Twenty-something job seekers: Quit whining and get creative

http://whiletruecode.com/post/quit-whining-and-get-creative

by josh_earl • 14 years ago

20 40 14 years ago

sp3324• 14 years ago

You can't blame the 20-somethings for 8% unemployment and rampant underemployment.

dasil0033• 14 years ago

If you're looking for someone to blame, yes, young adults are the safest demographic from righteous blame. On the other hand, if you're looking to make your way in the world and having a hard time, blame will not get you any closer to putting a meal in your belly. Well that is unless you want to be a talk-radio wacko, but even then I hear those guys have to fight like rabid dogs for low wages for decades with only distant hopes of any kind of middling success.

randomdata6• 14 years ago

If you believe that the 18-34 demographic are still the biggest spenders, as has been conventional wisdom, perhaps they are to blame?

For example, how many 20-somethings stroll down to their local grocer and buy food produced by 50-somethings†, instead of sourcing their food from people their own age? It is difficult to complain about the lack of jobs when you are not willing to support your own peers.

† About forty percent of the farmers in the US are 55 years old or older: http://www.epa.gov/oecaagct/ag101/demographics.html

pcopley3• 14 years ago

You're right.

However, you can blame them for the entitlement almost all of them seem to feel. I say "them" even though I just recently turned 26 and for a long time did have that feeling of entitlement. At the risk of parroting the article, you can't go to college and expect anything, particularly in tech. You've got to be willing to make below-market, almost slave wages in a crappy entry level job or internship.

I changed careers a year and a half after I graduated with a Poli Sci degree in 2008. The first gig I could get was a 6-month internship for $2,000. It's taken me that and consulting quite a few web clients to get the point where I could accept my first entry-level professional (corporate) programming gig less than 4 months ago.

sp3324• 14 years ago

I just don't like the "quit whining" part of the title. Times are hard, you can at least agree with the 20-somethings that far. The article should be presented as methods of coping with a bad situation instead of pretending to be a solution.

Edit: massive edit

AUmrysh• 14 years ago

The entitlement was instilled in us by our parents. "If you don't go to college you'll never get a good job, you'll just flip burgers!", and our teachers (like the guy who stapled burger king applications to the tests of students who failed). It's instilled in us by the universities when they tell us they have an X% job placement rate post graduation.

Most universities don't prepare students for the real world, and when we graduate we feel very bitter and abandoned. It's not entitlement, we were raised to believe that going to college meant getting a job, and suddenly when the economy goes bad everyone starts acting high and mighty; "Well, you shouldn't expect a job just because you went to college."

I'm sure you can understand the frustration as you've experienced it yourself. Don't blame the young adults who just graduated, blame the people who told us we would only get a job by going to college who now criticize us for not being able to get jobs after we graduate.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

The problem with taking advice from someone who has succeeded is that you never know how much of their success was simply luck, and how much was actually strategy. As for the successful people themselves, they tend to believe wholeheartedly that their success is at most 10% luck. This is usually optimistic.

The fact is that no matter how faithfully you reproduce the superstitious rituals of a past lottery winner, your odds will be the same as everyone else's. It is foolish to walk in someone else's footsteps before you assess the odds and find out how much effect the strategy actually has, and that successful person is not who you should talk to to make that assessment.

paulhauggis4• 14 years ago

"As for the successful people themselves, they tend to believe wholeheartedly that their success is at most 10% luck. This is usually optimistic."

Winning the lotto is nearly 100% luck.

Changing your strategy because you keep failing over and over until you finally succeed is 90% non-luck.

I'm really tired of people looking at anyone successful and saying that somehow there wasn't nearly as much skill or dedication involved, it MUST be luck.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

>Changing your strategy because you keep failing over and over until you finally succeed is 90% non-luck.

Well, I should clarify that by "luck" I really mean "anything other than the strategy a person attributes their success to". For example, it seems that Steve Jobs believed very strongly in magical thinking. In the end, it probably cost him his life, but he really seems to have believed that his success was, at least partially, due to his spiritualism. In that sense, even if his success were due to his other skills, I would categorize it as "luck" in the context of discussing the effects of Zen Buddhism. If you took 1,000 other people and had them apply the same spiritual principles to their lives, you would find that Jobs' success was still anomalous and would need some other explanation.

So when I say "luck", I am not making a judgment about whether the person "deserves" their success, or whether there was "skill involved" with their success. Instead, the meaning of "luck" that I am using is more related to the concept of statistical noise. It may seem weird to say "Steve Jobs wasn't successful because of Zen Buddhism; he was just lucky that he happened to have one of the best marketing minds of his generation combined with an excellent understanding of aesthetics and user interface, and an aggressive instinct for competition", but that is what I mean. Admittedly, using the lottery as an analogy may have been distracting.

The fact is, simply becoming successful cannot give you a strong idea of why you were successful. It gives you one data point and no scientific control. You will encounter other successful people, but this is not a random sample, and it only tells you one side of the story. The only way to even begin to figure out what strategies are actually causally related to success would be to analyze a proper random sample of both successful and unsuccessful people and look for correlations.

randomdata6• 14 years ago

Changing your strategy because you keep failing over and over until you finally succeed is 90% non-luck.

What is the difference between changing your business strategy and changing your gambling strategy? If you tried lottery tickets and the horse track, then finally hit the jackpot at the slot machines, would you say that 90% of the win was due to your active involvement in choosing the game?

sp3324• 14 years ago

This is absolutely the case with the author. He decided after 6 months to stop pursuing a failing strategy, but then spent 2 years trying to get a permanent position on a team. If he had stopped that "failing strategy" after only 6 months maybe he would have found something more effective.

x12• 14 years ago

I wonder how the article reads if you %s/twenty/fifty/g. I've known older programmers who have been self-described "unemployable" for several years now.

pcopley3• 14 years ago

In what sense? Age? Technical knowledge/ability?

I know a programmer in Austin who makes his living in FORTRAN. I'd imagine if he loses that job he's pretty much SOL except for a few niche positions which are likely filled already.

x12• 14 years ago

Most of the defeated older programmers I've talked to feel that it is a young person's game and they don't want to have to relearn something new and come back as a junior. Quite often it seems like something simple that that is holding them back, like not having knowledge with jquery or more UI tools, or not knowing how to work in linux.

But I've never been unemployed for over a year and I have no idea what that does to your confidence.

simonbrown• 14 years ago

> It meant bootstrapping myself into a highly specialized field, then competing for an entry-level position against better-qualified computer science graduates.

So if everyone took the same steps, no one would be better off?

omgsean• 14 years ago

This is kind of ridiculous. Just because our industry is doing well doesn't mean that everyone is in a position to drop everything and learn to code. You had a lifetime of computer expertise to build upon, not everyone does.

The reason that the younger generation feels entitled is that they were convinced by the older generation to go deeply in debt TO the older generation for an education and a piece of paper that many of them are quickly finding is worthless.

It's like a nationwide, academic version of "oh you'll definitely be a great model, just pay me a few thousand dolars for these head shots and the work will start rolling in!" They got scammed.

Total_Meltdown• 14 years ago

(Disclaimer: I've only been to one school - a state university. Your results may vary.)

I think we've forgotten that higher education is supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career (the return). As a current-student twenty-something, I can remember in high school when the rule was basically: people go to college, losers go to vocational schools, failures go straight to work.

As absurd as it seems now, it's unfortunately what we were fed (though not in so many words). College was never an investment for us, it was just the next phase of school if you weren't so terribly below average that nobody would accept you.

There is a lot of resentment, especially in the liberal arts and sciences type fields, toward higher education. Personally, if I was in charge of any hiring right now, I would look a lot more at practice and experience than at degrees and education. And I don't think I'm alone.

randomdata6• 14 years ago

I think we've forgotten that higher education is supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career (the return).

I believe you meant to say that it isn't supposed to be an investment in a high-paying career.

Education, like any other hobby, is an investment in yourself. The return is what you take away in joy from having participated in the activity. Like any hobby, the chances of finding financial rewards are greater by having done said hobby (think of how many have made fortunes by playing in a band, or playing sports, etc.), but the pursuit has always been about more than just money. Monetary returns are a nice bonus when one gets lucky, but it is still worth the cost and effort either way.

One year of post-secondary employment would be an interesting prerequisite for college, as a filter to weed out those who are only there because they believe it is the only path to employment. Unfortunately, it could, under certain circumstances, also keep people who are there for legitimate reasons away.

gklitt• 14 years ago

I don't think the OP is claiming that everyone should learn to code. He's just saying that people can think of creative ways to find a job, whatever industry they might happen to be employed in.

azmenthe• 14 years ago

"Hang out my shingle and start my own accounting firm."

Yes, a unemployable just-graduated accounting major with no CPA designation and no network can just start his own accounting firm. Stop whining, it's SO easy!(?)

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

No, it isn't that easy of course but as the trainee accountant is getting nowhere right now, perhaps some voluntary work with a local charity or an 'umbrella' organisation that provides book keeping/accountancy services to local charities might help generate a bit of experience and a CV?

Just on a 'nothing to lose' basis with no expectation of magic. And getting out the house, engaging with people who find keeping their books straight a chore and who perhaps don't have a clear idea what their financial position actually is... that bit where you have to explain the procedures and perhaps adapt them to a specific organisation's needs. Might just give the trainee accountant that edge in the letter writing.

randomdata6• 14 years ago

Managing the books is such a terrible pain point for small businesses, it seems like there would be tons of fantastic opportunities for someone with an accounting background to make it better. It doesn't have to be yet another cookie cutter accounting shop.

Even if the business is an ultimate failure, the lessons learned through the process are attractive to future employers.

kylebrown2• 14 years ago

These antagonistic responses from self-satisfied baby boomers and Gen X'ers really grind my gears. He compares the current recession to the late 70's, but most economic stats place it closer to the Great Depression. He even concedes that his bootstrap was the entry-level job he landed. And the studies cited in the relevant links confirm the other side of his anecdote: populations which enter the workforce in a recession are permanently disadvantaged (experience never gained, gaps on resumes that never go away, so that when hiring finally resumes its the fresh young guns who are chosen first).

The point isn't to whine and blame. The point is that we have to recognize the structural forces we are up against, or we'll collectively lose the battle (repeating a job search ad nauseum expecting different results).

I have one short response for my unsympathetic self-satisfied elders: you don't come whining to me a few decades from now when you're trying to retire with no pension, no social security, an IRA of confetti, and massive unexpected health costs.

We're in this together, so let's find a way out (self-righteous finger pointing doesn't help). I'll end with Thiel's concluding words, from a recent debate between him and George Gilder on The Prospects for Technology and Economic Growth (its on youtube):

... "in a world where there's no growth and everything is zero-sum. There will be a loser for every winner, and the people will start to suspect that the winners are involved in some sort of a racket. That's not the kind of world that I want to live in. I'd like us to find a way out. But if there is going to be a way out of the wilderness we've been wandering in for the last 40 years, we have to start by acknowledging that we're lost in a desert and that we're not in some sort of an enchanted forest. Thank you very much."

jasonkester• 14 years ago

Surely there's nothing wrong with speaking from experience though?

As an example, I came out of school with a Mechanical Engineering degree in 1994, in Seattle. The other notable thing about Seattle in 1994 is the Boeing was one of its cyclical "Hey, let's lay off another 10,000-odd engineers and maybe hire them back in a few years" phases. That meant that for every job I'd interview for, the second round would be me and half a dozen Boeing engineers who'd been doing that exact job for ten years but were now willing to take an entry level salary so that the bank didn't take their house. I don't imagine it was a whole lot rosier than the job market you describe today.

After the better part of a year's worth of that same interview a couple times a week, I followed the advice we just read in the article. I found a niche at a place doing something sorta related to my degree (Environmental Engineering), using a tiny sliver of the stuff I'd learned by accident at university to convince them I was worth hiring (Fortran, which their models were written in). Then I learned how to do the stuff I was hired to do. Then I spent 4 years migrating from there to writing their first web apps, and only then did I take off for a software shop and start down the road to where I can now antagonistically respond in a self-satisfied manner.

So yeah, things were (and are, and will continue to be) tough all over. Try not to think you're in some special circumstance where time-tested advice doesn't apply to you.

kylebrown2• 14 years ago

One can try not to think, but denial is counter-productive. I imagine that the job market in Seattle in 1994 was in fact a lot rosier than it is today, and charts will confirm that. You don't think there's more graduates with degrees in Environmental Engineering today, swarming all related niches (because the unemployment rate is also higher)? The data confirms it.

Those kind of lucky breaks (hire you first and then pay you while you learn?!) just don't come around like they used to. Things were obviously not tough all over, like they are now. There's a mass of empirical evidence to show this. I don't why our elders continue to deny it (to their own future detriment!) other than so they can bask in their own self-satisfaction.

Not to say that time-tested advice doesn't apply. It does, but it just doesn't work like it used to!

mistercow4• 14 years ago

>Surely there's nothing wrong with speaking from experience though?

Speaking from experience is fine until you start acting like your single experience can be taken as anything more than an interesting anecdote. This presumption is implied when one uses aggressive phrases like "quit whining".

wturner• 14 years ago

While I agree with the don't whine sentiment due to the fact that if you're reading the authors post you probably have access to clean water and a computer (most of the world doesn't), I do agree with the poster "mistercow" in that articles like this usually omit hypocrisy on the part of the author(s). I've seen the "don't whine, you're entitled meme" projected from some of the most spoiled and socially lucky people I've ever met. I've also seen it projected by very economically disadvantaged and uneducated people that routinely seem to sabotage their own potential. The answer is to accept that everyone is a hypocrite and figure out creative ways to make this work for you instead of against you.

batista• 14 years ago

>Twenty-something job seekers: Quit whining and get creative

But this articulate and intelligent job seeker would benefit from asking himself a question: Why am I doggedly pursuing a strategy that is so clearly failing?

I.e: blame the victim.

Or: surely, if something worked for me, the author, it can work for millions of unemployed people. The mass unemployment in the Great Recession was because those people weren't creative enough.

Or: sure, you can find a job, you just have to leave this dignity thing behind, and any sense that any member of society should be able to get a job at his skill level, and jump through hoops like a trained monkey to try to entice potential employers with your wit, determination and willingness to work for less money until they deem it OK to properly hire you (or not). Also: try changing field of work entirely.

Twenty-something job seekers: Quit whining and get creative

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