Is it time to stop calling the under-30 set "over-pampered, self-indulgent, spoiled brat babies"?

In My Humble Opinion
141

These are partly functions of supply. If every English major spontaneously switched to engineering, it would be a very different story. We might just find a dearth of people who know how to write.

Implicit in the demand for coders is the demand for coders of X caliber willing to work at Y price. Getting lots of people to switch to STEM majors and careers will certainly increase the supply of coders, but it also seems like it would decrease the quality. Marginal coders won’t necessarily be able to find work at any price and might wish in the end that they had just majored in English. If we make sweeping encouragements for people to major in STEM who probably have no business doing so, they won’t be any better off. If anything, it makes everyone else worse off. A STEM major is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for a “good” job, even in technology-related fields. It might help the right person already predisposed to that sort of career, assuming he even wants it in the first place.

Law yes, business and finance, no. Having an MBA is nice for a certain track for some kinds of corporations, but in general, it is not exactly necessary to start out, certainly not as a trader or something.

Or you can get an undergrad degree in whatever you want and still learn useful and valuable skills. Lawyers in IP do pretty well for themselves, yes. So do lawyers not in IP.

Now that’s laughable. Whether Google is hiring a few hundred or a few thousand makes no difference. It is still a vanishing fraction of the size of the labor pool of new graduates. The vast majority of STEM majors are never going to work for a top-tier company doing high-powered work.

Many seem to end up in IT. You don’t need to major in business to end up working for a corporation, and it sure seems you don’t have to major in computer science or engineering to work in IT. A good friend of mine is an IT director for a hedge fund. He’s done pretty well for himself as a philosophy major.

My personal view is that no matter what you major in, as an educated person in a complicated world, everyone should learn how to write a little code, read a foreign language or two, do some calculus, and learn how to write. Thankfully there are some places where you can still get a liberal arts education, right?

So what exactly are you suggesting then? Are you suggesting that people who like STEM should major in it? That is not exactly controversial.

And people can get good, well-paying jobs using skills that they do not necessarily learn in school, too. People do perfectly well getting jobs in marketing without having to major in it. It’s usually better that they don’t.

142

I followed my dreams a few years ago and completely changed my career. Now I do exactly what I wanted to do when I was a little kid. It’s been absolutely phenomenal. It took some planning and now it takes about 80 hours a week of work, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

143

Wholeheartedly agreed.

I was responding originally to people who suggested that the problem that recent graduates are facing is that there are no good jobs available for them. They listed jobs like call-center worker and security guard as the sorts of things that were available. So I pointed out that there really are good jobs available for recent grads if they have the right sorts of skills.

I don’t think everybody should get a STEM degree. Not everybody has the desire or the aptitude. But I think that people should be aware that it’s much tougher to start out with an English degree than an Engineering one. Lots of people will and should still make the choice for an English degree, but they should do it with their eyes open.

I look at graphs like these that show that as the total number of degrees awarded has increased dramatically, the number of STEM degrees hasn’t budged (has actually dropped slightly), and my belief is that people are deluded into thinking that the subject of the degree is an irrelevant detail and they’re studying what they like and what’s easier.

Which is more likely: That 25 years ago, a much larger proportion of college students were interested in STEM subjects, or that today students realize that STEM degrees are more difficult and think they’ll get the same rewards from any degree.

I think it’s the latter, and that the belief that all degrees are equally valuable is damaging. That doesn’t mean that everyone should get the same degree. Just that they should be aware of the difference.

144

Maybe this reveals me as an over-pampered, self-indulgent, spoiled brat, but I simply cannot fathom 80 hours of work a week. I typically do about 40-45 in the office and 5-10 at home per week, and it’s a strain. I’m not quite burnt out, but I’m looking forward to the holidays with a quiet desperation. And I don’t even dislike my job that much.

I suppose if there’s literally nothing else you would rather do with your free time but continue working…but even so, that’s 11+ hours a day. Every day. Seriously?

145

I figure you’re being facetious here, but what it actually reveals is a difference in priorities. And that’s usually what is going on when one person asserts that another person or another generation is pampered and lazy and indulgent and so on.

146

I’ve been seeing some people say work sucks by definition, or it wouldn’t be called work. Because work sucks, don’t expect to enjoy your work or you’ll be disappointed.
What I haven’t seen is anyone say that having a dream in any way means that a) you are guaranteed to achieve it or b) it won’t be hard work or c) you won’t have to pay your dues.
I’ve got no sympathy for the strawman kid who sits in the basement expecting for someone to come give him a job. I do have sympathy for the kid who got a good GPA, has been sending resumes out left and right, networking, and still can’t find anything. Telling that kid, who would have a job and be paying his dues in previous generations, to stop complaining and start flipping burgers is an insult.

Did someone force you to do this? I ask because I was for a while a de facto second level manager. I quickly realized that negotiating with internal customers and doing budgets all day would be my idea of hell. I don’t know if they would have given me the job or not, but I made damn sure I didn’t get it. It would have been more money, but more misery. I have never regretted that decision.

147

Does it take 80 hours a week of work, or 80 hours a week of activity which is too much fun to be work?
I pretty much agree with your response to iamthewalrus(:3=. Money has nothing to do with it. Anyone choosing a career only for the money is going to be miserable in it. It is nice to like something that pays well, of course. I have a friend who wanted to be an art major, but her father, career military, ordered her to study business. She worked her whole life in business, made reasonable money, but was always miserable. I also agree that crappy coders will get crappy or no jobs - but I find it hard to believe that someone who is miserable at programming would ever love doing it.

148

No, I’d say “Stop complaining, keep sending out resumes, and be willing to flip burgers while you wait because times are hard for everyone so shit’s gonna take longer than you may have thought.”

It’s a good bet that no one on the ole burger line is really excited about being there.

149

I don’t buy it. At Berkeley, at least, getting into CS or EE is very hard, and anyone not in that program can’t expect to transfer into it later. The easier majors are easier to get into. So there is more competition for the harder degree. Not that this is new. When I taught CS classes in grad school 35 years ago I never had to worry about football players wanting special treatment - they never came near my classes.

BTW, while the economy as a whole still sucks anyone lucky enough to have earned a CS or EE MS or PhD degree from a good school is in good shape, at least in Silicon Valley. Almost everyone is hiring. I know new grads are getting multiple offers, and I know they are getting big offers also. But two years ago things were bleak.

150

Yes, sarcasm was intended. I suppose when you set it against Doug’s posts in this thread it looks just as bleak and angsty as his.

I genuinely can’t fathom 80 hours a week though, unless there really is genuinely nothing else you’d rather do with your free time. I suppose if I got paid to play games and watch movies I’d clock in that much time. Difference in priorities, like you say.

I dunno about that. Some days I think about taking a low-level menial job because it’s just such low responsibility. You don’t take your work home with you, there’s no big-dollar clients to lube up and bend over for…if your passion in life is something that doesn’t generate much money, a low-responsibility job is a good way to keep your work life and personal life compartmentalized. I couldn’t afford the drop in pay, but sometimes it’s nice to think about.

151

You and Kevin Spacey.

152

And Ron Livingston. When I think about making that change, I think about Peter Gibbons going from Initech to working a shovel.

153

I am a full-time PhD student in a top tier program and do about 20 hours per week of consulting. I love my academic work: I get to read dead languages and do game theory all day, every day. I am fully funded and get a stipend, and more money on top of that for teaching. When I was in 4th grade, I told my parents quite proudly that I wanted to be an Egyptologist when I grew up. This semester, I am TAing a course on pharaonic Egypt. It don’t get much better than this.

My 20 hours in business keep the mortgage paid and support my wife and my 15-month old son. Like my academic work, it is almost entirely virtual. I almost never have to endure meetings anymore. I just work on projects and do analytical work. It’s enough hours per week to stay interesting without becoming utterly tedious.

It can be a bit much from time to time and there are sometimes things I would rather do. It might be nice to see friends a little more often, and I definitely miss playing video games. I wouldn’t be able to give up pretty much all of my leisure time for anything less than something I really love.

More or less. I roll out of bed and start working at about 6:30. I try to be done by 7PM so I can have a real dinner and spend a little time with my son. I am usually asleep by 10:30. This schedule holds for weekends as well as weekdays.

There’s definitely some drudgery to it, but most of the time, I am still mystified that I get paid to do what I do. I used to work a 40-hour week and felt like I spent half the time staring at the clock. Now I don’t really have weekends anymore, but the days never drag. I have never worked so hard nor been so productive.

Yeah. It is nice when one’s talents, passions, and abilities all align on some low-supply career with high barriers to entry. But for most of us, that just doesn’t happen. Majoring in something you wouldn’t have ordinarily won’t change that.

154

I’m not sure how literally you meant this. While I don’t work at McDonald’s, I have and do work fairly ‘menial’ jobs and I truly enjoy them! If I didn’t, I would be doing other things by now. I had a couple years where I worked full time as an office manager (a position that requires a degree in most companies) in a fledgling business; I had to quit. I hated being in charge of other people, I hated the stress that came with having to solve problems (plenty of which were unsolvable), and I hated sitting in an office all day fiddling with paperwork and emails. I vastly prefer jobs with a fast pace, where I’m on my feet doing physical labor, and where I’m an underling who fulfills her job requirements and doesn’t think about work for a second after I walk out the door.

Like Marley said it’s all about priorities.

155

Fair deal, I can admittedly think of a few things besides leisure consumption where I’d be willing to put in that kind of time. Sounds like a good life.

156

This whole meme of the “whiny, entitled under-30 year old who refused to flip burgers” strikes me as a strawman. I’d like to see evidence that (1) jobs flipping burgers (or other such “menial” work) exist in sufficient quantities and are sufficiently obtain that every unemployed college graduate could get such a job if they so chose, and, if so, that (2) a significant percentage of such young graduates are indeed refusing to take such jobs.

I can say, anecdoctally, that I know of many young college graduates right now who are indeed working low pay manual labor jobs, as well as many who have desperately tried to such low pay jobs without success.

Remember, media portrayals of vapid, spoiled youth who are handed everything they desire for free by overindulgent parents reflects to a large extent a particular economic class that does not encompass the majority of the population. Plenty of today’s young college graduates do not come from wealthy families and do not suffer under the delusion that everything in life is free. Calling them “entitled” or “whiners” seems more a way of deflecting from genuine grievances that today’s youth have, such as being saddled with ever increasing levels of crushing debt because government is abandoning its former investment in public education in favor of tax cuts for the super rich, or government giving huge bailouts to the same banks that caused the financial crisis while cutting back on what little social safety net exists for regular people who are suffering from said crisis.

157

To do what? To become a bureaucrat? Well, no. Not in an absolute sense. If I had wanted to stay employed at my current agency, then yes. My more “fun” position was being eliminated, so it was either move up and become a policy-type person, or re-enter the worst job market this country has seen in a zallion years. It was a no-brainer for me.

Maybe I have a higher or different bar of what constitutes “hell”. Hell to me is sending out a hundred resumes a week and not hearing anything. Or flubbing interviews. Or working double shifts at McDonald’s. Or asking my parents if I can move in with them because I have no money. Or starving out on the streets. Those are “hellish” scenarios. My life is heaven compared to how bad it is for many people. My worst day at work is blissful compared to what it could be. So when I view my situation like this, I absolutely love my job and wouldn’t trade it for the world.

I’m comfortable enough. Enough is all I need. I’ve never been very ambitious or full of desires. So “chasing dreams” has never been an important part of my life’s equation. Being comfortable enough has, though.

Then again, I see work as just the thing I do for eight hours in the day to put food on the table and to keep myself occupied. I have sixteen other hours in the day to use on self-fulfillment and happiness. I will always have those sixteen hours. As long as I make sure that what I do during the nine-to-five time interval is comfortable enough, then I can use the rest of my day anyway I like.

I totally understand people who are passionate about their line of work, and I admire them for it. But I also admire people who don’t think they have to be happy-happy-joy-joy to get shit done, and who realize that “career” equals neither “life” or “who I am”.

158

From the anecdotal evidence of Dear Abby and the like, the parents of the lazy bum kids who sleep all day, mooch, never help, and never look for a job don’t have much money. There is no correlation to the level of ones bank account and the inability to push a kid out the door. In fact, those with money probably have more connections and have more ability to get the kid a job, and probably a better one than flipping burgers.

159

There are a lot of fair points being made in this thread, but I think it’s worth reiterating that the problem is a fair bit deeper than just accusations that young people have unrealistic expectations regarding the job market. As a European I obviously have a European perspective rather than a US one, so I don’t personally know how bad it is in the US right now (and I imagine the variations by region are enormous) – but for example, the unemployment rate in Spain was 21.5% for the previous quarter (here’s one of the first English-language cites that turned up). That’s nearly 5 million people, and most of the unemployed are young. That problem is far larger than can be fixed by adjusting expectations – it’s a real and persistent absence of jobs, rendering it unrealistic for a great deal of people to support themselves at all, and it’s through no fault of the youth. I’d argue that effectively the entire industrialised world is facing essentially the same problem, only generally on a smaller scale (thankfully) – that is, Europe and North America currently does not have *enough *jobs of *any *kind to sustain the available workforce. People aren’t entitled to their dream jobs, but they are entitled to *a *job - it’s even in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for what that’s worth.

Anyway, I’m going to stop here – my observations are primarily based on what I saw and experienced in Europe up to a few months ago. Now that I’ve relocated to Brazil (relatively unaffected by the global financial crisis) again, I actually have a number of decent prospects for when my unpaid internship is over, plus I’ve recently passed the first step of the selection process for my dream job. So for the immediate future, I shouldn’t complain :slight_smile:

160

Not much actually. You are entitled to not be prevented from working, but to have a job requires someone else to say “I need this work performed and I am willing to pay you to do it”. You can’t make people hire someone else any more than you can make them work for someone else.