Generation B - Middle Aged, Laid Off and Losing Hope
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I have a lot of sympathy for people who have lost their job and if you were making $30,000 a year I can understand not having a nest egg. But for this guy I have no sympathy.
Well, the article says he asked his wife for divorce. If the divorce did materialize, I wouldn't be surprised to hear that his savings were drastically slashed ;-)
My initial comment was facetious. Honestly, I can't feel sorry for a guy whose career was raping gullible college students. If he jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge, I shan't shed a tear.
Ruslana Korshunova's death [1] was disturbing. If this guy committed suicide, it would not bother me the least.
Ruslana had a life ahead of her. This guy is in his late 50s, he has already exceeded the life expectancy of a few decades ago. He made a career as a parasite. Now he has no job. He could have moved to some remote place in Central or South America, or Asia where his savings would allow him to live (albeit frugally) for a few years and start a new life. Instead, he moves to NYC, which is not exactly cheap, tries to get a job in the dying financial sector, tries to publish idiotic novels, and when that all fails, he goes whining to the NYTimes, thus humiliating himself in front of everyone. Newsflash: the world does not owe him anything. He made bad life decisions, now he's paying a price. To each, his own.
To me it makes more sense, if he can live for 2-3 years off savings in NYC, to live there. Also, he didn't just seek a job in the "dying financial sector" (are we really naive enough to think it's dying?), but rather applied for over 600 jobs in a range of areas including supervising admissions at a college.
Applying for jobs can be soul destroying. A good friend of mine has applied for a lot of jobs in the past 6 months, but when there are only a few in your chosen field with a large number of people applying for them, and applying gets you no replies it can feel like pouring time into a black hole. It's easy to point out what somebody should be doing, but it's several orders of magnitude harder to actually do it yourself.
For this situation, we have the aphorism "beggars can't be choosers," which I find particularly apt for someone who became the former through being the latter.
1) lives in NYC and has no prospects of finding a job
2) thinks he may become a beggar when his savings are depleted in a couple of years
is in NO position to be picky. It's not a matter of whether he wants to move elsewhere or not. What he wants is irrelevant. It's a matter of buying time and of bleeding off as little money as possible until the economy starts recovering.
For instance, he could move to a small village in the Northeastern coast of Brazil, where a beach house can cost as little as $50,000. And let me tell you, I have NEVER met anyone who moved to Brazil and would rather live in that filthy, stinky, rat-infested metropolis called NYC...
The guy has an MBA, so he should be smarter. NYC lost tons of jobs in the financial sector. Economies such as Brazil's are actually growing. It's simple: move to where the action is. His experience would perhaps be valued in some company abroad that needs to do business with American clients.
Saying that the financial sector is dying was an hyperbole, but the sector is undergoing a huge transformation. A lot of tasks that were done by humans should have been done by computers. The crisis only triggered the inevitable. Again, I shan't shed a tear...
I might feel more sympathy for this guy if he were one of the many recent graduates unable to find the kind of jobs they need to pay off private student loans (with exorbitant rates) instead of being part of an industry that profited from them while ignoring their employment predicaments. What sympathy do guys like these ever show for their unemployed debitors?
"Mr. Blattman cannot walk by a street person now without wondering if this could be him."
So why the drama?
I'm actually shocked that this guy is in such disarray. If he's so in touch with the reality that "the world has changed," why doesn't he get another job doing something? Even delivering pizzas earns more than nothing - it would also get him out and talking to people.
Why move to new york, instead of a place with a lower cost of living?
Why write a novel? The story certainly didn't give me the impression that novel writing was something he loved to do. Also, writing a novel about your own life seems not only self-absorbed but uninteresting. Escpecially if you believe - as he does - that your situation is so common?
My uncle is just such a hacker. Developed the Canon Cat, target disk mode on the Mac, tested nuclear weapons in Nevada when he was a kid (and god knows what else he still won't talk about). But in America where we succeed by embracing the new it is equally characteristic to leave our old champions behind.
This is worth fixing. We're forsaking the very people we hope to become.
The company seems to create a bad situation ... ie give him a project which he has no chance of finishing, his direct manager ignores his cries for help and then waits till he fails and then fires him.
I've known this happen to 2 people. And at least in one case, I knew the engineer just needed a little guidance.
I have a completely off-in-the-weeds hypothesis that is based on some anecdotes of those around me. This hypothesis is as follows: the good, experienced hackers -- like your uncle -- are getting thrown into an faceless aggregate of all other not-so-good, experienced programmers of their generation. This bucket has a lot of assumptions that don't fit everyone within, but are applied to everyone all the same.
One of the things this bucket assumes, and one of the stereotypes we don't confront much, is that programmers don't develop any new skills after they leave college. They are useful so long as the technology du jour is the same as the day they graduated; as soon as it isn't, kick them to the curb and get the next batch.
Of course, this isn't true of all people. The problem is that they are lumped in with what I'll call the vocational programmers, who's titles are conspicuously prepended not just with the technologies they know, but the only technologies they will ever learn. It doesn't matter if they aren't capable or they just don't care, the net effect on their perception by others is the same. For a person to declare they are a loyal Blub programmer, for any value of Blub, is already the first nail in the coffin; more nails are driven every time their value of Blub gets more marginalized. That these sorts of programmers seem so common begets the assumption that every programmer has a defined value of Blub, and part of culling them is figuring out what their Blub is, and if it matches the required Blub du jour.
The bitch about stereotypes is they are almost never entirely false; there will often be some core group to which the stereotype applies, and then potentially a satellite group that gets falsely included into stereotype.
Something needs to change that changes the application of the stereotype; the easiest way I can think to do that is to make it extraordinarily painful on the people who would perpetuate the stereotype before they end up in a position where they do. Get the people who would cast disparaging labels on the bucket out as fast as possible, so the rest don't have the added weight of convincing everyone they're not like the others. These mediocre workers are not the people I hope to become, and though it may make me a heartless bastard for saying so, I have little reason but to forsake them. I think only by doing so will I avoid forsaking those that I do want to become, by making it clear that there is more than just a narrow band between the two groups.
I know people with their own businesses, not even big businesses, and they pull down upwards of $500,000 a year in money they pocket. The people I know didn't start off where he did, they started off with no degrees, no college, no nothing, just a ford truck and an idea.
This guy's going to sit on his ass for the next two years until things get desperate for him and by that time the economy will be back in full swing and he'll be straight back into a job.
No sympathy for this guy, or others of his ilk. There are so many middle aged, baby boomer, middle management people that have been way overpaid, promoted for no good reason, and pissed all of their ill-gotten gains away who are now complaining that they are hard done by in the financial crisis. I would counter that no, they aren't hard done by, they are now actually getting what they deserve, it certainly must feel like they are hard done by compared to the decades of being massively overpaid.
So basically, here's a guy living large for most of his life, bringing in $250k for much of it, and retiring at the age of 58. This is pretty much the definition of the American Dream.
Granted, he has a terrible self-esteem problem (top tip for all you 58 year old multimillionaires without jobs: don't tell women you're 'unemployed'. You're retired!), and evidently he managed to squander most of his wealth along the way.
But really, how sorry are we supposed to feel for a guy living well in the suburbs who might need to think about moving to a smaller apartment at some point in the next 3 years?
Page 1 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/3...
Page 2 - http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/3...
I started my first business when I was 27. My partner was 41 and had done things I hadn't even imagined. He was so smart, so seasoned, and knew the ropes about so many things that he saved us both countless hours and dead ends. And I was able to do things he never had a chance to learn. We made a great team.
Now I'm on the other side of that relationship. And would love to do it again with someone in their 20's. I have a million ideas that come from years of real world experience and not enough time to act upon them. (One of the reasons I'm here.)
Average life expectancy in countries where most people die from old age or incurable diseases is around 80. Slightly higher in Australia, lower in the USA. So if 55 is still middle aged, then 60 or so will probably be the boundary into old age.
Dividing things up equally, we get that old age is 60 to 80, and middle age is 40 to 60, and the age where you don't think about it and don't name it is 20 to 40.
That fits.
So what about pre 20? I've always held that children are aliens that mutate into humans. I think we pretty much would all agree that teenagers are not properly human, and so that ties in. Up to age 13 we are aliens, then 13 through to about 20 we mutate into humans. 20 to 40 we're simply "people", 40 to 60 middle-aged, 60 onwards old-aged.
I'm not sure I find that comforting ...
--
I was a bit surprised to find this article on HN, but since we're discussing it: Anyone else have ideas on how we, as a fairly narrowly-defined demographic, could help "generation B?" I personally feel like we have a responsibility to do so, if we can figure out how.
Although the rant about employers not acknowledging receipt of resume sure got me chuckle. Never had it other way, we certainly live in the different worlds :)
Of course the situation is different for older people. They already have experience and there is age discrimination (which does not make sense in most situations because it's not like workers will be in the same job for 10+ years).
The one thing that did not work for me was to spam resumes. Better to identify an area you want to get into and meet people.
He gets almost $200K handed to him and decides he wants to be an author? Great! But he's going about it all wrong.
Move out of the city, man! Find a nice country home. Ditch the Blackberry and all the other tech toys. Sell the suits. Stop spending money needlessly on train rides, eating out, and all that other nonsense. He's still trying to live his old lifestyle. It makes no sense at all.
Buy yourself a cheap laptop, get a basic package from your local ISP, install OpenOffice so you have a word processor for your writing, save your pennies, grow and cook your own food, and write!
Geez, I probably shouldn't armchair-quarterback other people's lives this early in the morning, but....
And feminists still claim discrimination in the workplace.
Actually, the answer is both sex and workplace dependent. (Yes, there are workplaces where there's no sex discrimination and some where the sex discrimination is against men.)
However, the furor over sex discrimination isn't that "subtle".
This line of thought reminds me of the furor over the lack of women on the boards of fortune 500 companies. I find it hard to get excited over whether folks who are otherwise extremely favored (namely the women who would be considered) run into a glass ceiling. The vast majority of both men and women run into glass ceilings that are a lot lower.
It's sort of like being mad because the oldest son gets to be king even if there's an even older daughter. Discrimination, sure, but it's not a problem worth significant effort.