looprecur

I really don't think anyone can predict when this bubble bursts. There are too many political and cultural factors involved. Also, as employment prospects decline and remain dismal throughout our second "lost decade", I tend to predict more shelter-seeking "students", debts be damned.

People used to think of financial insolvency and bankruptcy as a shameful failure. Not any more. There's a widespread sense that money isn't real and that repayment of debt is somewhat voluntary. This is why people were willing to buy houses at prices of 20-30 years' after-tax income during the bubble. Also, the fact that unexpected medical problems (and insurance malfeasance) can make virtually anyone bankrupt eradicates the association of insolvency with personal failure; now it's something that can happen to anyone, like a lightning bolt from the sky.

The result is that, absent regulation, people will continue to take out loans for unaffordable education costs, default on their student debts (which are nondischargeable, but this doesn't prevent default, only discharge in bankruptcy) and maybe have their wages garnished a bit. So we have debt bondage, but when the alternative is economic nonexistence (Wal-Mart job) this starts to look pretty good. At least the guy in the low-end office job, with 20% of his meager pay garnished, can sit down at work.

TL;DR version: in other words, as things are now, if college tuition cost $100,000 per year and loan companies were willing to offer it, people would still buy it, future insolvency be damned. If you take this offer, you have hope of an eventual regulatory change ("jubilee") that forgives or at least makes dischargeable student debt. If you don't, you face economic obliteration, unless you're visibly (at 18) in the top 0.01% of your age group in something (computer programming, acting, athletics).

This assumption is a mix of broken societal wisdom and an association fallacy. FWIW, there's another fallacy committed when they themselves become unemployed; everyone else unemployed is a antisocial lunatic, but they are a good person who has simply fallen on rough times -- total cognitive dissonance, but they don't notice, even when it is pointed out to them.

There's something generational in it, as well. Going on rough estimates and statistics I've heard-- although there's no hard basis for these numbers because no one can predict what the employment climate will look like in 2050-- a 22-year-old can expect, over the next 40 years:

* To be fired (not laid off, but personally fired) once.

* To be laid off, or to lose a job because his employer goes out of business, 3 times.

* To quit 3 jobs because of a negative job situation or otherwise pre-emptively (boredom, passed over for a promotion, risk of being laid off).

* To quit 3 jobs because a substantially better offer comes along.

* To quit twice because he needs a break (and won't be allowed to take ~3 months unpaid leave) or is considering career change.

* To leave 1 job to go into school.

* To have at least one spell of unemployment exceed 4 months.

That's 4 involuntary job losses, and 4-7 (the firing, and the there pre-emptive quits are the four; the layoffs are the "maybe" +3) that could be taken to reflect negatively on him and his career. This is what I suspect to be the average case over a 40-year career, with most of the disruptive breaks early on in it.

I don't think this is a bad thing. I think job volatility is, if it's limited and no one gets blackballed or rendered unable to make a living, a good thing. Just as no one is expected to marry their high school sweetheart, people are increasingly "dating" jobs and careers. And although breakups hurt like hell, the fact that they can happen when necessary (as opposed to a world where people marry in their late teens and stay together even if miserable) means people find better matches in the long run.

The result is that we're looking at a generation where everyone will have the experience of being unemployed at some point. But many people in their 40s and 50s got started in a different career environment and have never experienced it.

True and depressing.

I think one side effect of suburban alienation is that, because this geography thwarts organic friendships and also maintains social class barriers, people fall out of touch with people who are less (or more) fortunate than they are. Their talented but unlucky high school classmates who end up in shit jobs fall completely off the radar. This is what enables Americans to personalize individual success and failure (which are 50-65% luck) to a degree that other free societies would find unconscionable.

I think the post-Facebook generation isn't buying it, though. An internet connection is all you need to see that there are a lot of people getting screwed, and a few being rewarded, for no good reason.

It's my firm belief that the hottest rooms in hell will be saved for those who kick people when they're down.

I have been reading an unfortunately large amount of articles here on Hacker News seemingly deterring prospective students like myself from entering a university, especially from the field of Computer Science. They cite large tuition/living costs and "wastes of time" as not worth the potential four year education gained. These articles and blog posts claim that jumping straight into industry is an acceptable and perhaps even favorable alternative.

I don't think this viewpoint is credible, and you shouldn't listen to it. What is true is that, for many people going into college, it's a misuse (but a required one, often) of time because they're destined for non-college jobs. Widespread higher education is a waste of society's resources, and a lot of colleges out there aren't very good. But this decision isn't about society and its resources; it's about what's best for you.

What's best for you is probably to get a college education. It's very hard to get a decent job without one (and not so easy to get one if you have one, but that's another story).

Read every post on this thread. The advice here is great, and a good CS education will put you miles ahead (in terms of skill) of where you'd be without one. If, for some reason, you end up at a school that doesn't have a good CS program (a "Java school") then major in math and take the CS courses you like, plus independent studies.

As for which universities and colleges are decent, there are about 200 good universities and liberal arts colleges in the US, including most state flagships. You don't have to go to an Ivy or MIT to get a good education, and the drop off from Harvard to (for example) Penn State is measurable but not that steep; the academic job market is so rough that a lot of brilliant professors are ending up at middling universities. After you leave the top 200, the dropoff is much more severe.

Motivation is tricky. Sometimes it's worth it to continue, and sometimes it's not. Only you can make this decision, but you have to listen to yourself and figure out what it is that's bugging you. If it's a transient "motivational crisis" you can take some time off. If it's more permanent, then leave.

Academia sucks, but it's not much better than most corporations are. It's just different. In academia, money and resources are scarce but time is abundant. In corporations, money is abundant but time seems scarce (because of tight deadlines, 90 percent of which are completely arbitrary). So (to simplify grossly) academics build really cool things that no one uses or cares about while corporate employees build ugly commercial things that are actually useful.

Great point. A sad reality of the career game is that you win not by being most truthful, but by building a coherent story.

My moral stance is this: "fudging" is okay-- if you were fired, turn it into a layoff-- as long as you're not representing yourself as having skills you don't have. If you do, you might end up in a job where you're incompetent. It's not only morally wrong and costly, but you're the one who ends up most severely punished, because being that far out of your depth sucks.

No. First of all, a lot of startups still need to raise money. It may be cheaper now than in 1998 but it's still not cheap to pay 2-6 people for 6-24 months. And getting users and customers does not necessarily equal profitability.

What has actually happened in that there is a mismatch between investors and VC. In '98, many investors were MBAs who were willing to take VC investment on so-so terms because they wanted to eventually become VCs and they valued the connections. In '10, they want to take a lot less money (because they need less) on much better terms, and VC still hasn't adapted to that change.

But I cannot understate the value of having seasoned, risk-accepting, wanting-to-change-the-world investors and entrepreneurs. Silicon Valley has a singular advantage in this regard.

Renting in general (cars, housing) is one of those things that people want other people to do, but not for themselves, at least not on things they consider important. For example, if you rent textbooks, you give them up at the end of the semester... but a lot of people want to have them around for years later.

An example is that, following the housing crisis, people quipped about how all "those people" who were taking out bad mortgages should have been renting instead of buying their homes, and there are a lot of arguments for why renting is superior to ownership for real estate (repairs done by professionals, more mobility, etc). But few people actually want to live by this. They'll gladly rent in their 20s when they're starting out, but they want to own the house they raise their children in.

No. Poverty is overrated.

It sounds like his argument for "poverty" is that investors micromanage and sink companies. The obvious solution is hands-off VC and more trust of entrepreneurs. In other words, we need to move away from a culture in which VCs are high priests and entrepreneurs (unless they've "completed an exit") are seen as unwashed beggars.

Also, investors can be a pain in the ass if you're funded; most people know at least one entrepreneur who was sunk or scumbagged by a bad investor. They can also be a pain in the ass if you're not; getting them is a miserable endeavor I wouldn't wish on anyone, and although someone who hasn't invested in you can't fire you, obviously, he can black-ball you (investors talk to each other).

And a founder is far more likely to drive a company toward profitability if he’s is about to lose his life’s savings.

Meh. I don't disagree at a 180-degree tack-- maybe 160. I think "the stick" is a pretty bad motivator overall, and when people get panicked, they make bad decisions. Everyone's different, but in the aggregate, people perform better if the potential personal loss is reduced; that's much of why limited liability exists. This is true in small as well as large companies. We all know that small companies tend to be more innovative, but that's in spite of the small company's insecurity, not because of it.

Capital starvation leads to innovation. Slim bank accounts are the best way to motivate sales people. So don’t worry if you think you don’t have enough capital. Instead, be grateful for your sense of urgency.

Disagree. Bad financial situations and anxiety lead people to take greater risks and make decisions that it's harder to make in a "cozy" corporate job, not because comfort leads to mediocrity but because the corporate strings often hamstring or extinguish greatness.

Sometimes those risky decisions turn out to produce results that are really good for the person making them, and for society. Sometimes the results are terrible. On the whole and for most people, "the stick" is not a very good and definitely not a very productive thing. Exceptions exist-- final fantasies that produce something great (actually, Final Fantasy was so-named because it was produced by, and actually saved, a dying game company)-- but those are rare.

Don't get me wrong: startups are great, but I think the poverty and urgency are necessary evils of the game, not benefits. We need startups in this economy, because what was once accomplished by blue-sky R&D (which doesn't exist anymore) is now increasingly done by startups, which are acquired if successful.

Also, don't get me started on urgency. Bosses in large companies play the "urgent" card with artificial deadlines all the time, so a lot of people work under a state of urgency. Does the OP have an idea how many millions, if not billions, of lines of absolutely terrible code have been written in the name of urgency?

This is a serious problem, even today, but the article seems to fail at addressing it.

1. The "nurturing" sort of work isn't inferior to the analytical style of work. Both are important. Raising children is one of the most important things we do, and God knows a lot of people aren't doing a very good job of it.

2. The erroneous assumption that men are always better-suited to analytical work and women are nurturers is problematic and ridiculous. It screws people both ways. Male nurses are considered effeminate, while women who excel analytically are underestimated.

3. Combating sexism in academia, research and medicine is a noble goal, but I don't see solutions being put forward here.

Surprising fact: most people like working. Many people hate being told what to do and when to do it, but people have a fundamental desire to work.

Here's how to do basic income. Starting with 2010 GDP as a base, 50% of all GDP after that goes into a basic income fund that's distributed to everyone. It starts out small and eventually grows to a point where no one has less than a 1/2*N share. For example, let's say GDP/capita is $40000 in 2010. If it rises 2% to $40800, then $400 goes into the basic income fund.

If the result of the basic income is that people become lazy and don't work, the basic income falls or is phased out and we call the experiment a failure.

Right. All they have to do is sell their kids so that they need less space (cheaper housing) and don't need to spend money on education, and then "wing it" with regard to health insurance. "Just don't get sick" is great advice that I'd give to anyone in this country; I mean, can you believe that people in the US think they have the right to get cancer? The fucking nerve of some people.

[Follow-up: On a serious note, I know that's an obnoxious reply, but I'm sick of conservatives who somehow believe the problem is that people are spending too much on unnecessary things. There is some of that, but most bankruptcies come from the big-ticket items-- housing, healthcare, and education-- which ought to be affordable.]

I will gladly work to destroy the bigoted and heartless sort of society that conservatives and so-called "libertarians" seek.

Depends on the kind of slavery. Slavery has been a fixture of most economies, with the degree of force and inflexibility variable across societies. In one phase of the Ottoman Empire, slaves could own land and armies... but were still slaves. Likewise, dalits and buraku can become very wealthy because they're doing work that no one wants to do, but their status as low-class individuals persists. Some variants of slavery (such as modern sex slavery and early American racial/hereditary slavery) are brutal and horrible; others have been more benign.

The state of the American proletariat is not quite slavery, but it's getting there. It's a state of diminishing leverage that, uncorrected, will lead to a slave economy. In first-world countries like the EU and Canada, it's unimaginable that someone would lose everything because of a health problem. Now, if you want to avoid (err, make less probable) this fate, you have to get a job that provides health insurance. (Don't even get me started on the terrorist attack we call the individual health insurance market.)

The Hacker News libertarians (who are, despite our shared nausea, far smarter and more reasonable than the right-wing of any other community, I'll note) believe they will be future technology "barons". Pretty much everyone I've ever met with conservative leanings expects to be fabulously wealthy one day-- the smart ones and the idiots alike. (I once heard a community college drop out making $8/hour defend Republican economics, opening with the sentence "if I make a few million dollars...")

At least 95 percent of them are going to achieve upper-middle-class status but not great wealth or connections. They'll have decent jobs and nice lives, but they won't be dick-swinging robber barons. They won't be on the short list for garden parties thrown by Sequoia partners. When this fate befalls them, they'll swing hard to the left.

By definition, a person who is working only because he must will not get a fair wage. One side has leverage, one does not. So the worker gets screwed.

The ideal society is one in which no one has to work but everybody does. A basic income grant (which everyone, working or not, gets) would get us pretty close to this, because most people would still work for reasons of pride and the desire for a better lifestyle than what's available if they don't. Those who would use the grant as an excuse to slack off are the least productive members of society anyway, so we'd not be losing much if they stopped working.

Minimum wage has its problems, because it's a very clumsy implementation of basic income that falls hardest on those who are trying to employ low-end workers. Better would be to give everyone enough basic income to live at a reasonable standard, and let a free market decide what's a fair wage. If that's 75 cents per hour, that's fine because work isn't the person's only source of income.

We're not there yet, but our economy has been headed in that direction for the past 30 years. Michael Lind has termed it "Brazilianization", in reference to the inequality and corruption one sees in much of Latin America due to the lack of a concern for social justice in the governing class.

Capitalist economies with no welfare state (laissez faire) converge to an economy where people have to work to survive, which depresses wages, which can very easily (and reliably) bring about a vicious cycle. The end state of this is one where the lucky among the proletariat become servants (paid a pittance, but in a nice house and well-fed, enabling a very nice life in comparison to the alternative) while the unlucky and poorly-connected (who cannot even find employment as domestic servants) starve. This would be very damaging to minorities and Latinos, because the upper classes would demand (and be able to get, due to the collapsed economy) white, formerly middle-class, maids and nannies.

Minimum wage and welfare programs aren't good just for their direct beneficiaries, but for a lot of people, because they raise the bar across the board. If minimum wage is $8/hour, then skilled workers will expect $15 and entry-level white-collar will expect $20. Increase that to $10, and skilled workers are now asking for $18, and white collar is asking for $25. Although this causes "inflation", it's the good kind because it represents a wealth transfer away from legacy and in favor of labor.

On the other hand, if there is no minimum wage (which is similar to a basic income but contingent on working) then the reference point collapses and everyone gets poorer.

You don't get to the leaderboard if your account is nuked. Survivor bias.

Admittedly I've said things that are immature and stupid and that I regret. None of them merited the destruction of 2000+ karma account. Not a one. The banning policy around here is extremely inconsistent.

Also, I once got hellbanned for comparing Clojure favorably over Arc. (Although Arc wins on aesthetics, Clojure has the JVM libraries which is a win in the real world. That was the gist of my argument, and enough to merit a ban.) The ban policy on HN is heavy-handed, inconsistent, destructive and, quite frankly, moronic. If Paul Graham is directly responsible, he should be embarrassed; if others are doing the trigger-happy banning, he should revoke these powers.

I don't think "fucking asshole" is much worse than "trophy kid". They're about comparable in terms of incivility.

I agree. Hacker News has a lot great people on it.

Karma, however, is a joke because accounts are regularly nuked for no good reason, which necessitates starting over at zero. Hellbanning spammers and outright trolls makes sense. Hellbanning good posters who make one annoying comment is ridiculous. If you don't like what someone has to say, disagree with him. (This is also why I don't like downvoting without a reply; I think people who object to something should say why they object to it.)

I think a lot of the criticism of our generation and of job hopping is projection. The whining about entitled, self-centered young people sounds exactly like the complaints that were made of the Boomer generation in 1970, and they're just as exaggerated-- somewhat true, mostly not.

What's lost in this mess is that very few people actually want to job hop. They do it because they have to do it in order to have their career progress at an acceptable pace. It's risky and painful and the vast majority of people would rather not have to do it. So it sucks to be criticized for a behavior that we're forced into.

Loyalty has to be earned. If I'm pigeonholed or passed over for a promotion, damn right I'm going to start looking for another job.

Also, with all the complaints about people job hopping to increase their salaries, this wouldn't work at all if companies paid fair salaries. If companies are slow with raises and promotions, leaving their people underpaid after a couple of years, they get what they deserve when people stream out. (Obviously, this matter is different for cash-strapped startups, but people who join those aren't especially concerned about salary.)

Job hopping is a touchy subject because young people don't like job hopping, as was discussed in those posts. They do it because, in today's corporate climate, they usually have to do it in order to prevent being pigeonholed, neglected, and otherwise left to stagnate.

Most people in most companies are going to find that the people above them don't care about their advancement. Sure, companies have their spiel about personal growth and continuing professional development, but it's often paper-thin. Managers can't look out for the careers and development of 10 or 20 different people, so it's often only one or two who gets "protege" status (favoritism in project allocation, mentoring, political look-out).

Also, the level of visibility and relevant work that are necessary for career advancement in today's competitive culture simply cannot be available to everyone. Unless you're a startup founder, you have to become the protege of someone important-- which only happens for the lucky few within 12 months at a new job, or you're wasting your time. This means that anyone with half a speck of ambition is going to keep moving around until finding a fit. No one exactly likes doing this; it's better to have this success early on and no longer need to "job hop".

So job hopping is not really voluntary. It's a natural outgrowth of today's corporate culture, one created by our elders who seem to be unhappy about our rational response to it. They're mad that the people under 35 have actually figured out the unwritten rules.

Oh, and I am pw0ncakes. Why did I (have to) change username? Because the incivility on Hacker News exists on both sides of the table. At least uncivil comments can be seen and argued against, whereas the sloppy, poorly-reasoned, invisible and heavy-handed ban policy, on the other hand...

Are you learning? Every job has grunt work, even the interesting jobs. If you're not learning from what you do, and if your boss doesn't have your advancement/education as a top priority, then learn. But if you have to put up with a couple months of boring work in order to get what you want, you should.