Guys, they were anecdortes, not road maps. You don’t need corner stores or Radio Shacks. The larger point is that good things happen to the people who step up. If you take the attitude that you’er just a drone that no one cares about, and you act accordingly, well, that’s how people will treat you.
I can’t tell you where the big opportunity might come from, or even that there will be one. But I AM saying that serendipity exists, and that standing out from the crowd through harder work, better education or a better attitude will best position you to grab it.
“There is no such thing as luck. There is only adequate or inadequate preparation in dealing with a statistical universe,.”
-Robert Heinlein
And since I’m quoting science fiction authors, Sturgeon’s law says that 90% of everything is crap. That includes a lot of workers. Your job is to be in the 10%. Management types call them the ‘vital few’, and finding them is the holy grail of HR. Make yourself one of them, and you’ll do fine.
Hide back in the pack with attitudes like, “Why should I have to? That’s not what you pay me for”, or adopting a hostile relationship between you and your boss, or any number of things people use to justify not stepping up when asked, will ensure that your jobs truly are ‘static’. I’ve seen people sabotage themselves with bad attitudes towards employment my entire life.
So what do local teens do for spending money nowadays? I’m the parent of a 14 year old, and I can tell you he can’t wait to be old enough to get a job so he can earn his own money.
My company was mostly bachelors or masters. My group was mostly PhD since we were involved in specialty that undergrads don’t learn.We were dealing with leading edge microprocessor design, so experts were scarce. Thanks to my conference work I knew all the leading professors and thus had pretty good access to their students - and I trusted their evaluations.
I would have liked to have hired more experienced people, but my boss never got the reqs.
I am not saying our hiring policies were rational. I once had a chat with an HR person who came over from our old company, and she told me the dirty details. I thought I was in Alice in Wonderland - curiouser and curiouser. But it told me how to hack the system to get what was best for us.
Hell yes. I learned a ton from the new students I hired.
And an old grad probably has bigger gaps, but they may not be aware of them. And they are probably in newer technology, which is more dangerous not to know. I kept up better than most, and I still had a lot of holes in knowledge of recent areas like machine learning, for instance.
Heinlein’s suggestion for writers was to write the story, do another pass to correct typos, and send it in. It worked for Heinlein, but it wouldn’t work for 95% of writers who need multiple passes. Mozart and Beethoven seemed to work in different ways, with Mozart writing in his head while Beethoven worked out variation upon variation.
I got on Jeopardy the first time I tried out, easily, because I have a good memory. Some people there tried out every six weeks and got nowhere. I couldn’t give them advice, except be born with different genes. Perhaps some of the people who don’t make an effort find even simple job skills hard, or have been raised in an environment where they are not given credit for these kind of skills.
Most Dopers are high on the achievement scale. Let’s not denigrate those who aren’t.
I’m not just talking about raw achievement. ANYONE has the capacity to offer to stay after work and help with something, or agree to pick up a lousy shift when someone is sick, or do some extra tasks during downtime, or whatever.
The person who makes it to manager in a store is not an Einstein, and doesn’t have to be. What they have to be is reliable, pleasant, and willing to work hard when necessary. That’s all it takes to make it into the top 10% in many places.
My mother was not a genius. Neither was my brother. Both succeeded merely because they were always the hardest workers in the bunch. And ‘success’ is relative. Neither became rich, or even well off. But they succeeded on their own terms, within their own limits.
It happens though. I have one. I developed the data and the system. Like you say few and far between though. I had the perfect credentials for it (no degree for this at the time). But I was already experienced in something nobody knew anything about.
Excellent. Most times, hard work only gives you blisters or headaches.
Similar to my brother. He ended up doing well driving a truck. He made plenty of mistakes along the way though.
Could not agree more.
If I may ask, @Sam_Stone , what did or do you do in last job?
My last job was Sr. Software Developer at a big company. I was there for 20 years. Before that I was a professional gambler for a few years, the IT director in a publishing company and before that I ran my own software company for a decade, having started it while in college.
My kid tutors math and teaches tennis. But most of the time she’s on the resume building treadmill of extracurriculars that proclaim “Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Initiative” to make her attractive to colleges. Robotics, school literary magazine editor, math honor society president, Math team, Community Service club co-President. She was using Google Calendar in 8th grade to manage her meetings.
We live in a relatively affluent town with very “good” schools, where 98% of graduates go on to college (93% to four year schools). Half the students are gunning for Highly Selective or higher colleges, and the stupid resume building starts at age 11. My suspicion is it also screams “I’m upper middle class, your kind of people, and can PAY!” more than it proves anything else.
30 years ago when my siblings were in a similar situation, the type of resume they needed to get into say UNC or Tulane wouldn’t get you into Generic Directional State University nowadays.
I was competitive when I graduated. I’m not sure I would be as competitive stacked up against today’s top students. Of course these days I question the real value of an elite college compared to another university. Yet, I just opened a 529 for my three year old kid. I’m trying to afford our expensive public alma mater for him by the time he graduates. He doesn’t have to go, I just want him to have that option. He might be a leader, I guess a girl can dream, he certainly likes telling people what to do, but so far he has very limited social skills. But he’s so freaking smart I have to believe some college will know what to do with him. He has eccentric engineer or mathematician written all over him.
I think it would be cool if personal character predicted career outcomes but I’m not convinced it does. Research demonstrates that the best thing a child can be in this country is wealthy. I came from a less well-off background and it blows my mind that my son might not have to pay for college. I know so many good hard-working people who never get ahead. Stay late to do extra work when you’re a single mother and the daycare closes at 6pm? That’s not going to happen. Hell, I’m not even a single Mom and I can’t respond to the crisis need for shelter volunteers at my own agency without seriously messing up my husband’s day. The people who don’t go that extra mile are usually just so exhausted. And not everybody gets an equal allotment of energy, I know that for a fact.
All that said, one of the best insights of my life was that there is never any cavalry coming to save you. You just have to figure it out for yourself.
There’s some balance, somehow, between people are totally helpless and anyone can do anything.
To my experience …many kids (unsure if it’s ‘most’ kids) simply don’t spend their own money. If they need something – and also usually if they want something – it’s the parents buying it. Sometimes, the “want to haves” don’t happen.
It’s just a different universe for today’s teens (my own two plus most of their friend groups). There’s almost no hanging out in public places – no going to the mall, going shopping, the proverbial ‘malt shop’, no more video arcades, none of that. Social life is largely lived online and via texting. Parents pay for the computers & phones & the internet service … the kids avail themselves.
I take it that it’s different for different kids in different places. I’m just reporting what I’m seeing in my immediate sphere.
One way I’m reckoning it is that today’s high-schoolers are comparable in maturity levels and activities to yesterday’s 12-14 year-olds. My daughter makes 21 this year, and her and her friend group (her age up to about 23-24) are pretty much living like 1980s-90s teens. Only after high-school graduation have their wings begun to spread a little.
My son was a worker, he always wanted money - and needed it. So he bussed tables at a restaurant, worked at a movie theatre, moved sheetrock for some buddy’s father for cash under the table.
My youngest worked at Target for a bit, but frankly didn’t need money like their brother did. And was much busier building the college resume - that did pay off because we paid something like $30,000 for four years at a selective (but not highly selective) university after scholarships. It was a way better deal for us for them to have a college application that included activities and volunteering than one that had job when it came to scholarship money - they would have made a few thousand dollars at a job. They got $30k a year in scholarships.
There are lot of reasons people aren’t working such as mental illness, physical disabilities, sex offences and felonies along with homelessness which not a lot of legit jobs that withhold taxes want to hire since jobs discriminate against felons, homeless, physically disabled and mentally ill thinking they are untrustworthy and not reliable. Thats why lot of mentally ill, homeless, and felons along with sex offenders work under the table cash jobs like illegals from Mexico or Central America lining up in Home Depot waiting for a guy in pick up truck which pays less than minimum wage since cash jobs don’t do background checks.
Working in fast food has become incredibly stigmatized in recent years. Not sure why; it’s an honest paycheck. As for Walmart, etc. they treat their employees very poorly, doing things like changing schedules without asking if it’s OK first, and that’s the least of it.
One thing I’m hearing more and more in recent years is that people are increasingly graduating from COLLEGE with no work experience whatsoever. An unpaid summer internship, maybe, but no paid employment of any kind.
TBH, most people really don’t want to “move up the ladder.” They just want to do their jobs, and go home.
Your son will do well and find a well paying job with benefits if he is doing good in school. You don’t need to do extracurriculars to be successful in life.
I once worked for a very, very, very large organization with extremely strict work rules. “Staying late to help out” would get you over time pay for the time and a pink slip. Not kidding, saw it happen to three people while I was there. Absolutely positively no overtime ever, so “picking up an extra shift” only worked until you hit the 40 hour mark.
Why was I there? They paid three times what other companies in the area were paying at the time. Wish that job had lasted longer but alas, from the start it was made clear it was a temporary position. I got called back twice after my first run so I must have done something right, but there was never going to be any way to leverage that job into something more or permanently/long term and no way to get promoted. You stayed at the level you were hired at. This was explained very thoroughly at orientation. No matter how outstanding you were the most it would get you is an offer to work a few more weeks as the project wound down. That was the most.
Granted that situation was a bit unusual, but “work hard” doesn’t always work. Hence the term “work smarter”. At the place described above the smarter approach was to follow the rules to the letter and, sure, be reliable and work hard but don’t put so much effort in you get diminishing returns.
In my experience “pleasant” is NOT a requirement to be a store manager.
As mentioned up thread, the number of jobs and the number of people wanting them have both increased, but the former faster than the latter. There’s absolutely nothing mysterious going on. Employers compete in compensation and job quality. Walmart and fast food are lacking in the latter.