Hugh MacLeod on career prospects | Hacker News Reader

Hugh MacLeod on career prospects

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41 pointsdanielh20 comments

In China, if you are one-in-a-million skilled at your endeavor of choice, there are still a thousand people better at it than you. Ditto with India.

I had a facts-of-life conversation with myself prior to entering college on how good of a computer programmer I am (decent, but not the best) and what my competitive situation would look like next to 100,000 Indians graduating every year (not so great). That is when I decided to double major in a language. Playing the Venn diagram game, the circle of people who are better programmers than me is pretty big, the circle of people who speak better Japanese than I do is pretty big, but the intersection of those two circles is pretty freaking small.

I really suggest that everyone play the Venn diagram game for themselves. And, no, "speaks English kinda good" and "has a college degree" is no longer enough to cut it. Find yourself a niche and be at or near the top of the skill curve in it. (I rush to add, for my fellow ArtSci graduates, that it helps if the niche has cough economic value. Nobody says you can't be the world's leading expert on traditional Louisianan pottery, but that may end up being your hobby rather than your day job.)

P.S. "Can program way out of paper bag" INTERSECT "marketing skills" results in a disgustingly small set. This is great news for small businessmen!

If I'm a one-in-a-million programmer in a population with one billion people (which I assume is what you were getting at), to have a thousand people better than me would assume that 100% of that population are programmers. They are not. Say for arguments sake that 5% of the Chinese population are professional programmers, then if I'm one in a million then I have around 50 other people on my level in the entire country.

On the other hand if my entire gimmick is "I'm a decent programmer but I can speak Japanese!" and you limit yourself to that market then the reality is that your opportunities are drastically smaller than even "American programmer who is self-qualified with good experience, solid skills and good work ethic looking for a 9-5 job in America."

Your numbers are more precise than Patio's, but I think they miss the bigger point he is trying to make: distinguish yourself from the crowd, find a niche.

To your second point, he also does emphasize that you need to create a marketable niche. Programmers who speak Japanese would be very valuable, iff there aren't a lot of Japanese speakers who can program.

I got the point, I just don't agree that it's essential or even all that effective to become niche. In fact I can think of many examples were becoming niche will hurt you in the long term - I mean, hey, my niche used to be Perl :)

Which I guess is my point - if you're a programmer and looking to add a language to your toolkit, surely a programming language would be the better choice?

The problem comes if you choose the wrong niche and become overspecialized for that niche. It could be that at first that niche does just fine, but after some number of years some technological shift might occur that would render your very specialized skills obsolete. That's the danger.

Not saying that finding a niche is a bad thing, but you have to be flexible enough such that you can find another at short notice if need be.

You're overlooking the scaling factors at work here, though, which make the "our world has too many good people" worries lose a lot of their force.

As long as the need for labor scales roughly in line with the population and the supply of competitors scales with the population as well, then your economic prospects are equally good whether you're in the top 1% (or .0001%) of a thousand people in a field or a hundred million.

You just need to make sure you're in a field where the need for labor (and the compensation's correlation with talent) scales properly with the population. A good surgeon is always going to be in a decent situation, because the demand for surgeons is exactly proportional to the number of people around; a high level competitive athlete is probably much worse off as the population grows, because the number of paying athletic competitions is mostly uncorrelated to the population (though other opportunities correlate better, like teaching gym class, being a personal trainer, etc. - music is similar, in that the number of massively profitable rock stars is mostly constant, but the more mundane opportunities, like gigs and lessons, grow in line with the population).

Startups probably walk both sides of the line depending on the specific business plan, and I suspect that a lot of them do have plenty to fear from the growing pool of competent entrepreneurial programmers. One of the issues here is that the supply of programmers is probably growing a bit faster than the population; then again, so is the need for them, especially as the world shifts more and more towards the digital, so it's possible that there's still a good balance there, I'm not sure.

Curious to what are the various topics you covered under the facts-of-life conversation?

"And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking the same is starting to happen to white collar guys more and more, as well. But it’s not quite out in the open yet. Society’s not quite ready to have that conversation."

This. I wonder how long it's going to take until we're allowed to talk about this. It's pretty clear that five years ago if you graduated from an Ivy but you weren't that smart, you could still get a pretty good job. But today these people are mostly unemployed because they aren't willing to take a menial job, and the thing is that it looks like they'll never get offered anything better than a menial job. How big does this class of people have to get before this is officially a 'thing'?

Well, pretty big, because it has to override all the signals sent from the actors that wish to perpetuate the status quo, such as the Ivy League schools themselves, who are not interested in admitting that their education has lost value. This, plus social inertia, is delaying recognition of this new social status.

Am I the only one who feels that having to actually try to get a good job straight out of uni should be the norm rather than the exception?

College is not training for a job. It's something you should do because you want to learn. If you go to university because you want a job, you're a fool. There's no conceivable reason why simply "having a degree" (or, for the blue-collar example, being alive) should be a guarantee of a "good job".

I didn't graduate all that long ago, from a top university, and yet I had to actually struggle to get my first job (graduating right after 9/11 and being a foreign student didn't help). I don't see that as abnormal, though. What's so terrible about a little struggling? It's not like any of these so-called thousandists are struggling to feed themselves. Does anyone really want to just waltz out of college into a boring, reasonably paid job for the rest of their life? I find it hard to empathise with anyone whose aspirations in life stop there.

Sorry for the slightly incoherent rant, but this sort of thing (which I think they call "an overgrown sense of entitlement") bugs me. Nothing's guaranteed in this world, not even that you'll have a fair shot. Compared to most of human history, these are fantastic times we live in, where almost everyone is at least given the opportunity to do something with their life. Stop bitching and get on with making the most of your life!

If it's difficult to find a good job* straight out of uni, then graduates must work hard at /finding a job/ rather than at something society values (e.g., engineering). If we're imagining better worlds, I think it would be better to have a superabundance of worthwhile things to do than to have a superabundance of people chasing a smaller number of worthwhile activities.

*(or found a startup)

Making sure people are matched to jobs they're good at and they like is something that society values. Or would you prefer that your career was chosen by a central committee?

I think one of the worst gaps in a college education is the preparation for finding a job. I graduated with no clue for what to do next, having rested in the thoughtless assumption that it would all just follow. No one had ever told me that the search for work is the most important job you'll ever do.

> If you go to university because you want a job, you're a fool.

Even if that's what your elders had been telling you all your life? I'm not saying it's their fault either; after all it worked for them [1], so it made sense to pass on a working theory. I just don't think it's apt to label a young person foolish just because they listened to the (flawed) wisdom of the more experienced.

[1] I'm speaking only of the U.S. Baby Boomer generation like my parents, since that's all I'm qualified to speak of.

Yes. If you listen to what everyone is telling you without evaluating it for yourself, you are indeed a fool.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine. I was ranting to him how I didn't feel good enough in any single pursuit and was upset at having so many hobbies and side-interests diluting my ability to be much better at any one thing. He basically told me: "Well, no one has the exact same set of skills that you do and being diverse in training is a virtue. Plus, even if there is someone better than you at everything you do, that person's really fucking busy right now, so there's still a lot of work to do"

Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?

The era of the 6-figure starting salary for MBA's may be drawing to a close (though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads), but the forces that demolished Big Auto are specific and concrete; no similar force applies to "white collar" in general.

"Doesn't the idea that there are thirty million piano-playing Chinese children imply that there is also a massive impending expansion in total addressible worldwide market?"

How many top piano players do you really need in the world? Especially a world where music is so easy to reproduce and distribute. When it comes to cello players, there's only one YoYo Ma - how many other notable cello players can you name?

"though it is not, as my little sister will tell you, for law school grads"

Your little sister may want to rethink that. There was an article in the local paper here a few weeks back about how recent college grads are having a tough time finding work. One of the people profiled graduated from a fairly well respected local law school back in the Spring and has yet to find anything. She said that she and many of her former classmates are now on food stamps.

The idea of 30 million piano-playing Chinese isn't important because we need piano players. It's important because the fact that someone can take piano lessons implies a certain level of economic status beyond day-to-day survival. It implies a growing middle and upper class. Those implications lead to the conclusion of much larger markets, which leads to the idea of more wealth creation resulting from people filling those markets.

That is a powerful post. This is the HN moment. The HN community can play a critical role in shaping the next decade.

Personally, as scary as the coming years may be, I've been expecting them, and am excited.

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