot of things are possible if we could try .Even a small up-liftment may be of significant help.

Let me know your thoughts. sankar@cloudshoring.in

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