[mgkimsal]

It's a greater likelihood, sure, but... people also need to learn to take control of their lives. Dude - the $80k Art History job ain't coming along - deal with it. Pivot. I have an undergrad degree in Philosophy, but have been working in software development for more than 15 years, earning a good living most of that time too.

This notion that "oh no, i have a liberal arts degree - my life is forever ruined and I'll be serving coffee part time until I die" is a tired meme. "There are no jobs!". Yes there are, in some fields. Hustle to get in to those fields, regardless of what your "major" was. Just do it.

Now... I realize not everyone can do this - life situations dictate that some people have more struggles than others. But I meet single, healthy unattached 20-somethings that complain about the state of things - this is the best time in your life to retool, readjust and get moving. And they generally don't.

[roguecoder]

I have an B.A. in Theater. I've been a software developer for a decade, no problem. My theater degree taught me context-dependent textual analysis (i.e. requirements gathering), social observation (i.e. UX testing) and modeling. It has done far more for my career than a CS degree would have.

The problem is that people have started seeing college as vocational training, because that is how it is portrayed. "If you spend this money, you will get a job." That shouldn't be why you go to college: you should go to college to learn how to think and learn. A career is what you do afterwards.

However, both employers and graduates need to believe that for it to work. If no one is willing to hire people without prior experience eventually employers can't hire anyone unless there is a vocational education program in place. And then we get to where we are today, where people rush to whatever vocational program is at hand until the field is flooded with applicants, just because it seems like almost-maybe-a-sure-thing.

[hexagonal]

Graduated from college in 95... which makes you, at a minimum, 39 years old, right?

[mgkimsal]

in that ballpark, yep.

It took me 6 years to get through, with going part time and dropping out for a while.

[hexagonal]

So maybe you, rich old white man, should avoid contributing irrelevant noise to this discussion?

The problem is statistical. There just aren't enough jobs, an irreconcilable jobs gap. While it's nice that you had the incredible luck to pivot into a completely different field, that just doesn't matter here. You can't base an economy on every worker flipping heads ten times in a row.

[mgkimsal]

Hrm....

so we should only take advice/input from people who haven't done something that would be suggested or advised? That certainly makes sense. Perhaps we need a few more layers of federal and state government programs on top of the ones we have to fix things for everyone without them needing to do anything more than tick a box?

Wow... why don't we see the same vitriol against multimillionaire 'founders' who build a company, flip it, then advise others to do the same, all the while claiming it was 'hard work'? Perhaps because the majority here want to buy in to that myth?

Of course luck was involved in my situation - I've had good luck and bad luck. I've made some pretty stupid mistakes on my own, involving more zeros than I care to count. But it's not down solely to luck - much of your success or failure is down to how you react, and how you learn from your mistakes. A big part of the problem - and I had this 20 years ago as well - is that young people haven't had enough life experience to be able to make good decisions - you don't get those until you're old/older. And very few younger people listen to older people re: advice - I know I certainly didn't, nor did many people I know, and it hurt us all in different ways.

Yes, it's all relative, and I'm not 23 in today's job market. But I have been both variously fired and laid off, deep in debt, and with nothing but a philosophy degree and minor retail and general work experience. It certainly ain't fun.

Even getting a degree - took 6 years, and I worked part- or full-time the whole time - usually multiple jobs (retail, delivery, food service, etc). I don't typically have a lot of sympathy for students who hit school full time, take out loans for the whole thing, and do not do one lick of 'work' (yes, school is work too, I know) while at school.

Unemployement was ~8% during the early 90s recession - we've certainly had higher this time around, so yes, there's some statistical differences, and the numbers are different. But complaining about broad social/political/economic forces isn't going to do much good for individual people. This reminds me of the food industry criticism - "everyone's getting fat! look at all the stuff they put in the food - we need regulations, etc". Yes, regulating food labelling, food ingredients, etc will probably help the aggregate over time, but it won't help me lose weight. I need to stop overeating, eat better foods, exercise sensibly, etc. Will that advise help everyone? No, because most people won't follow it, but it will make a difference to most individuals who put it to use.

EDIT: Should I even have taken this as personally as I did? Probably not, but didn't want to delete it now. :/

[eli_gottlieb]

That would be pretty good advice if there was any field at all with a shortage of new-graduate level employees in the USA.

[mgkimsal]

See, I still disagree with you here. Forget 'graduate-level' anything - you're still thinking in terms of formal education and degrees. Compete on hustle, moxie, other initiative - create your own life/job/work/etc - people will find you. Make a name for yourself doing something.

I know, this all sounds airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky, but it's largely true. Many employers are still going to be impressed more with hustle than with degrees on paper. The ones that aren't - perhaps you don't want to work there anyway.

The world is very much who-you-know vs what-you-know, and getting out there networking with people is going to get you a better chance of work than fighting with 9 other degree-holding applicants filling out forms on monster.com.

[eli_gottlieb]

And I still disagree with you here. It's not about me and my personal employment situation; specifically, because my situation can always be improved via a purely relative advancement that would have no net benefit if everyone did it (see: "Darwin the Market Whiz"). Also, generally, because I personally am doing decently right now: I damn well wanted to go back to academia and get a research degree, and I've lucked out to get into a damn fine research institution. I've had to turn down 1 offer to convert a a good contract gig to full-time and turn away four recruiters pursue that (not to mention previous interviews where I was told I was turned down because they saw that I truly fit in grad-school more than I fit in their team right this month). I'm also continuing my open-source/research project and working on a side-business idea in the meanwhile. But just because I'm ok doesn't mean everyone else is ok, once we dispose of the false assumption that I'm average.

The real problem here is that you have half a generation 18-22 year-olds coming of age, trying to leave their parents' care, and finding that there's basically no demand for their labor.

Millions of people can't all have more hustle, moxie, initiative, mojo, or whatever other nigh-meaningless abstract term we've chosen to convey "the capitalistic equivalent of sex-appeal", than each other. There has to be actual demand for labor to hire these people.

Conversely, even though I'm not average, an overall bad labor market affects me. The tech sector is "recession-proof", but nothing is Great Depression proof. An ultra-capitalist economy geared towards maximizing debts and rents for bankers, lobbyists and lawyers does, in fact, ripple out to the tech sector and affect hiring. For instance, it means that there are very few R&D labs in computing right now (though a friend of mine has been interviewing with R&D teams at Oracle and I'll be happy to have the connection!), lots of VC-funded start-ups, and much of the world's top technical and scientific talent ends up writing financial algorithms. Someone who wants to actually do hard-core technology like me finds himself really curiously starved for places to work, given how well the tech-sector is supposedly doing. Oh, and everyone is wondering when this latest start-up bubble will pop, especially after GroupOn, Facebook, and Zynga IPOs.