Very, very true. I have many friends who are late x’ers or like you and myself, intermediate people, who have yet to move beyond the lowest levels of management simply due to there being no room. Many of them have Master’s degrees and are still working coffee shops or waiting jobs. The market has also had a shift in terms of hiring. it’s no longer “what you know”, but purely “who you know” that even lands you a chance at a decent position. IT might be an exception to this, as is the medical field. The boomer’s, and the Silent Gen have a fair reason to try and maintain that stranglehold as they are terrified of losing their medical benefits, but they are doing everyone else a terrible disservice by keeping younger workers in stagnant positions where they languish without any additional training for management. My father who has just been forcibly retired at 61 after a 30+ year career as a retail executive predicts 3-5 years of corporate turmoil across the board when they are all shifted out.
A lot of us mid-to-late 20s Dopers hit on this idea in the Late-90s music nostalgia is starting to set in for the early twentysomethings thread.
That’s a good question. Sometimes a project is personally important to you: it might be your idea, or you might have had a hand in defining it. Then working hard makes sense. Sometimes you know it is important to the company, and you know you’re visible. But other times it is the same old crap, a project running behind and understaffed like every other, something that is already a failure or that no one cares about. It makes no sense to work hard at these black hole projects. Something not worth doing is not worth doing well, and a piece of crap delivered on schedule doesn’t smell any better than one delivered late.
It’s always been “who you know”. And how do you think you get to know those people? You go to the best college you can get into. You study hard and get good grades so a good company will hire you into their campus recruiting program. You work hard so you can develop the professional relationships that will help you as you move forward in your career.
Companies hire young people to WORK. They aren’t hiring them so they can fast-track them into their management programs (unless you happened to be hired by some company’s corporate management trainee program).
I think it depends on what business you are in. From my own perspective I work a lot less hours than I did in the 90’s or early 2000’s. I’ve noticed a distinct lessening of the pace in IT from the almost frantic days when I first started in this business.
That said, I’ve also noticed that a lot of companies are going with what they consider the minimal number of qualified (or not) IT staff that they can get away with. This puts a lot more pressure on each individual member of the staff to pull more weight…and also means each one is more strapped if things DO go tits up. That recent dust up in San Francisco is an excellent example of putting to many eggs in a single basket and putting to much pressure on a single individual to handle everything.
As I said though, from my own perspective I’ve gone from something on the order of 70+ hours a week (including travel of course) to maybe 50+ hours a week (it varies and some weeks if things DO go tits up it can be pretty bad). And at least in my own circle of friends and colleagues this seems to be the over all trend. I know people who have been going home to actually see their wives (or husbands) and families regularly for the first time in years.
-XT
Not in my, or any number of my friends and acquaintances experience. College, while worthwhile in terms of certain training aspects, has been nearly useless for us. Job placement and campus recruiting programs are a joke. You’d be far better off joining a fraternity or sorority then investing your time in those programs. The vast glut of oppoutunities available were entry level positions a high schooler could have easily secured without any field relevance. Not so long ago, a qualified applicant could send a resume’ out to a hiring manager and expect a decent chance of a call back or interview. The current market seems to be based solely upon “networking” and nepotism. There is an exception to this rule in the highly skilled fields. A perusal of the paper, or hiring adverts will turn up a huge number of positions for people with 5 yrs experience minimum in their respective fields. This eliminates recent grads, and anyone else who hasn’t simply assumed a course of technical work from day one. FEW companies will train for any position above the lowest levels. They hire in those positions from other companies.
That’s half the problem. They are hiring intelligent, creative, somewhat skilled, technologically savvy young workers, and leaving them to rot in the bottom rungs. They are wasting a huge resource of talent and innovation by clinging to the old model of management that is incompatible with today’s society. It is sad that there is a growing gap between those who CAN manage and the jobs that simply require a meatbag to man the post, but there it is. There is a reason that there are so many books and training manuals published on this topic. The communications revolution really DID change the culture and personality of the following generations. I don’t think that most grads come out expecting to fly up into upper management immediately and start taking vacations to Fiji. I also do not think that they expect to be stuck in positions they could have held WITHOUT their degree, and the huge debt that comes along with it, for years on end, living below what is required for them to make a decent living wage.
Considering the number of my fraternity brothers who are lawyers, investment bankers, traders, consultants, engineers, accountants, and managers in large corporations you are correct about joining a fraternity or sorority.
Something they don’t tell you when you are applying to schools is that the schools reputation and rankings matters. The top ten employers at my undergrad alma matter last year were:
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PricewaterhouseCoopers
IBM
Bear Stearns (sucks for those guys)
Goldman Sachs
Accenture
Deloitte
Merrll Lynch
JP Morgan
about a 125 altogether. Engineering, petroleum and other companies are also on the list.
These companies actively recruit at my school. These students will start as analysts or consultants and spend the next couple years working long hours and weekends where they will be gaining the skills and experience that will make them valuable to other employers. Or they might go back to school for a masters.
Go to work at one of the companies I mentioned or any of their competetors. For the most part EVERY young worker they hire is creative, somewhat skilled, and technologically savvy. They wouldn’t get hired if they weren’t. You will bust your ass working for those companies though because all those creative, somewhat skilled, and technologically savvy analysts and consultants are trying to get off the bottom rung and eventually become managing director or partner. The alternative to getting promoted is being counselled out or getting frustrated and quiting on your own. In the 4 years I was at my last job, about 90% of the people I started with had not only quit, but had gone to multiple companies (many on the list) in that time.
I used to see it all the time in consulting. Every bright kid with a big mouth thinks he should be made manager after one successful project and partner by age 29.
One of my friends, a 37 year old senior manager went out to visit one of our clients - an old trucking and shipping company. The Director of their group had worked there 30 years, starting out as a driver and eventually working his way up to running the whole division. My friend commented to me "this guy must think we are a bunch of overpaid retards. A bunch of 28 year old consultants and lawyers with 2 years out of grad school calling themselves “senior director” or “vice president” are going to tell this guy something about his business he doesn’t already know.
In reality you need a mix. You need the wise old gray-haired Mr Burnses (we had a couple in my old job who were freakin awesome) who have seen and done it all. You need the constant influx of new young talent with their drive and stupid enthusiasm and you need people in between to coach and direct them. Too much of one, and you end up with a dot-com full of kids enthusiastically running their company into the ground. Too much of the other, you end up like my current job where nothing gets done because people are so entrenched in beurocracy and hierarchy.
I want to second this. Big companies have special recruiters for the best schools. When there are limited resources, the top ones get the most attention - and I’m in engineering, so that’s two segments. Plus, interviewers start with a perception of you based on the school you go to. Do you think their attitude is the same for someone with a degree from Harvard vs Podunk U? Also, top schools have active alumni networks in big cities. These can be really valuable networking opportunities.
I know it is popular in some places to consider all colleges the same. Some of the guidance counselors in my kids’ high school were like this. But that’s bullshit.
Job placement programs are good in that they gather information for you, but they’re no substitute for actually looking for a job. My younger daughter’s college puts a lot of time in resume writing throughout the four years. She’s still in school, but actually got a full time summer job this year, so it seems to help.
Speaking of such things…
I remember a guy I worked with back in 1990 who had completed his MBA in after-hours schooling. He walked into the VP’s office the next day and announced that he was ready to be a manager now. :rolleyes: 
They molified him by giving him a project - his first as a PL (Yes, he expected to go straight from P/A to Manager because he got his MBA).
Anyway, the project was a PC based project, and the guy had never done a damned thing involving a PC other than use it as a mainframe terminal. Myself and another PC programmer were assigned part time to the project.
Let’s just say that he found the first big meeting to be rather enlightening, and we found it rather amusing. All his well-laid plans were completely pointless as they’d been based on mainframe structure and design, which had absolutely no connection to PC based tools of the era. He was so flustered and so lost that myself and my co-worker ended up doing the design work, then the project got lost, delayed and eventually cancelled. Never heard another word about this guy becoming a PL or Manager.
Shortly after that, I worked at another company with an ambitious work-all-hours type who wanted to make Director by his 30th birthday. He didn’t make it. I still point to that guy as the worst manager I ever had.
Then on my last IT job in 2001, I got a newly minted Manager who was 26 years old and equally ambitious. Work, work, work all the time. Drive people off with his demands, expect people to cancel family vacations at the drop of a hat. Didn’t like it when I told him he’d wake up one day to find that his wife was divorcing him because he was never around and his kids didn’t know who he was.
From your location, are you by any chance Australian? I ask because at that time Aussie dollars would have made it even worse.
I know a company like that, although I believe they pay much better, and they build some very interesting software that I have dealt with in the role of an informed IT user. Dang it, if they offered me a job I’d probably accept it, but it does seem to be another one of those consulting firms where you have to wear a suit all the time. My old office was near LAX, and once I had a meeting with one of their guys who had just stepped off the plane from London. I’m assuming he wore that suit all the way from the Greenwich Meridian, which seems like a huge drag. Similarly, their people would always show up at meetings in ties, which nobody at my company ever wore. But any way you look at it, those guys were good at what they did; their dress code was not vain puffery in an attempt to mask incompetence.
Thirded. I’m convinced that, in some cases, I was invited to interviews mainly due to the schools listed on my resume, rather than for any specific experience that I have. Moreover, my undergrad major and grad school subject area are (mostly) unrelated to what I do.
PL? P/A?
While it pains me to say it, the name of your school (and usually fraternity)is more important than whether or not you actually learned anything. Ticks me off.
From what I’ve seen, your estimate is generous. Between 3 and 4 hours a week seems more accurate in many cases.
One issue with the need to work with people halfway around the world is that language and cultural issues can make things very difficult. At my last job, much of the infrastructure and development work was farmed out to an onshore vendor, but many of the vendor’s people who worked with us were based offshore, in the Philippines and India. These people were competent, I’m sure, but we always tried to get the onshore analysts in Colorado if we could–because they could almost always fix or resolve an issue about 4x faster than the offshore analysts could. The offshore analysts were, in a sense, “three times removed” from our operation–different continent, different culture, different company. Perhaps that’s just too many steps away from the operation you’re supposed to support, in order to be effective.
Project Lead and Programmer / Analyst I’m guessing.
The only way someone knows whether you learned anything was by your GPA and by your schools reputation for academic excellence. The assumption is that if you got in to Harvard or Wharton, you probably are pretty motivated anyway. And if you actually graduated, the assumption is that you probably picked up a thing or two.
I mean there are all different levels of jobs. Sure, you might be very bright and hardworking by whatever standards your school has. But when you are hiring a NASA engineer to design your satellite or a quant guy to design your deriviatives trading model for your hedge fund, you might need that guy who has that almost effortlessly brilliant Rainman meets John Nash meets Good Will Hunting intellect.
Now granted a lot of really smart people didn’t go Ivy League and not everyone who goes to Harvard or MIT is super brilliant. Some are just well connected or hard working. I’ve worked alongside bright people from those colleges. They were smart but not jawdroppingly so. Then again, we weren’t designing robots and shit or anything.
A lot of it is work ethic too. I’m sure a lot of companies hire from those top schools because they attract the type of people who are not going to ask about work/life balance. They will just overachieve for their employer at the expense of everything else just like they did in college and high school.
Also, an MBA is not a project management certification. I probably learned more about actual project management in my undergrad Civil Engineering program than in business school. MBAs teach you the fundamentals of business - accounting, marketing, finance as well as give you a shit load of experience on team projects and group presentations. A common criticism of MBAs is often that they are too strategic and high level in their teachings to be practical for your mid-level managers - the guys who actually need to get projects done. For the most part, an MBA (from the right school of course) is a Golden Ticket to investment banking or high value management consulting.
Yes, exactly. Programmer/Analyst is a fairly common title that can mean anything from 2 years of experience to a reasonably senior person.
The gist of it is that while he was an experienced programmer, he was a mid-level person lacking in experience in any lead or leadership position. But since he had earned his MBA, he reasoned (incorrectly) that he was ready to jump to the head of the line and become a Manager right then.
I worked for a call center as a Supervisor and put in a minimum of 50 hrs a week. My typical week was 70-80 hrs.
All the supervisors had to train the employees, the paperwork/computer work was redundent, they were reactive vs proactive - and of course, they were short handed in Supervisors and we had a stream of new employees hitting the floors. All new employees had to scored on 8 calls a week… multiply that by 12 (they would not disperse the new-hires equally so the later shift Sups would get stuck with all the extra work) and top it off with the old tape-recorded calls that were not reliable.
Oh, and this was all salaried.
Before that, with the same company, I worked at a sales office that was in a tiny town. The in-line store had to keep extended hours so there were days I worked 12 hr shifts (I did take an hour lunch though) 7 days a week. The overtime on the paychecks were awesome, but I rarely saw my kids and my health deteriorated FAST (I became so anemic that I looked like a walking dead person… yes, I was a pasty-whittish-gray… and ended up in the ER room)
Thing is, after working as a Sup for another year with such long hours I ended up in ER again with the same problem and another blood transfusion.
Prior to that, I rarely missed work and even went 2 yrs with perfect attendance and a nice bankable vacation.
Unfortunatly, I cant go back in time but if I could, I would not have sacraficed family for my own career goals with a company that tossed me out like yesterdays trash.