chappa nailed it.
I’m sorry, but even if you find this job soul-destroying, the fact is you need a job. 42k plus benefits for a 4-year marketing student is awesome! Unless the job is something like stomping on kittens, take it. Take it, and look for a better job. It looks good on your resume, it’s really good pay, and who knows - you might like it. It really hardly matters what details are missing, unless it’s something like “we need you to move across the country”. This kid fucked up.
I’m loathed to call young people stupid. Assuming the nephew turned down a job for the reason stated in the OP, yes, it was an incredibly stupid decision. However, it is easy to think this only because it hasn’t worked out yet. For all we know, tomorrow he could get hired for his “dream job”.
It could be that he was concerned he would be miserable at that job apart from salary, but being a young male he came up with a macho cover to save face. If he’d come to me for advice, though, I would have told him to suck it up. Quitting a job when you are miserable is perfectly acceptable as long as you’ve got something lined up OR you have ample savings OR you have someone who is willing to support you indefinitely. If you don’t have these things, you need to slog it out until you do. ESPECIALLY if you are young. Because the skin isn’t so thick yet when you’re young. Every paper cut seems life-threatening when you haven’t experienced a bullet shot.
He may be in a social circle full of movers and shakers–recent grads who have their eyes set on making six figures. It would be hard to resist this kind of peer pressure and be the only one who “settles” for a pleb job while everyone else moves out to Silicon Valley or something.
We also don’t know what kind of subtle pressure his parents have put on him. If his parents have upper middle-class incomes, he may think $42K is paltry for someone of his upbringing. Which of course is self-entitled bullshit. But it would be understandable if his whole life he’s overheard his parents bashing “poor” people who don’t make “good” salaries like theirs.
Obviously the kid never heard of networking.
I was a degreed Aero Engineer during a period of hiring freezes and the only job I could get was in the financial aid dept of a junior college, so I took it. The job sucked, the boss was an arrogant ass, and while I knew I was helping out students who wanted to continue their education, I was close to embarrassed being there.
But one conversation led to another, and I found out a woman there was married to a man who worked in the plant engineering division of a local depot. He sat down with me, helped me customize my resume, then hand-carried it to the head of the tool-design branch. I was hired as a Mechanical Engineer during a brief thaw of the hiring freeze, and it led to a very successful 26-year run doing both mechanical and aerospace structural engineering. All because I took a job that really was beneath me in terms of what I’d been educated to do.
I think there’s a moral in there somewhere…
If he is an engineer, he’s correct, $42k is beneath him. Otherwise? He’s a dope.
This is not atypical for someone that age. It’s a sign that he knows what he doesn’t want, but doesn’t have a good idea of what he does want. It may not be the smartest move objectively, but it may be that he needs to struggle a while to figure out his real goal.
When you have a strong goal, you can do stuff you aren’t excited about, because you are building towards something. But when you don’t have a real objective, settling in to something like that can feel like giving up-- which is a terrifying thing to feel at 22.
I graduated with a not-particularly-marketable degree. I refused to even look at stable jobs because they just didn’t seem right to me, they seemed like dying. So I barely scraped by with an assortment of low wage service jobs, and applied to absurd positions that I would never get because they sounded cool. I had no idea how one gets a good job.
Then one day I took a poorly planned trip to India on a whim. I fell in love with travel and realized that if I ever wanted to travel as much as would like to, I’d need a job that bought me plane tickets. 10 years and a lot of hard work later, I’m living the dream, doing exactly what I was meant to do all along.
I’d certainly be better off if I had figured that all out a lot earlier. But I didn’t. I am lucky to have a family that balanced their desire to see me stable with an understanding that I had to find my own path.
Seriously?
Like we weren’t all dopes at that age? Like we didn’t gain our wisdom from making stupid mistakes when we were young.
It’s his life. These are his mistakes to make. And live with.
Surely you have something better to apply your energies to. So what if he made a bad decision? No one’s going to jail or getting their hand cut off here.
He can and will recover from this.
Less judgey, more lovey! That’s my advice!
It’s always easier to get a job, while you have a job. Future employers see a current job as a positive. He should have taken the job, waited a year and then started looking for other things while he continued to work.
He’s got his family and friends to offer him love and unconditional support. We’re strangers that represent the real world and our role is to tell him he fucked up.
As for moving on to a better job, do you think somebody who’s hiring for a great $80,000 a year job is looking for applicants whose experience is working part time at a dry cleaner’s? No, they’re going to hire the guy who’s working that $42,000 a year job. Great jobs go to people who have good jobs, good jobs go to people who have mediocre jobs, and mediocre jobs go to people who have lousy jobs. This kid is now going to have to struggle his way back up to the level of that job he turned down. And when he gets there, he’s going to find he’s now fallen behind everyone else who’s been working there for a few years.
Without more information, I can’t tell. If it was a mistake, then at 21 is a fine time for making a mistake. Arm-chairing it, it sounds like he would have been wise to take the job, get some experience, and look for a job while he’s employed, since it does seem this job is in his field and would advance his market value within that field. Now, if job was far away from what he wanted to do, or if it was completely soul-sucking, then I can understand his decision, and it may not be stupid. But I am worried that nothing much has progressed in the interim in terms of the job search.
Still, not a biggie.
This.
He did actually use the words that the pay was beneath him. Yet from what I understand the job is somewhat similar to what he was doing for free for 3/4 a year. 
Huh?
He actually wanted the job but was insulted at the pay offer. Whether it was negotiable I know not. I also don’t know what he thought he was worth.
This topic has come up recently because my sister-in-law and her husband have been bitching about him working 3 lousy days a week and then doing nothing.
Do your sister-in-law and her husband charge him rent? If not, they should, just to soak up whatever little money he’s earning and push him to get a real job.
Assuming that everything here is fairly and accurately reported then I’ll move my answer to more of the “dope” side of things. It sounds like he let a bit of youthful hubris get a hold of him. It happens. What matters is how he recovers from his (probable) mis-step. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s doing much to make career in-roads–and that is what worries me–but we only have one side of the story here.
Ahh, who could fault a young man for falling for the allure of toluene?
ETA: on second thought, the kid will never be able to afford cake on a dry-cleaner’s salary.
He’s a dope. As noted up-thread, he was doing the same work for free for nine months and you have to start somewhere.
How much do straight out of school, wet-behind-the-ears engineers make these days? (and what kind of engineers are we talking about?)
Maybe he knows approximately what other people are making, and he knows they lowballed his offer? It’s one thing to not make much, it’s another to know you are making 20k less than everyone else in your shoes.
That happened to me once. I had good reason to expect a decent compensation package, and I was surprised in the offer letter by a total low-ball that was much less than anyone else on the team-- and then they stonewalled my negotiations. The message I got from that was pure “we don’t value you and your opportunities in this organization are limited.”
I took it because I had financial obligations, but I spent every minute of vacation time interviewing for other jobs. If I had been 22 at the time, I would have told them to shove it.
I think he simply had too-high expectations. Does he regret the decision now?
Depends on the specific field (materials science and computers seem to be on the high end, with environmental work on the low end), but between $54K and $65K to start.
This. It took me 5+ years to get a job in the legal field making $42K. It doesn’t make him dumb - he’s a 21 year old with no experience of the real-world job market - but it was a really stupid decision. I am assuming that he didn’t have another offer, and that it wasn’t a cold-calling job (which many “marketing” positions are). You couldn’t pay me enough to do that again.
Double post.
It’s much easier to find a job when you already have a job. That’s a weird quirk of the job market, and right now it’s causing people with a lot of potential to languish in unemployment. Your nephew seems to have fallen into that trap. On the other hand, your entry salary level can have an impact on your earning potential throughout your whole life, so there’s kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” aspect to the job search. Welcome to life, kid!