Is this kid from a rich family or something? For all we know he’ll be making millions, I really don’t get trashing him because he turned down a job.
Yeah, seriously. Granted I’m in the Midwest so the pay’s a little lower in comparison here, but it took me about 8 years out of college to claw my way over the 40k mark. (B.A. in History.)
My first job out of college paid ~21k a year.
If you haven’t read the article, note a few things. First, he did try for an officer position in the Marine Corp but was rejected due to medical reasons.
And note this quote, “Scott Nicholson also has connections, of course, but no one in his network of family and friends has been able to steer him into marketing or finance or management training or any career-oriented opening at a big corporation, his goal. The jobs are simply not there.” He seems interested only in a job at a big company. but they’re not the ones doing the hiring now. Most jobs are at small companies.
Also, note this quote, “In better times, Scott’s father might have given his son work at Endeavor, but the father is laying off workers, and a job in manufacturing, in Scott’s eyes, would be a defeat. ‘If you talk to 20 people,’ Scott said, ‘you’ll find only one in manufacturing and everyone else in finance or something else.’” It’s a sign of the times and the state of the country that this kid is rejecting the idea of working in manufacturing. The US doesn’t seem to make anything any more.
Finally, the article says that both the father and grandfather got their starts through connections and not perseverance.
Wouldn’t the kid be more employable if he already had a job? Wouldn’t that in itself be reason enough to take the* lowly *40k per?
He has asthma. I know a few service members who have asthma and are active duty. They either were diagnosed with asthma after they joined or requested and received a medical waiver prior to joining up. He was also told he could apply again, now that his condition was known, but he gave up.
And yet, a manufacturing job is also one that he would likely reject, since as you indicated in your second cite, he wanted a white collar job at a big company. A lot of people don’t have sympathy for this guy not because he’s young or his family is well-off enough so that he can afford to be and stay unemployed for over a year. The real reason seems to be that his parents are completely financially supporting him, but this doesn’t seem to motivate him - out of guilt or gratitude - to sufficiently bust his hump to discover opportunities that may not appear on monster.com.
One of the first things the article mentions is that he scours online job listings and applies online. That’s good, but if he’s truly serious and determined to get a job, he needs to get out of his parents’ (or brother’s) place, volunteer, intern, or otherwise get in a potential employer’s face (in a good way) so that they can see he is dependable, valuable, and worthy of the first job opening they have. For him, the perfect is the enemy of the good. Yet, day after day, he’s waiting for the perfect to show up and by the end of the article, he’s willing to become a part-time bartender or do temp jobs while still rejecting the good.
I don’t get anything about this story- why is this in the paper? Why does anyone care?
He’s a somewhat naive kid who hasn’t quite realized that being from an upper-middle class family is not the same as being from an outright rich family and that while there was a time that somewhat-well-connected kid fresh out of school could get a fast track job with a big corporation, that’s probably not what is going to happen to him right now. Sure, he comes off as a bit of a douche, but it’s not like he’s whining about things.
I don’t think it’s a huge crime to pass up a well-paid but otherwise uninspiring job. One of the reasons our parents worked so hard is so that we would have options they didn’t have. And it’s not like we expect all this for free. We have children later so that we can have these kinds of choices when we are young. At an age when our parents were chasing kids around the big front yard and enjoying stable married suburban life, we are filling out online dating profiles and listening to our biological clocks tick in our rented apartments. We know the trade-offs.
I know people who just jumped on the first job they could after college. Many of them are still working those jobs and their Facebook updates are an endless stream of “Ugh, I don’t want to go to work. Can’t wait until Friday.” Inertia is a strong force and once your career is in motion it can be tough to stop it even if it isn’t fulfilling you. Mostly they have families to raise so they have a good reason to keep plugging away. But if you don’t have a family to support, why not hold out a bit and see if you can get something better going?
*At 16, she quit high school
to make her fortune in the Promised Land
She got a job behind the counter
at an all-night hamburger stand.
She wrote faithfully home to Mama
“Now mama, don’t you worry none.
From small things, Mama, big things one day come.”*
- Dave Edmunds
Prediction: as a result of notoriety earned from the Times article, he will soon be offered a starring role in a weekly basic cable reality show called “Scott Nicholson’s Hardly Workin’,” which will follow the young man’s “inability” to find a job as he frequents tanning salons, goes windsurfing, and cavorts drunkenly in Cancun with his equally unemployable friends.
Way I read it, he wants an “entry level” position, but one that puts him on a career track.
The issue being whether or not there exists these days anything like a ‘career ladder’ to get on. Most folks I know did not have the sort of scripted career that this type of thinking assumes.
However, the issue seems to be - accept reasonably good money now for what you think is a dead-end position, or hold out for a job in a position you think is going places. Can’t say that there is an obviouly wrong answer to that question - much depends on your cirumstances. If one has resources, such as parents willing to support you, it may pay off to hold out for the better career, rather than take the first offer (and possibly be trapped by inertia into doing it for life). Or maybe not, if you don’t have any realistic chance of getting anything better.
I think about this in my own career. I’m a lawyer in a big firm in Toronto; my “administrative assistant” (used to be called a 'secretary") works as hard as I and is, I judge, of the same basic ability. So why is she working at a position which pays so much less? Well, unlike me, she was not in a position when young to take years off earning and go to law school. Similarly, many folks don’t have the luxury of turning down a job making $40K claims-adjusting of whatever to wait for something better.
Dear Sir, or Madam,
As a matter of general policy, this office, and Paul in Saudi no longer provides comments on the Younger Generation, its morality, sexuality or mode of dress and dance. This is because Paul in Saudi is quite out of touch with young people with their hair and their clothes.
I am sure however, the issues you have raised are valid and the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
I am, very sincerely yours,
Paul in Qatar, Saudi, whatever
This is true. Many of us have student loans coming out of school, and if we accept a so-so job away from home, we might also have a leased apartment and car payments. So the need to pay these bills every month is a motivator for staying with a job that might not be the right one. The kid in the story is lucky that he doesn’t have loans and can live at home after college.
I love these threads where you crotchety old folks get angry that standards of living for college educated Americans has gone up. How unfair for you!
It’s either you’re out of touch or it’s Jackmannii:
Or maybe he’s just being ultra au courant, making a meta-metrosexual comment.
If you only read the first page you don’t find out that the guy’s family is quite well-off. On page three we find that his parents’ combined income is about $175,000 a year, his grandfather seems to be wealthier than that, and his parents and grandparents paid all of the college costs for Scott and his two brothers. On page four we find out he’s moved into an apartment with his brother and his parents are paying the rent (presumably $1,000 a month).
The Times tries to pass him off as a representative millennial, and you can see a lot of posters here fell for it because it confirms their preconceived notions. And some of the issues discussed in the story are legit regardless. But he’s not a typical example of a young kid out of college because he has essentially no motivation to take a job. His family is on his case about it but it’s clear they aren’t pushing all that hard: he’s 24, so he probably graduated college in 2008. They should have based this story around someone else.
More to the point:
Why do under-educated, inexperienced people think that some overworked, resumé-shredding robot of a human resource person will find them valuable or worth hiring?
More than ever these days, you are your resumé. Who you really are will never get you hired, or even interviewed, in times when there are 200, 400, 1000 applicants for every slot. You have to master the formalities, hit the marks exactly, and even then, chance has to be on your side.
We live in a complicated world. People who can’t or won’t negotiate its complexities have no place in this world.
Colgate University has a crest.
Um, “hell in a handbag” has been around awhile. I’m pretty sure it predates this Carter Administration-era song:
Give a man a free ticket on a dead end ride
And he’ll climb in the back even though nobody’s driving
Too goddamn lazy to crawl out of the wreck
And he’ll rot there while he waits for the welfare check
Going to hell in a handbag, can’t you see
I ain’t gonna eat no Government Cheese
- The Rainmakers
Like the laid-off person struggling to keep their family fed and house from being foreclosed, who’d love to have a $40K a year job.
There have been spoiled, entitled sluggards in every generation. Most have had the sense to stay out of the N.Y. Times.
But what you’re trying to say is that $40k at an insurance agency is a shit job. It isn’t! Even in a good economy.
He spends 5 years at the insurance company, if he’s good, he might see an assistant manager position. Meanwhile, economy recovers. He sees a better job at a big corporation. Big corporation goes ‘HAI THERE YOU HAS AN EXPERIENCE, HAVE BETTER THAN ENTRY LEVEL JOB’ over alternate version where he sits on his ass waiting for 3 years to get an entry level job at same corp and has lost 3 years of experience the big corp thinks is good to have.
Nah, the New York Times couldn’t have done that. Their coverage of the current economic troubles has been consistently about the hardships of the wealthy and near-wealthy. AFATC, they’re the only people that matter.
Sure. But even if they were doing a story about a recent college grad who was having trouble finding a job that met his expectations and making connections and such, someone who wasn’t from a wealthy family would have better illustrated their point. Colgate is very expensive private school. Collegedata.com says it costs about $53,000 a year to attend, and even for those who go to a school like that, how many graduate with no student loans?