How twentysomethings are coping with the recession. | Hacker News Reader

How twentysomethings are coping with the recession.

slate.com

39 pointsPoleris42 comments

Open articleView on HN

Classic Slate-reader cocoon types:

1) Works for a library/museum-centric non-profit (degree unknown)

2) Works for a political campaign, expensive degree from private university (BU)

3) Works for local government (degree unknown)

4) Left job with architecture firm due to move, current job unknown

5) No job, MA in English, can't afford to get desired PhD in Literature/Women's Studies (sob!)

So basically, not a single person (bar possibly #4) willing to get their hands dirty in the private-sector business world. Also, not a single male. What exactly are we supposed to take from this?

That if you want to get laid, it helps to major in liberal arts?

I did just fine as a mathematician... then again, I spent most of my free time hanging out with the artists, because they had better parties.

Not necessarily. Just start conversations with a low impedance to join. That's why a common greeting is "Nice day, isn't it", instead of, "I was debugging some comonads in Haskell the other day".

But comonads are so much more fun!

Post graduation of course, it does help to be making double what your peers are making.

I graduated about 5 years ago with $22,000 in debt. Its been paid off for the last 2.5 years (on a salary not too much different than an American liberal arts major). I hate the notion of owing people money.

Since then I've had 3 jobs, started a business, saved up a bit for retirement and for a rainy day, and built the business up to where it could be the day job if I needed it to be.

So I'm looking at my 27th birthday in a few weeks not exactly feeling the crushing weight of the great depression on my shoulders.

I suspect there are more than a few people like me in my generation. We don't talk to reporters because we understand that college-educated Americans should not snivel about how hard they have it.

This 25 year old is enjoying a new high paying job (that he absolutely loves) after leaving the military. After one month of employment we've eliminated half our credit card debt and will tackle the rest over the course of the next six months. We're currently shopping for our second vehicle and educating ourselves on the VA Home Loan process as we intend to buy a home at the end of the year.

22 here, grad school. Though, admittedly, I made that decision about 18 months ago.

Well this 21 year old is enjoying a long 'vacation'. I'm immigrating to Canada so I left working as an electrician in the UK and am currently using the free time as I wait for all the papers to go through to concentrate on my writing. I currently have no financial concerns even though I haven't done a days work in over half a year, because between 17 and 20 I made so much money doing electrics that I didn't have to worry about anything. With a guaranteed job offer here in Canada I'm actually looking forward to being able to work, not for the money but to give me something to occupy the day.

My 24 year old brother just recently quit his job and is currently riding out the crisis in the UK programming for some of the community projects he likes online.

I'm immigrating to Canada

Welcome! I hope all the paperwork goes smoothly and you get settled well.

Thank you. We've got a family friend in immigration, so he's helped a lot as the information given is really contradictory. It's not always clear with him either because he can't tell anyone how to get into the country easier, so he's kind of stuck just giving answers... but it's still better than the website.

We're hoping I don't need a police check in Canada as it can take up to 120 days, but another family friend can get them rushed and complete in 3 days. So I guess I'm kind of lucky my wife's family is so connected.

Which city are you moving to in Canada? I'm building an app for electricians and I'm always looking for feedback from people with domain experience (also if you hack that's a plus too). We're in Toronto and moving to Vancouver soon.

This 36 yr. old east coast entreprenuer is taking his wife, three kids and life savings to silicon valley to build a great technology company! All the core fundamentals of success hold true in this economic environment, if not more so. The only people that should "stay home" are those that seek the quick hit. If you want to truly build something great and long-lasting......I believe the American dream to be alive and well!!

What are you looking to achieve in SV that you can't here in NYC?

(Not to generally say which is a better city for startups, but just curious to your reasoning).

I agree with PG and MA and many others that a startup, especially a good one, has a much better shot in a startup hub. Both the SV infrastructure and mentality value those that build great technology. While it is true that there exist other pockets of this (NYC, Boston, Austin, etc). SV is not a pocket, it's the entirety of the community and that has massive value.

22 year old - working at a start up for a decent salary - and wrangling the last of my debt (<$5k).

I never attended college, so I was able to forgo college debt.

No plans to buy a house (yet) - but have plans to start a company in late 09' or 10'.

27 here, working at Google and loving it, saving close to 80% of my monthly take-home pay. Debt free, with investments relatively intact.

However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn 26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:

"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have done everything a "successful" person does, yet end up with none of the things I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might not be able to swing any of it.

"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."

It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside of school, not just inside the academic bubble.

Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class, the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook" and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous." The students were basically flabbergasted.

But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and stealing from them?

It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you.

Rather than outright lying, much of it is due to the generation gap. Parents and other elders are just suggesting what worked for them. Doing everything right by being a good student, good worker, and good citizen was almost a surefire way to a successful, stable life until "Generation X" started to come of age.

That's a much better way of putting it.

But will people my age see it that way? Well-intentioned or not, it's still wrong. All that many of my friends see is that they do exactly what their parents said to - in some cases, spending years of their life for it - and they're doing worse than people who ignored it all and happened to get lucky.

Strange, I can't think of a single friend of mine who lived their lives according to what their parents wanted. Not one.

This is a more banal explanation, but majoring in something more useful than history might have helped. My sister is about to graduate with a BA in history and she can't find a job either.

Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.

When I was looking at schools, the advice I got was "Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in - employers like liberal arts as much as technical fields because it shows that you know how to think. While if you get a degree in something specific like engineering, your job will probably end up outsourced to India."

Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this was bullshit and employers really do care about concrete skills. But had I not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)

"Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in"

I wonder who has a better chance of getting a job at Google: a history major from Stanford or a CS major from , say, CSU Chico?

That's an interesting point. I suspect it depends a lot upon their concrete programming skills as demonstrated in the interview. It's funny how my first reaction - even as someone who always says "Your degree doesn't define you, and talent will find jobs no matter where you went to school" - was to assume that the Stanford history major is much smarter than the CSU Chico CS major, and just happened to pick the wrong major. But that's not necessarily true: maybe the guy from Chico is a Zawinski-class programming genius that happened to grow up in a family with no money and no college expectations. The point of the interview is to tease out circumstances like that so talented people from bad situations can rise to the top anyway.

It's also interesting because I know some Amherst history majors that I could never imagine getting a job at Google. But I also know an Amherst Asian Languages & Civ major who does work at Google, albeit in a non-technical position. Yet I don't know anyone at Google from a CSU: my friends here are from Rice/Brown/Brown/Amherst/Stanford/Berkeley/ Stanford/UChic/Cornell/Berkeley/Berkeley/ CMU/Duke/UCSD.

My thinking is that the CSU grad won't even get an interview unless he or she knows someone at Google. Whereas the Stanford history grad will get an interview just on virtue of being a Stanford grad. However, I have no idea and wasn't trying to make a point - was genuinely curious about their filtering process.

I got into Google from Iowa State. But then, I was an employee referral because of someone I met interning at Microsoft. I don't think I would have gotten the Microsoft interview coming from Iowa State if I wasn't a girl. Microsoft hired four interns from Iowa State that year, all female.

I have a friend that works at Google Pittsburgh that was a CS major from the University of Pittsburgh. I think Google will interview people from state schools as like as they have a 3.75 GPA.

They both have poor chances, but I'd say the CS major has a better chance, unless the history major has taken enough CS classes to be able to be useful to Google.

Studying history gives you perspective. You don't need to major in it, but the heart of historical research consists of analyzing all the known evidence from a time/event and trying to logically argue a case for why things happened as they did, and/or finding the weaknesses in others' interpretations. It's not about memorizing dates.

The mainstream in computer science is incredibly ignorant of its own history, and burns a ton of energy reinventing the wheel every few years. (The old school Unix tools still work, for example, they're just fast as heck now because they were written to work on computes with about as much processing power as a bar of soap has these days.)

I'd go so far as to say unix command line tools work much better than the window-based alternatives. Or at least I use them more as time goes on, and use nautilus less.

Twenty-eight, working for a startup in SV, and building a product in my spare time. Debt-free, in spite of a row of some bad fiscal/personal disasters and paying for school. Putting about 60% of my take-home in the bank at the moment.

Looking at trying an experiment at the end of the year and 'going homeless' for three months after my lease expires. The worst case is I find out that it's hard and I don't like it, but it'll cut my monthly expenses down to nothing for a few months. Will look at buying a home in a few years, as I plan to turn into a traveling hacker for a year or two once my full-time gig is up.

I have zero sympathy for liberal arts majors who spent years in school, sans job, and now can't find a employment because they lack both marketable skills and the gumption to start a company.

This 25 year old is keeping his day job (server admin/help desk) with a friendly boss who doesn't mind him working after work. I'm doing business/computer consulting after 5pm and on the weekends and am currently involved in a few projects for websites and small business server infrastructure. I've got very little credit card debt (under 2k - mostly operating expenses) and even though I never finished college I still have about 8k in student loans but should have them paid off in a few years. I save about 30% and have recently had to apply some of that to take on some extra family related expenses as my folks have been hit a lot harder then I have.

I can't say I'm enjoying the economic climate and watching all layoffs (At my day job and with my friends and family) but Its motivated me to take some hobbies and work that normally took a lot of energy and figure out how to do more with them. I can now go from sales/brainstorming to invoicing a lot faster and easier then I could even just a few months ago. I think that will pay off in the long run.

Also, saving now, and putting into my 401k and roth/IRA's should help a lot when I'm older. I'm glad I can put money in markets now when they're low! (and I'm lucky I got confused and pulled out about 2 months before markets crashed! They weren't making any sense to me.)

Well, I'm in an interesting situation here.

24, married, no kids, 1 dog. We're both planning on quitting our jobs in the summer with no direct plans for seeking employment. Quite an interesting situation.

I've got my products released and am working on some bizdev leads that have a high probability to go through.

We have been looking for jobs in our new location; however, it's been our experience that it's a much higher probability of success to start a business than go kissing ass and submitting resumes.

So we're at a big inflection point. We're either going to be living with one set of parents (which we have discussed and are prepared for) or we won't have to worry about money for the next several years.

I've always thrived on volatility, and my wife and dog are just along for the ride.

23 year old here.

Girlfriend and I are moving to a different city (Montreal) in July. I leave my job in June but gave huge advanced notice.

Everyone around me keeps asking if I've found a job yet and they always cringe when I say "No." To be fair, I haven't sent out TOO many resumes but I'm starting to pick up the pace.

One side of me just wants to forget about senidng out the resumes and try my hand at freelance work, consulting, and whatever else I can think of to make money. Work from home and try something totally new and exciting. I have savings an the GF will be going to school so the government (loans for university) + part time job will keep her money in check.

It's definitely scary I'll say. Like the one comment said, you could have done everything right but in the current situation you may not get anything that you could have 5 years ago. I say forget about all that and just go full force into trying it out.

We twentsomethings are young and we can always bounce back a few times before we end up on the streets :)

Ah, yes... the recession. I keep hearing about it, but I'm just not feeling it.

I always wondered if I did the right thing by accepting my parents offer to pay for college if I stayed at the home school. (I started at a community college, and transfered to a local university.) Then, I looked at the fact that I was a commuter and never "had the college experience." Now, I am grateful for the complete lack of debt I have today.

Yea, but they have the debt. It's still in the family. Heck it's still in the community, and the city. The biggest problem I'm having now is dealing with people who are making money but can't afford to pay all their bills. It's usually because they have some debt left over from when they were making more money, or when projections looked a lot better then they are now.

It's fortunate you aren't immediately bound by the debt of school, take advantage of it. But the debt does still exist.

You're overlooking the fact that he started at a CC and finished at a state school.

The debt doesn't exist if there is no debt.

If, for example, the CC got the first 2 years of core credits out of the way cheap & the state school had good incentives for locals, & the parents had a small college fund.

Not everyone does things the same, you know.

The debt doesn't exist -- my parents paid up front from savings bonds they had been buying for a decade precisely for my education. Between 97 and 2001, my education costed approximately 2000 dollars for the community college portion, and 10,000 for the university portion. I lived at home and worked to pay the additional expenses.

I am continually saddened by all the people who knew their jobs were superfluous, who knew all they did was push paper & supply a warm body, who are surprised when they are laid off. And surprised at the businesses for overstaffing (while still probably providing a low standard of service.)

Sure, lots of laid off folks truly did generate value. Not all are like the people I described. But there are lots of them, on both sides (employer & employee).

Suck it up!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com