I have heard that this is how CS grads sometimes end up in help desk forever. They can’t find a development job out of school, and so they decide that help desk is something they can do and that pays enough to live on, and then 5 years down the road no company will hire them for anything other than help desk since they have 5 years in help desk and nothing in development.
Sure, all things being equal. But we are also talking about a time period of a 40+ year career so I think overall it ends up equalling out. Some years will be recessions. Others will be booms. Just from my own career I think I’ve experienced about an equal amount of good and bad circumstances. And sometimes what seems like bad luck at the time actually forces you into what ends up being a better situation.
I got out of undergrad the end of 08.
I may just now be landing an office job, at the company my mom works for (I at least got my resume looked at, she couldn’t do anything beyond that). In college I didn’t have any internships or a whole lot of useful job experience and this past year I’ve applied for countless jobs and gotten TWO interviews. There is so much competition. And I’m not talking applying for top-level law firms and shit like that, I’m talking HR assistant and admin jobs at local companies of all sizes, jobs that I am qualified for too. Shit, every time any company around here was hiring it’d be on the damn news. And I live in a big city. And this job I might land is in a totally different area I DON’T want to work in, but I need money and experience doing something.
I didn’t go to a top school or anything but I know I am smart and capable and it’s very hard to take all the rejection. I’m working on my masters now and I do it at night so I could work, and pretty much all of my classmates work. A LOT of them are kind of dumb, but THEY have jobs. It just sucks; makes you feel crappy about yourself. I want a job in my chosen field, I don’t want to get stuck somewhere else forever. I know I’m capable of any job I apply for but the ridiculous amount of competition for a small number of jobs is hard to deal with, as many people on here know. And it stinks to have to deal with this right from the start, get off on a bad foot. I am very worried I am getting a masters in a certain area but will never get to use it because I will get stuck somewhere else I don’t want to be because I have to take whatever I can get in this recession.
The issue is one of timing. Sure, recessions and jobs come and go. However, there is a big difference between “me losing my job now that I have 10 years of professional experience under my belt” and “me not being able to get a job in my field (and thus any professional experience) because I graduated during a recession”.
I’m not saying the latter is such a devistating blow as to automatically ruin one’s prospects, merely that it is a not-insignificant hurdle and misfortune.
In the professions, after graduation and getting one’s first position your marketability is all down to experience. Even getting a couple of year of relevant experience makes all the difference in your ability to have something employers (or clients) want. A recession at the beginning of one’s career makes the task of getting a toe-hold of relevant work experience all that much more difficult. Later on, you may suffer a misfortune like losing your job because of a recession, but you will still be marketable after the recession has passed. That may not be as true for the person forced by circumstances to take on non-relevant work experience just to put food on the table and pay rent right out of college.
Edit: the experience of myskepticsight as stated in the post above mine is, unfortunately, pretty typical, and his or her concerns not without foundation.
I graduated with a degree in Physics from one of the top universities in the world (as I’ll so-humbly put it) in 2008. Decent if not spectacular GPA (3.5), two and a half years of continuous research experience. I decided to work in politics for a couple months until the election.
Campaign ended, candidate didn’t win. No job in the worst economy in a generation. From December 2008 until October 2009, my two occupations were working in a warehouse part-time and being homeless, crashing on friends’ couches.
Luckily I finally managed to finagle a programming internship through pulling strings through a friend of a friend, and I have the enviable position of coding (which I hate) for $12/hr with no benefits.
Yeah, graduating college in a recession can fuck you up good. I don’t even see how I’m going to get out of the situation I’m in now and move to something I actually care about.
Only if you believed you were entitled to an $ 80k/year job upon graduating. In that way it doesn’t mess you up anymore than graduating in a regular job market and not being able to find a job in your chosen field.