18 ms·

The Youth Unemployment Bomb

108 points by alexwestholm 16y ago

patio11 16y ago
I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day". I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new normal for him has become that he works 15 minutes a day or less on his job search. (Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.)
- _delirium 16y ago
  (Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.) The welfare-reform efforts of the past 15-20 years in most western countries have tended to do exactly the opposite, oddly enough. Out of a worry that people were just receiving benefits without really looking for work, you must now demonstrate that you're actively sending out resumes and filling out applications. Some jurisdictions even require you to show up every so often to a center where they help you search job listings and send out resumes.
  - bioh42_2 16y ago
    John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again. It seems silly, but if we truly recognize that long term unemployment has a horrible way of killing one's ability hold a job, then Keynes idea is rather practical. The government not as welfare but simply as employers of last resort. Much like the Fed is the lender of last resort. Obviously this has the danger of government employees lobbying for ever better pay until it is economically irrational for people to seek work in the private sector.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      Hmm interesting; I vaguely remember that, but had forgotten about the concept and term. Looks like it's still a fairly active idea being debated by economists, though not so much by politicians: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+resort%22&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+reso...
    - marquis 16y ago
      You would think that all a government has to do is supply assistance to trades people to hire/train apprentices. I had a cousin go into the Navy just to learn a trade which upset me, as in previous decades he could have learnt the same trade by entering an apprenticeship. I belive some countries like Austria still support these programs, I have friends whose teenage boys left school early but were able to enter a subsidised apprenticeship rather than drop out and become unemployable.
    - Alex3917 16y ago
      "John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again." In his lifetime though we already did this. If you were too poor to get by then you could go live at the town farm where you would receive public assistance in exchange for working. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse
    - gaius 16y ago
      I agree, but Charles Dickens made that politically impossible. "Are there no workhouses?" Etc.
      - rdouble 16y ago
        WPA was long after Dickens.
        gaius 16y ago
        I don't know what that is, some American thing? Here in the UK every time it's suggested the word "Dickensian" gets bandied about and that's that.
  - ylem 16y ago
    I have a sister who is unemployed in California (Pasadena), so I will make a few anecdotal observations. She was an honors student in college and taught special ed for some years before moving on to manage some group homes for the mentally impaired. She then went into home health care and became unemployed when a job offer fell through. During this time (over 1 year), she has applied for many jobs (including an interview with a nursing home facility (sorry, don't know the details) on a reservation in New Mexico, where she would have to commute an hour each way to work--where she was a good fit and the daughter of one her teachers arranged for the interview). Some have been at traditional companies (HR), others have been at Target, Macy's, and other temporary jobs. Here's what she's found: 1) If you have a college degree, it's hard to get hired even for jobs that are 9 months with no chance of permanent employment, because you are "over qualified" 2) These unemployment centers are fairly useless for those with an education. If you go in everyday and a job happens to come in that matches you, then good. Otherwise, you're better off searching the internet yourself. Also, most of the money that's provided for training is for pretty basic jobs, like "medical coding" which seem like good outsourcing targets. Even though you go through the hoops for these, getting authorized to take these certificate programs can be Kafka-esque. For my sister, while she's still looking for a job, she's decided she wants to go the entrepreneurial route. She got a chance to pitch her idea to an incubator in Ann Arbor, but she only had crude drawings and while they liked the idea, they really wanted a prototype. She is not a coder, so she's enrolled for some courses at the local community college. But, I will say that I've seen some bias against hiring people who have been unemployed for some time. For example, a friend works as a pharmaceutical researcher and was told by recruiters that they are only interested in people who currently are employed (she was)...I think there's a tendency to believe that the jobs are out "there" and people are just too lazy to find them. However, I'm increasingly believing that we've moved to a two fluid model (to coin a physics phrase) where for people with specialized skills, or experience (for example, I've talked to people in sales at IBM and other companies who have told me that they've found it hard to hire people with the skills they want), the job market is actually not that bad and they are being actively recruited. On the other hand, there are people with lower skills and for them the outlook is rather bleak.
    - pzxc 16y ago
      I've never understood how being "overqualified" is a problem. No one says you have to list your degree or make mention of it. Just pretend you don't have one? What am I missing here? Are people too egotistical to accept a job at McDonald's when they have a degree? It has always been my opinion that any job is better than no job. If you need money, take what work you can. There's nothing that says you can't keep looking for a better job while you are working a holdover job. And, just like omitting mention of the degree, when you do apply for jobs that you really want, now or later, you don't have to put on your resume that you worked at McDonald's for three months while you were looking for better work.
  - cosmicray 16y ago
    Perhaps the time has arrived to dust off the old operating manuals for the CCC and the WPA. For those who don't recognize the acronyms, those were 2 of the major 'New Deal' programs during the 1930's era Great Depression. They were intended to get people back to work, and to try to restart the economy. The general objective was to renew/refresh our public infrastructure (via WPA) and to reforest-ate clear cut areas and improve problematic drainage (via CCC). Both programs were accused of being socialist (and perhaps they were).
  - jamesbkel 16y ago
    I've been experiencing this problem over the past few weeks. I've been working to find jobs that meet my fit (fairly high education and experience in a specific field) but many of these position take a week or two in order to schedule a full day of interviews. Yet, in order to get any sort of benefits (I'm in MA so, I can't drop off health insurance even for a short time) I need to send out resumes for obviously bs jobs.
- Alex3917 16y ago
  I think the bigger picture is that at least in the US, most of these people will never get middle class jobs because they just aren't smart enough to really contribute anything. If unemployment among youths is around 50% or whatever today, then just imagine what it will be in ten years when gas is $8 per gallon and we're facing food shortages. There is simply no way this is going to solve itself without massive government intervention, and I have trouble seeing that happening considering that there has been basically zero progress made by the federal government since I've been alive.
  - maurycy 16y ago
    Alex, you might be interested in Lang, Siniver, 2011[1]. What is interesting in this particular study how quickly the market acquires the information. So, if the unemployment is a global phenomenon across many different markets, in the same civilisation, it is possible that it changed somewhat permanently. (just an idea; I'm not fully convinced as well) [1]. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16730 http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16730
    - Alex3917 16y ago
      "Our results are therefore consistent with the view that employers use education information to screen workers but that the market acquires information fairly rapidly." I'm potentially interested in reading this but I have to ask, are they measuring the acquisition of information by changes in employment status and salary? Because if so this seems like begging the question.
      - maurycy 16y ago
        Yes. It uses self-reported wages.
  - prostoalex 16y ago
    Agree. For a good portion of 20th century majority of such population has been able to find jobs in manufacturing or some sales role. While competition from Asia eroded the first sector, Internet slowly eliminates the middlemen in other sectors. Travel agencies and newspapers first, retail associates, car salesmen and real estate agents next.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I've been very careful to craft my resume for the job applied for and to only apply for those where I have a shot. 1 interview out of 3 resumes seems like a good rate. I've only sent three, but that's because I realized the economy wasn't getting better any time soon. "Ran an advice blog" definitely looks better on my resume than "got really good at writing resumes." I'll start sending them out again once unemployment drops a couple percentage points, but I've made more money from this blog than I would have lost driving around asking for jobs (which is a double digit number, but still meaningful). I mentioned this here some months ago in a similar thread, and I'm only more sure of the value in doing this now. :)
  - patio11 16y ago
    Not applying for work because the unemployment rate is high is mind bending to me. Can you explain your reasoning? This sounds like it is full-stop guaranteed to mean several hundred thousand people get jobs before you get considered. I like the blog idea more than playing xBox but the commitment strategy here strikes me as severly suboptimal. (You may wish to recalibrate your understanding of meaningful: delaying your start date by 24 hours costs more than double digits.)
    - mkr-hn 16y ago
      I spent a year after college looking for jobs to apply to. I found three I was remotely qualified for (those I applied to). If I applied for even a small portion of the jobs that pop up on local job boards, it would consume every hour of the day. In a normal economy you'd see entry level jobs there. But every job wants years of experience and specialized certifications. I don't even have the means to get the certifications. Taking an alternate route is a coping method. I still probe the job boards during the day.
      - kevindication 16y ago
        One piece of advice: don't let the job ad make you think you're unqualified and stop you from applying. Employers often a) don't know what they want/need b) throw everything they can think of in that ad. It may be a challenge to get past the naive recruiter without all of the skills mentioned on your resume, but it can be worth it because the interview will bear out whether you'll actually be useful to the hiring manager.
- vaksel 16y ago
  there aren't that many new jobs added to all the jobs sites every day, so if you limit yourself just to sending resumes within the closest 100 miles, 15 minutes a day can be as much as you can actually spend. and yes sending resumes isn't as productive as having connections, but a lot of people just don't have that many connections that they can tap to get them a job
  - patio11 16y ago
    So make connections. People with day jobs manage to do this, too: imagine how easy it is with lots of free time.
    - vaksel 16y ago
      easier said than done you have to think outside the programmer mindset where there are lots of opportunities to meet people. For other careers, the only way to meet people in your industry is through a job or a conference.
      - patio11 16y ago
        I keep forgetting that the thriving tech scene in rural Japan skews my perspective so much. Seriously, though: if this is true, shouldn't programmers be basically incapable of dating (skew in industry, barriers to meeting outside)? It can't be harder to meet people than to date people. They go to places and do things. Well known places, most of which are in the phone book, many of which are open to the public, etc. I mean, take the automobile industry. I think anyone on HN could find a car salesman or MechE willing to talk to you in maybe two phone calls. There, you aren't a stranger anymore. (I further predict that most MechEs would fall over themselves lining up to talk to someone who sounded interested in torque ratios or whatever.)
        rdouble 16y ago
        Programmers are basically incapable of dating...
- sp_ 16y ago
  This is so true. I have a friend, fresh out of college with a Masters degree in CS from a German university, who has been unemployed for about a year now and in that time he has sent out maybe 10 to 15 applications. I carefully try to nudge him in the right direction by keeping an eye open for job offers that might interest him or by suggesting programming challenges/projects that could improve his skills. But instead of working on things that could improve his chances to get a job, he just watches TV all day long. If he put in only maybe three hours of open source coding time a day, his chances to score a job should increase tremendously. If you are an unemployed software developer, it is much easier to stay on top of things than in many other professions but in the end you have to have the motivation for it.
  - bartonfink 16y ago
    Honestly, if he put in three hours of ANYTHING constructive a day he'd be much better off than he is now.
Tycho 16y ago
Luckily the soil is fertile: All over the world, the hittistes and shabab atileen, NEETs and freeters and boomerang kids are hungry for a chance to thrive. Hmm, but how hungry? Compared to say people who came of age in the 40s or 50s? I'm not sure hungry is the right word. Restless maybe. Peckish.
- jhamburger 16y ago
  Do you have anything substantial behind this or is it just general "worst generation ever" talk?
  - Tycho 16y ago
    Well, even my mother, who came of age in the 70s, shared a small home with 8 other siblings and two very over-stressed parents (who would have had things even harder). She was literally desperate to leave and start living much more comfortably (ie. independently). Nowadays kids come from much smaller families, and have numerous cheap distractions/entertainments like the internet, cellphones, tv, games. Living independently would probably mean facing up to a lot of problems, just for a little more freedom. How could they possibly be just as hungry/desperate? Plus many people conduct their entire jobsearch from their laptop, and get benefits paid directly into their bank.
    - jhamburger 16y ago
      If people were really comfortable spending the early stage of their adult life with Xbox and mom's cooking, they could have skipped going $100,000 in debt for six years of post-high school education that your mother's generation couldn't be bothered with.
      - Tycho 16y ago
        That perhaps makes sense where you live, but in my country going to university is free and is simply the done thing. Having vague long term goals for your life is one thing, having practical concerns forcing you into action vs. letting you laze around and enjoy pastimes, is another.
bambax 16y ago
> But the failure to launch has serious consequences for society—as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's overthrown President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, discovered. Mmm, what? Don't make it sound like overturning dictators is a bad thing, dude. Maybe it's much better for "society" to have unemployed young people with not only the courage to fight for freedom but also nothing better to do with their time, than to have people with jobs who tolerate authoritarianism.
- kjhgfdfgh 16y ago
  The trouble is that they might get confused between overthrowing our stalwart allies in the war against terrorism like Mubarek and start thinking that there is no real difference between a dictator for life and a government that relects the same group of millionaire business leaders every year or one where the same bunch of toffs from the same few fancy schools get to be in charge.
  - kjhgfdfgh 16y ago
    Suppose you have a 'democratic' country where the same party has been in power since independance. The party leaders have got rich by telling everyone else the country is booming - when it was all a property scam. Now they have 30% youth unemployment and are cutting school and college funding to pay for it. They were quiet happy to support terrorists in another country for their own political gains - they might want to start worrying about where the next car bomb will be placed. And this is isn't in the middle east ......
    - JohnnyBrown 16y ago
      Ireland?
wisty 16y ago
I've spoken to a few Chinese about this, where manual workers get more than uni grads (though not as much as successful business owners). Chinese really value education (in the high culture sense), and education (in the sense of meaningless test scores), money, and status. Until a few years ago, degrees were a ticket to riches. Now, they just mean you are overqualified for higher-paying jobs. Their feelings about it tend to be extremely complicated.
- ylem 16y ago
  I think that you see this in places like Spain as well--you have a large educated, unemployed fraction of the population...
kiba 16y ago
It's time for youth to blaze new path to employment. 19 years old like me are trying to build a living on the internet by writing, programming, and selling ads. It's a lot of hard work to find clients and more scary when you're trying to deliver the work.
- bsaunder 16y ago
  Buy an Arduino and start building robots. IMHO, there's a long, rewarding career there.
  - kiba 16y ago
    I don't have such capital but I have around 600ish dollars worth of saving(In an another currency!) that's earned through hard work. Hopefully, the network of clients I am building will grows to such portion that I am able to find constant work as well charge more.
ngvrnd 16y ago
Things which cannot continue, won't.
rst 16y ago
One key bit: "more education is not always better. What matters is matching the skills of the workforce to the skills that employers demand. In Iran, where the percentage of people aged 15 and over with postsecondary degrees has soared from 2.5 percent to 10.5 percent over the past 20 years, the education system has become 'a giant diploma mill,' says Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economist at Virginia Tech." The same is true here, as many of our chronically "overqualified" unemployed could attest. What's worse, some of what counts as "training" here is a set of dubious commercial vocational schools --- cosmetology schools, and the like --- which soak up student loans, and leave the trainees with large debts that are hard to dismiss, even in bankruptcy. (And these are pretty big business. One of them, Kaplan, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post corporation that has over $2 billion in revenue, accounts for just about all of the parent corporation's profits. Not without controversy by the way; reports of abusive practices from Kaplan have led to allegations of fraud: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html The Washington Post, of course, has editorialized in favor of its baby.)
- ylem 16y ago
  This would seem to be especially true of "for profit" colleges. There was a pretty depressing tv special (frontline?) on it...They sell hopes and dreams.
scotty79 16y ago
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. Wealth is manufactured by machines not people. Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how much average member of society has to work for same basic needs. You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work because that work thanks to technology is producing more and more wealth. You can't keep prices of meals to be higher than recent technological wonder. Someone at some point will call bullshit on that. "My sandwich is not worth same amount of wealth as 4GB flash thumb drive. They just want me to pay this much for sandwich to keep me working because I need sandwich. I'll just pass on working, buy cheapest food and see how this works out. They don't seem to want me in their companies anyway." This unemployed generation can be the first one to take advantage of wealth humans get from technology en masse without need to cunningly trick everyone else out of their share. They'll get their share just by being more or less human dead weight that rich won't be able to shake off because they can't kill them or even let them die because there's for the first time too many of them.
- jerf 16y ago
  "Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more." Our poor people, at least in the US, are a lot more wealthy than they were several decades ago. Actually if you dig into the economics of deciding how much to work and for what, how preferences vary depending on how much of a resource you have and how cheap a lot of things are compared to decades ago, this is neither surprising nor terrible, nor really even preventable without actually going down to these people and dictating their economic preferences and proper lifestyle to them, which I at least find a repugnant idea. If you want to live a simple life with nothing from beyond 1950, no modern medicine, no modern tech gadgets, nothing beyond 1950, you can do it substantially cheaper. But it's just so easy to work a few more hours and get the modern stuff that it's the rare person who will choose to do this. If there's anything to be horrified by, it would be the cheapening of debt that has made it too easy to get buried under it vs. decades past.
- yummyfajitas 16y ago
  Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf (Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer many objections: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845 In particular, this is not a result of the poor being disproportionately old or young.)
ylem 16y ago
I think one thing that we have in the US is that unemployment centers were set up in a different age and are designed to serve unskilled labor--but there are not so many unskilled jobs. Some of the training programs that are paid for are short "certificate" programs of dubious worth. But, here's a question: currently sites like ODesk provide contract labor. Some of the jobs are for people to do research (for example, I wanted a listing of high schools/contact information for a side project I'm working on). I've only done a couple of postings, but I got very few American applicants. Is it just not well publicized? The rates are low, so it's not a good long term solution, but in some cases for "simple" research jobs, the rates could be $10/hr, which compared to some service jobs is competitive (since many service jobs here also don't provide health care)--especially in some lower cost of living states.
iamdave 16y ago
I grew up with an ex-drill sergeant for a father. My dad was a skilled carpenter, a certified electrician and welder (TIG, MIG and Stick), and has fixed every single car I've owned and totalled. Passed down to myself and my brothers, we're both skilled in welding, my brother now has his own electrician shop. I work in IT. If suddenly my IT job goes away, I have a trade to fall on. Skilled trades and physical labor it seems to be lost arts on my generation (I'm 25) and that depresses me.
- tannerburson 16y ago
  Move out of the city. In the more rural areas that isn't as true. It's definitely trending in that direction, but there are still a lot of kids who grow up with parents in skilled trades who pick up a lot of those skills growing up. Combine that with high schools that have legitimate trades programs, and there's at least a much better opportunity.
netmau5 16y ago
They mention the product lifecycle being short as a primary reason for not wanting to bring on new employees. If it takes someone 12 months to get up to speed in an 18 month product lifecycle, it is too costly. I've got to wonder what kind of industry takes 12 months to get up to speed unless you've got workers coming in with absolutely no training and education. For most programmers I know, the worst case ramp up time is around 3 months. That is often with a project that will never be profitable, much less make it for 18 months. There are other fiscally attractive reasons to hire young so I'd think if training was the only problem, we could solve that problem. The problem I see with regards to education in most companies is that there is simply no one on staff who can do the training effectively or is given the time to do so. Perhaps this will open the door for the return of a mini trade school in the form of an app.
- redrobot5050 16y ago
  Hardware engineering can easily be 12 months out of 18. There are a sundry of reasons: a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just aren't addressed at the same level. b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or Wasabi). c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc. d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months. e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU. This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.
pragmatic 16y ago
The simple answer is: These kids are training for the wrong jobs. College (in many areas) is a waste. Trade schools (vo-tech) offer a (almost 100%) guarantee of employment. A trade is a gateway to self employment (once you have your hours in for licensing). My brother has his master electrician's license in two states. He has more work than he knows what to do with. I have two friends who recently went back to school (one finishing undergrad business/marketing the other MBA). Their job outlook is _poor_. The market is flooded with people that have _soft_ skills. Our company is still hiring network technicians. Again a two year degree with _hard_ skill requirements. (Cisco certs, etc). Tech school is way cheaper than college and your job prospects are good.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I started on a networking specialist degree (2 year community college) before the economy tanked, and finished just after. I went in figuring I'd be dead before a technology would exist to automate it. I'm sure I'm right, but I didn't think about how a recession would impact it. On the plus side, there were endless streams of entry level positions I was well-qualified for before things went south, and I'll probably be able to find a job related to my degree when the economy starts improving.
- ianhawes 16y ago
  Couldn't agree more. I know plenty of people that do masonry, electrical work, etc.. and they're busier than ever.
- thedaveoflife 16y ago
  I agree that there are certainly plenty of opportunities presented by developing a technical skill. However the unemployment rate is only 4.5% for the college educated vs 10.7% for high school only and 8.4% for an associate degree/some college. So maybe college is not as much of a waste as you might think. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
  - pragmatic 16y ago
    Yes but show me the figures that break out Electrician/Plumber/LPN from 2 year business degrees. My sister in law got a 2 year biz degree. You're qualified to be a secretary (without experience). She went back and got LPN with an additional year at school. Her job outlook is amazing. Her income is 2 to 3 times what she could have made with only her business degree. Associated degree/some college includes a lot of things like child care/business, etc.
rorrr 16y ago
Anther problem is the education that people choose. The world is full of "VCR repairmen", while everyone is using disposable bluray players. I see it again and again, students pick silly, simple or just useless degrees, such as * philosophy * international relations (every single one of those wants to work for the UN, maybe 0.001% ends up there). * arts, all kinds * history (how many historians do we really need) Don't get me wrong, they are interesting and entertaining, but just not very helpful when it comes to being employable.
- mikecarlucci 16y ago
  Not to troll, but Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci etc. were all technical people with understanding of philosophy, art, history, mathematics. Obviously these are cherry-picked examples, but having only technical knowledge isn't a great solution either.
  - rorrr 16y ago
    I never said anything about technical only knowledge. I myself took a few art classes, and enjoyed them. What I said is that people pick these majors, and then we see these crazy unemployment stats. Most of these unemployed people are not qualified to do anything that society is willing to pay money for.
    - mikecarlucci 16y ago
      OK. Just making sure. Sometimes "the arts" get too much of a bad wrap here.
- jkeel 16y ago
  I' also add that these may seem "silly" on the cover but can be put to good use later on. I've known several successful managers (including our current Director) who have their undergrad degree in philosophy, albeit coupled with an MBA. Generally, I think the more well rounded a person is they can usually lead a more successful (fulfilling) life.
- 16y ago
deleted 16y ago
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andresmh 16y ago
In Mexico they are called nini's (_ni_ estudian, _ni_ trabajan). They often find "better" opportunities joining organized crime/drug cartels. This, in my opinion, is one the main challenges that need to be resolve in order to end violence in Mexico.
foljs 16y ago
Oh, there's no problem, if the are determined and work hard enough, they can all be entrepreneurs...
jderick 16y ago
The government should create jobs to solve this problem. Unemployment is cruel and inefficient. Prioritizing reducing the national debt over employment is short sighted.
DrJokepu 16y ago
The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language of their choice. I'd even accept an only marginally working solution with a few bugs. Still, most of them just can't do it. They don't even know how to start. Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. After 3-5 years of higher education, many of the graduates can't solve even the most basic programming problems. I suspect that this must be the case in other professions as well. Something has to be done about the completely defective higher education systems.
- mkr-hn 16y ago
  I was fortunate in community college because the instructor for my major (Linux admin) liked to spend large parts of class time telling stories from working in the IT industry. Many interesting stories from dealing with MS audits in a mixed source environment. The most interesting classes were those where he had us solve a real world problem (like researching and preparing an executive summary for a purchase). Or the time he mangled all the computers while we were on break and had us troubleshoot them.
- tomjen3 16y ago
  fib a b 1 = 1 fib a b 0 = 0 fib a b n = (fib a b (n - 1)) + (fib a b (n -2)) Where do I send my CV (I always loved London).
- tastybites 16y ago
  Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. I've been working in industry for over 10 years and the only time I've ever had to write a fibonacci sequence generator was during a code challenge (that lead to an interview).
ahoyhere 16y ago
I'm sure many people who are unemployed are unemployed through no fault of their own. But... ... the other day I checked out a site for finding tech/design-oriented interns. There were 50 listed in my city (Philadelphia)... and most of the eye-catching descriptions the interns had written for themselves were things like: * "Coming soon" * "19 years old" * "I'm a recent graduate of the University of Miami" * "My name is Brittany" * "My name is [redacted] and I am a 19-year-old Korean-American student." This was the only part of the profile that was really custom to them, other than checking off a list of skills & available times/dates. Don't even get me started on the usernames they chose to present to potential employers. (Musicbabi_87?!) Their chances are pretty much zero. Obviously nobody taught these kids (and, in a few cases, adults) anything at all about professionalism or the fact that when they take a job, their job is to serve the employer. And they obviously haven't been reading books on their own that would teach them that. Only a precious few mentioned anything that would tell me what I'd get out of the deal, how they could help me/be useful to me. Almost none even expressed any interests or goals of their own. So, obviously, I'm not hiring any of them -- when I would have liked to. They got in their own way. This is, sadly, their fault.

108 points by alexwestholm 16y ago

I'm most worried not for the numbers as for the corrosive effect long periods of unemployment have on employability. You lose the simple habits which are required for lots of gainful employment, such as "getting up before 9 AM consistently" and "working mostly non-stop for 8 hours a day". I see this in a lot of these articles where folks will, e.g., claim they applied for 15 jobs in 3 weeks. At some point the new normal for him has become that he works 15 minutes a day or less on his job search. (Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.)

_delirium 16y ago
(Relatedly: some days I wonder if the single most effective form of unemployment relief would be teaching people that sending out resumes is for suckers.) The welfare-reform efforts of the past 15-20 years in most western countries have tended to do exactly the opposite, oddly enough. Out of a worry that people were just receiving benefits without really looking for work, you must now demonstrate that you're actively sending out resumes and filling out applications. Some jurisdictions even require you to show up every so often to a center where they help you search job listings and send out resumes.
- bioh42_2 16y ago
  John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again. It seems silly, but if we truly recognize that long term unemployment has a horrible way of killing one's ability hold a job, then Keynes idea is rather practical. The government not as welfare but simply as employers of last resort. Much like the Fed is the lender of last resort. Obviously this has the danger of government employees lobbying for ever better pay until it is economically irrational for people to seek work in the private sector.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    Hmm interesting; I vaguely remember that, but had forgotten about the concept and term. Looks like it's still a fairly active idea being debated by economists, though not so much by politicians: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+resort%22&hl=en&btnG=Search&as_sdt=1%2C5&as_sdtp=on http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22employer+of+last+reso...
  - marquis 16y ago
    You would think that all a government has to do is supply assistance to trades people to hire/train apprentices. I had a cousin go into the Navy just to learn a trade which upset me, as in previous decades he could have learnt the same trade by entering an apprenticeship. I belive some countries like Austria still support these programs, I have friends whose teenage boys left school early but were able to enter a subsidised apprenticeship rather than drop out and become unemployable.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "John Maynard Keynes did suggest welfare should be employing people to do things, even pointless things like building giant structures and them demolishing them again." In his lifetime though we already did this. If you were too poor to get by then you could go live at the town farm where you would receive public assistance in exchange for working. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poorhouse
  - gaius 16y ago
    I agree, but Charles Dickens made that politically impossible. "Are there no workhouses?" Etc.
    - rdouble 16y ago
      WPA was long after Dickens.
      - gaius 16y ago
        I don't know what that is, some American thing? Here in the UK every time it's suggested the word "Dickensian" gets bandied about and that's that.
- ylem 16y ago
  I have a sister who is unemployed in California (Pasadena), so I will make a few anecdotal observations. She was an honors student in college and taught special ed for some years before moving on to manage some group homes for the mentally impaired. She then went into home health care and became unemployed when a job offer fell through. During this time (over 1 year), she has applied for many jobs (including an interview with a nursing home facility (sorry, don't know the details) on a reservation in New Mexico, where she would have to commute an hour each way to work--where she was a good fit and the daughter of one her teachers arranged for the interview). Some have been at traditional companies (HR), others have been at Target, Macy's, and other temporary jobs. Here's what she's found: 1) If you have a college degree, it's hard to get hired even for jobs that are 9 months with no chance of permanent employment, because you are "over qualified" 2) These unemployment centers are fairly useless for those with an education. If you go in everyday and a job happens to come in that matches you, then good. Otherwise, you're better off searching the internet yourself. Also, most of the money that's provided for training is for pretty basic jobs, like "medical coding" which seem like good outsourcing targets. Even though you go through the hoops for these, getting authorized to take these certificate programs can be Kafka-esque. For my sister, while she's still looking for a job, she's decided she wants to go the entrepreneurial route. She got a chance to pitch her idea to an incubator in Ann Arbor, but she only had crude drawings and while they liked the idea, they really wanted a prototype. She is not a coder, so she's enrolled for some courses at the local community college. But, I will say that I've seen some bias against hiring people who have been unemployed for some time. For example, a friend works as a pharmaceutical researcher and was told by recruiters that they are only interested in people who currently are employed (she was)...I think there's a tendency to believe that the jobs are out "there" and people are just too lazy to find them. However, I'm increasingly believing that we've moved to a two fluid model (to coin a physics phrase) where for people with specialized skills, or experience (for example, I've talked to people in sales at IBM and other companies who have told me that they've found it hard to hire people with the skills they want), the job market is actually not that bad and they are being actively recruited. On the other hand, there are people with lower skills and for them the outlook is rather bleak.
  - pzxc 16y ago
    I've never understood how being "overqualified" is a problem. No one says you have to list your degree or make mention of it. Just pretend you don't have one? What am I missing here? Are people too egotistical to accept a job at McDonald's when they have a degree? It has always been my opinion that any job is better than no job. If you need money, take what work you can. There's nothing that says you can't keep looking for a better job while you are working a holdover job. And, just like omitting mention of the degree, when you do apply for jobs that you really want, now or later, you don't have to put on your resume that you worked at McDonald's for three months while you were looking for better work.
- cosmicray 16y ago
  Perhaps the time has arrived to dust off the old operating manuals for the CCC and the WPA. For those who don't recognize the acronyms, those were 2 of the major 'New Deal' programs during the 1930's era Great Depression. They were intended to get people back to work, and to try to restart the economy. The general objective was to renew/refresh our public infrastructure (via WPA) and to reforest-ate clear cut areas and improve problematic drainage (via CCC). Both programs were accused of being socialist (and perhaps they were).
- jamesbkel 16y ago
  I've been experiencing this problem over the past few weeks. I've been working to find jobs that meet my fit (fairly high education and experience in a specific field) but many of these position take a week or two in order to schedule a full day of interviews. Yet, in order to get any sort of benefits (I'm in MA so, I can't drop off health insurance even for a short time) I need to send out resumes for obviously bs jobs.
Alex3917 16y ago
I think the bigger picture is that at least in the US, most of these people will never get middle class jobs because they just aren't smart enough to really contribute anything. If unemployment among youths is around 50% or whatever today, then just imagine what it will be in ten years when gas is $8 per gallon and we're facing food shortages. There is simply no way this is going to solve itself without massive government intervention, and I have trouble seeing that happening considering that there has been basically zero progress made by the federal government since I've been alive.
- maurycy 16y ago
  Alex, you might be interested in Lang, Siniver, 2011[1]. What is interesting in this particular study how quickly the market acquires the information. So, if the unemployment is a global phenomenon across many different markets, in the same civilisation, it is possible that it changed somewhat permanently. (just an idea; I'm not fully convinced as well) [1]. http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16730 http://papers.nber.org/papers/w16730
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "Our results are therefore consistent with the view that employers use education information to screen workers but that the market acquires information fairly rapidly." I'm potentially interested in reading this but I have to ask, are they measuring the acquisition of information by changes in employment status and salary? Because if so this seems like begging the question.
    - maurycy 16y ago
      Yes. It uses self-reported wages.
- prostoalex 16y ago
  Agree. For a good portion of 20th century majority of such population has been able to find jobs in manufacturing or some sales role. While competition from Asia eroded the first sector, Internet slowly eliminates the middlemen in other sectors. Travel agencies and newspapers first, retail associates, car salesmen and real estate agents next.
mkr-hn 16y ago
I've been very careful to craft my resume for the job applied for and to only apply for those where I have a shot. 1 interview out of 3 resumes seems like a good rate. I've only sent three, but that's because I realized the economy wasn't getting better any time soon. "Ran an advice blog" definitely looks better on my resume than "got really good at writing resumes." I'll start sending them out again once unemployment drops a couple percentage points, but I've made more money from this blog than I would have lost driving around asking for jobs (which is a double digit number, but still meaningful). I mentioned this here some months ago in a similar thread, and I'm only more sure of the value in doing this now. :)
- patio11 16y ago
  Not applying for work because the unemployment rate is high is mind bending to me. Can you explain your reasoning? This sounds like it is full-stop guaranteed to mean several hundred thousand people get jobs before you get considered. I like the blog idea more than playing xBox but the commitment strategy here strikes me as severly suboptimal. (You may wish to recalibrate your understanding of meaningful: delaying your start date by 24 hours costs more than double digits.)
  - mkr-hn 16y ago
    I spent a year after college looking for jobs to apply to. I found three I was remotely qualified for (those I applied to). If I applied for even a small portion of the jobs that pop up on local job boards, it would consume every hour of the day. In a normal economy you'd see entry level jobs there. But every job wants years of experience and specialized certifications. I don't even have the means to get the certifications. Taking an alternate route is a coping method. I still probe the job boards during the day.
    - kevindication 16y ago
      One piece of advice: don't let the job ad make you think you're unqualified and stop you from applying. Employers often a) don't know what they want/need b) throw everything they can think of in that ad. It may be a challenge to get past the naive recruiter without all of the skills mentioned on your resume, but it can be worth it because the interview will bear out whether you'll actually be useful to the hiring manager.
vaksel 16y ago
there aren't that many new jobs added to all the jobs sites every day, so if you limit yourself just to sending resumes within the closest 100 miles, 15 minutes a day can be as much as you can actually spend. and yes sending resumes isn't as productive as having connections, but a lot of people just don't have that many connections that they can tap to get them a job
- patio11 16y ago
  So make connections. People with day jobs manage to do this, too: imagine how easy it is with lots of free time.
  - vaksel 16y ago
    easier said than done you have to think outside the programmer mindset where there are lots of opportunities to meet people. For other careers, the only way to meet people in your industry is through a job or a conference.
    - patio11 16y ago
      I keep forgetting that the thriving tech scene in rural Japan skews my perspective so much. Seriously, though: if this is true, shouldn't programmers be basically incapable of dating (skew in industry, barriers to meeting outside)? It can't be harder to meet people than to date people. They go to places and do things. Well known places, most of which are in the phone book, many of which are open to the public, etc. I mean, take the automobile industry. I think anyone on HN could find a car salesman or MechE willing to talk to you in maybe two phone calls. There, you aren't a stranger anymore. (I further predict that most MechEs would fall over themselves lining up to talk to someone who sounded interested in torque ratios or whatever.)
      - rdouble 16y ago
        Programmers are basically incapable of dating...
sp_ 16y ago
This is so true. I have a friend, fresh out of college with a Masters degree in CS from a German university, who has been unemployed for about a year now and in that time he has sent out maybe 10 to 15 applications. I carefully try to nudge him in the right direction by keeping an eye open for job offers that might interest him or by suggesting programming challenges/projects that could improve his skills. But instead of working on things that could improve his chances to get a job, he just watches TV all day long. If he put in only maybe three hours of open source coding time a day, his chances to score a job should increase tremendously. If you are an unemployed software developer, it is much easier to stay on top of things than in many other professions but in the end you have to have the motivation for it.
- bartonfink 16y ago
  Honestly, if he put in three hours of ANYTHING constructive a day he'd be much better off than he is now.

Tycho 16y ago

Luckily the soil is fertile: All over the world, the hittistes and shabab atileen, NEETs and freeters and boomerang kids are hungry for a chance to thrive. Hmm, but how hungry? Compared to say people who came of age in the 40s or 50s? I'm not sure hungry is the right word. Restless maybe. Peckish.

jhamburger 16y ago
Do you have anything substantial behind this or is it just general "worst generation ever" talk?
- Tycho 16y ago
  Well, even my mother, who came of age in the 70s, shared a small home with 8 other siblings and two very over-stressed parents (who would have had things even harder). She was literally desperate to leave and start living much more comfortably (ie. independently). Nowadays kids come from much smaller families, and have numerous cheap distractions/entertainments like the internet, cellphones, tv, games. Living independently would probably mean facing up to a lot of problems, just for a little more freedom. How could they possibly be just as hungry/desperate? Plus many people conduct their entire jobsearch from their laptop, and get benefits paid directly into their bank.
  - jhamburger 16y ago
    If people were really comfortable spending the early stage of their adult life with Xbox and mom's cooking, they could have skipped going $100,000 in debt for six years of post-high school education that your mother's generation couldn't be bothered with.
    - Tycho 16y ago
      That perhaps makes sense where you live, but in my country going to university is free and is simply the done thing. Having vague long term goals for your life is one thing, having practical concerns forcing you into action vs. letting you laze around and enjoy pastimes, is another.

bambax 16y ago

> But the failure to launch has serious consequences for society—as Egypt's Mubarak and Tunisia's overthrown President, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, discovered. Mmm, what? Don't make it sound like overturning dictators is a bad thing, dude. Maybe it's much better for "society" to have unemployed young people with not only the courage to fight for freedom but also nothing better to do with their time, than to have people with jobs who tolerate authoritarianism.

kjhgfdfgh 16y ago
The trouble is that they might get confused between overthrowing our stalwart allies in the war against terrorism like Mubarek and start thinking that there is no real difference between a dictator for life and a government that relects the same group of millionaire business leaders every year or one where the same bunch of toffs from the same few fancy schools get to be in charge.
- kjhgfdfgh 16y ago
  Suppose you have a 'democratic' country where the same party has been in power since independance. The party leaders have got rich by telling everyone else the country is booming - when it was all a property scam. Now they have 30% youth unemployment and are cutting school and college funding to pay for it. They were quiet happy to support terrorists in another country for their own political gains - they might want to start worrying about where the next car bomb will be placed. And this is isn't in the middle east ......
  - JohnnyBrown 16y ago
    Ireland?

wisty 16y ago

I've spoken to a few Chinese about this, where manual workers get more than uni grads (though not as much as successful business owners). Chinese really value education (in the high culture sense), and education (in the sense of meaningless test scores), money, and status. Until a few years ago, degrees were a ticket to riches. Now, they just mean you are overqualified for higher-paying jobs. Their feelings about it tend to be extremely complicated.

ylem 16y ago
I think that you see this in places like Spain as well--you have a large educated, unemployed fraction of the population...

kiba 16y ago

It's time for youth to blaze new path to employment. 19 years old like me are trying to build a living on the internet by writing, programming, and selling ads. It's a lot of hard work to find clients and more scary when you're trying to deliver the work.

bsaunder 16y ago
Buy an Arduino and start building robots. IMHO, there's a long, rewarding career there.
- kiba 16y ago
  I don't have such capital but I have around 600ish dollars worth of saving(In an another currency!) that's earned through hard work. Hopefully, the network of clients I am building will grows to such portion that I am able to find constant work as well charge more.

ngvrnd 16y ago

Things which cannot continue, won't.

rst 16y ago

One key bit: "more education is not always better. What matters is matching the skills of the workforce to the skills that employers demand. In Iran, where the percentage of people aged 15 and over with postsecondary degrees has soared from 2.5 percent to 10.5 percent over the past 20 years, the education system has become 'a giant diploma mill,' says Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, an economist at Virginia Tech." The same is true here, as many of our chronically "overqualified" unemployed could attest. What's worse, some of what counts as "training" here is a set of dubious commercial vocational schools --- cosmetology schools, and the like --- which soak up student loans, and leave the trainees with large debts that are hard to dismiss, even in bankruptcy. (And these are pretty big business. One of them, Kaplan, is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Washington Post corporation that has over $2 billion in revenue, accounts for just about all of the parent corporation's profits. Not without controversy by the way; reports of abusive practices from Kaplan have led to allegations of fraud: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/education/10kaplan.html The Washington Post, of course, has editorialized in favor of its baby.)

ylem 16y ago
This would seem to be especially true of "for profit" colleges. There was a pretty depressing tv special (frontline?) on it...They sell hopes and dreams.

scotty79 16y ago

Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. Wealth is manufactured by machines not people. Some generation has to close the gap between how wealthy society is and how much average member of society has to work for same basic needs. You can't make basic necessities cost always nearly same amount of work because that work thanks to technology is producing more and more wealth. You can't keep prices of meals to be higher than recent technological wonder. Someone at some point will call bullshit on that. "My sandwich is not worth same amount of wealth as 4GB flash thumb drive. They just want me to pay this much for sandwich to keep me working because I need sandwich. I'll just pass on working, buy cheapest food and see how this works out. They don't seem to want me in their companies anyway." This unemployed generation can be the first one to take advantage of wealth humans get from technology en masse without need to cunningly trick everyone else out of their share. They'll get their share just by being more or less human dead weight that rich won't be able to shake off because they can't kill them or even let them die because there's for the first time too many of them.

jerf 16y ago
"Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more." Our poor people, at least in the US, are a lot more wealthy than they were several decades ago. Actually if you dig into the economics of deciding how much to work and for what, how preferences vary depending on how much of a resource you have and how cheap a lot of things are compared to decades ago, this is neither surprising nor terrible, nor really even preventable without actually going down to these people and dictating their economic preferences and proper lifestyle to them, which I at least find a repugnant idea. If you want to live a simple life with nothing from beyond 1950, no modern medicine, no modern tech gadgets, nothing beyond 1950, you can do it substantially cheaper. But it's just so easy to work a few more hours and get the modern stuff that it's the rare person who will choose to do this. If there's anything to be horrified by, it would be the cheapening of debt that has made it too easy to get buried under it vs. decades past.
yummyfajitas 16y ago
Our wealth has grown exponentially in recent decades but poor people still work 9 to 5 or more. This is a myth. The poor work very little - their full time labor force participation rate is only 10% or so (this includes both the employed and unemployed). 80% of the poor don't work at all. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2007.pdf (Before you criticize this statistic as being too simple, go see this thread where I answer many objections: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2129845 In particular, this is not a result of the poor being disproportionately old or young.)

ylem 16y ago

I think one thing that we have in the US is that unemployment centers were set up in a different age and are designed to serve unskilled labor--but there are not so many unskilled jobs. Some of the training programs that are paid for are short "certificate" programs of dubious worth. But, here's a question: currently sites like ODesk provide contract labor. Some of the jobs are for people to do research (for example, I wanted a listing of high schools/contact information for a side project I'm working on). I've only done a couple of postings, but I got very few American applicants. Is it just not well publicized? The rates are low, so it's not a good long term solution, but in some cases for "simple" research jobs, the rates could be $10/hr, which compared to some service jobs is competitive (since many service jobs here also don't provide health care)--especially in some lower cost of living states.

iamdave 16y ago

I grew up with an ex-drill sergeant for a father. My dad was a skilled carpenter, a certified electrician and welder (TIG, MIG and Stick), and has fixed every single car I've owned and totalled. Passed down to myself and my brothers, we're both skilled in welding, my brother now has his own electrician shop. I work in IT. If suddenly my IT job goes away, I have a trade to fall on. Skilled trades and physical labor it seems to be lost arts on my generation (I'm 25) and that depresses me.

tannerburson 16y ago
Move out of the city. In the more rural areas that isn't as true. It's definitely trending in that direction, but there are still a lot of kids who grow up with parents in skilled trades who pick up a lot of those skills growing up. Combine that with high schools that have legitimate trades programs, and there's at least a much better opportunity.

netmau5 16y ago

They mention the product lifecycle being short as a primary reason for not wanting to bring on new employees. If it takes someone 12 months to get up to speed in an 18 month product lifecycle, it is too costly. I've got to wonder what kind of industry takes 12 months to get up to speed unless you've got workers coming in with absolutely no training and education. For most programmers I know, the worst case ramp up time is around 3 months. That is often with a project that will never be profitable, much less make it for 18 months. There are other fiscally attractive reasons to hire young so I'd think if training was the only problem, we could solve that problem. The problem I see with regards to education in most companies is that there is simply no one on staff who can do the training effectively or is given the time to do so. Perhaps this will open the door for the return of a mini trade school in the form of an app.

redrobot5050 16y ago
Hardware engineering can easily be 12 months out of 18. There are a sundry of reasons: a) Moore's law. The technology your school is using for hardware design is easily 5-6 or 10 years out of date. This makes it easier to teach and cheaper to work on, but the "real world issues" like heat, leakage current, etc just aren't addressed at the same level. b) Intel has its own RTL that is not taught in schools. Some technology companies also have proprietary in-house technologies (like Cachet, or Wasabi). c) Ripple effects. Analog components might change/fluctuate and this impacts the entire design. Or a new antenna placement might merit new design, etc. d) Scale. An undergrad in hardware engineering typically builds a 5 stage pipeline processor that supports 2-4 hardware interrupts and a memory controller. This is enough to run linux on an FPGA. You've engineered a computer! But a Core 2 Duo has 23 pipeline stages. Vector units. Out of Order execution. 96% accurate branch predictor. Each one of those things I've mentioned could be the focus of a masters or PhD thesis. Getting hired, you'd be expected to pick up the logic of all of them in about six months. e) Minimization. More systems are being done by less chips. This is what is called System-On-A-Chip design by some. Previously, you'd need to know how to design a CPU. Now you need to know how to integrate a CCD into the CPU. This is off the top of my head but i'm sure you get the point.

pragmatic 16y ago

The simple answer is: These kids are training for the wrong jobs. College (in many areas) is a waste. Trade schools (vo-tech) offer a (almost 100%) guarantee of employment. A trade is a gateway to self employment (once you have your hours in for licensing). My brother has his master electrician's license in two states. He has more work than he knows what to do with. I have two friends who recently went back to school (one finishing undergrad business/marketing the other MBA). Their job outlook is _poor_. The market is flooded with people that have _soft_ skills. Our company is still hiring network technicians. Again a two year degree with _hard_ skill requirements. (Cisco certs, etc). Tech school is way cheaper than college and your job prospects are good.

mkr-hn 16y ago
I started on a networking specialist degree (2 year community college) before the economy tanked, and finished just after. I went in figuring I'd be dead before a technology would exist to automate it. I'm sure I'm right, but I didn't think about how a recession would impact it. On the plus side, there were endless streams of entry level positions I was well-qualified for before things went south, and I'll probably be able to find a job related to my degree when the economy starts improving.
ianhawes 16y ago
Couldn't agree more. I know plenty of people that do masonry, electrical work, etc.. and they're busier than ever.
thedaveoflife 16y ago
I agree that there are certainly plenty of opportunities presented by developing a technical skill. However the unemployment rate is only 4.5% for the college educated vs 10.7% for high school only and 8.4% for an associate degree/some college. So maybe college is not as much of a waste as you might think. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t04.htm
- pragmatic 16y ago
  Yes but show me the figures that break out Electrician/Plumber/LPN from 2 year business degrees. My sister in law got a 2 year biz degree. You're qualified to be a secretary (without experience). She went back and got LPN with an additional year at school. Her job outlook is amazing. Her income is 2 to 3 times what she could have made with only her business degree. Associated degree/some college includes a lot of things like child care/business, etc.

rorrr 16y ago

Anther problem is the education that people choose. The world is full of "VCR repairmen", while everyone is using disposable bluray players. I see it again and again, students pick silly, simple or just useless degrees, such as * philosophy * international relations (every single one of those wants to work for the UN, maybe 0.001% ends up there). * arts, all kinds * history (how many historians do we really need) Don't get me wrong, they are interesting and entertaining, but just not very helpful when it comes to being employable.

mikecarlucci 16y ago
Not to troll, but Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, Leonardo DaVinci etc. were all technical people with understanding of philosophy, art, history, mathematics. Obviously these are cherry-picked examples, but having only technical knowledge isn't a great solution either.
- rorrr 16y ago
  I never said anything about technical only knowledge. I myself took a few art classes, and enjoyed them. What I said is that people pick these majors, and then we see these crazy unemployment stats. Most of these unemployed people are not qualified to do anything that society is willing to pay money for.
  - mikecarlucci 16y ago
    OK. Just making sure. Sometimes "the arts" get too much of a bad wrap here.
jkeel 16y ago
I' also add that these may seem "silly" on the cover but can be put to good use later on. I've known several successful managers (including our current Director) who have their undergrad degree in philosophy, albeit coupled with an MBA. Generally, I think the more well rounded a person is they can usually lead a more successful (fulfilling) life.
16y ago

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andresmh 16y ago

In Mexico they are called nini's (_ni_ estudian, _ni_ trabajan). They often find "better" opportunities joining organized crime/drug cartels. This, in my opinion, is one the main challenges that need to be resolve in order to end violence in Mexico.

foljs 16y ago

Oh, there's no problem, if the are determined and work hard enough, they can all be entrepreneurs...

jderick 16y ago

The government should create jobs to solve this problem. Unemployment is cruel and inefficient. Prioritizing reducing the national debt over employment is short sighted.

DrJokepu 16y ago

The fact is than even the educated kids are unemployable. We constantly try to hire graduate developers here in London but the fact is that most of those kids are simply unemployable. They have impressive degrees from the best universities, but I simply can't hire someone who can't code a simple Fibonacci algorithm at the whiteboard in the interview room. In the language of their choice. I'd even accept an only marginally working solution with a few bugs. Still, most of them just can't do it. They don't even know how to start. Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. After 3-5 years of higher education, many of the graduates can't solve even the most basic programming problems. I suspect that this must be the case in other professions as well. Something has to be done about the completely defective higher education systems.

mkr-hn 16y ago
I was fortunate in community college because the instructor for my major (Linux admin) liked to spend large parts of class time telling stories from working in the IT industry. Many interesting stories from dealing with MS audits in a mixed source environment. The most interesting classes were those where he had us solve a real world problem (like researching and preparing an executive summary for a purchase). Or the time he mangled all the computers while we were on break and had us troubleshoot them.
tomjen3 16y ago
fib a b 1 = 1 fib a b 0 = 0 fib a b n = (fib a b (n - 1)) + (fib a b (n -2)) Where do I send my CV (I always loved London).
tastybites 16y ago
Universities simply don't prepare kids for the needs of the industry. I've been working in industry for over 10 years and the only time I've ever had to write a fibonacci sequence generator was during a code challenge (that lead to an interview).

ahoyhere 16y ago

I'm sure many people who are unemployed are unemployed through no fault of their own. But... ... the other day I checked out a site for finding tech/design-oriented interns. There were 50 listed in my city (Philadelphia)... and most of the eye-catching descriptions the interns had written for themselves were things like: * "Coming soon" * "19 years old" * "I'm a recent graduate of the University of Miami" * "My name is Brittany" * "My name is [redacted] and I am a 19-year-old Korean-American student." This was the only part of the profile that was really custom to them, other than checking off a list of skills & available times/dates. Don't even get me started on the usernames they chose to present to potential employers. (Musicbabi_87?!) Their chances are pretty much zero. Obviously nobody taught these kids (and, in a few cases, adults) anything at all about professionalism or the fact that when they take a job, their job is to serve the employer. And they obviously haven't been reading books on their own that would teach them that. Only a precious few mentioned anything that would tell me what I'd get out of the deal, how they could help me/be useful to me. Almost none even expressed any interests or goals of their own. So, obviously, I'm not hiring any of them -- when I would have liked to. They got in their own way. This is, sadly, their fault.