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this is why i think teen summer jobs squander potential. young adults should be learning skills instead of doing shitty jobs, although someone has to do that wo

this is why i think teen summer jobs squander potential. young adults should be learning skills instead of doing shitty jobs, although someone has to do that work.

ip26 4y ago
Summer jobs do teach skills. Customer service, working in a team, working independently... you take those things for granted, but a fourteen year old is not usually born with these things.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Those jobs also aren't effective teachers of skills. Some exceptionally engaged employees will pick them up. Most of the rest will pick up the attitude that it doesn't matter if you get fired from one jobby job because you can get hired to do the same thing across the street and then take your original job back once you're fired from the other place and your current manager has left for better opportunities. A strong concern for long-term professional reputation is for white-collar work and independent tradesmen.
  - ip26 4y ago
    That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered. How would you envision nudging “the rest” to pick up skills over their summer, assuming they weren’t working?
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      The "assuming they weren't working" adds a major wrinkle because my default suggestion would be to get them into better jobs where professionalism and responsibility actually matter. At least as far as teamwork (and possibly independent work) is concerned, sports or marching band are the first two summer opportunities to come to mind. However, that still leaves out customer service (and the effectiveness of that actually being picked up by most teenage employees is debatable, at best).
seibelj 4y ago
I could not possibly disagree harder. I started working in 8th grade and worked through high school and college. As my friends partied in college I remembered those shitty jobs and why I was in college, it was 100% a motivator for me to work very hard. My son is treated like a prince but he’s going to scoop ice cream and sell pizza slices or he isn’t getting an iota of help from me. You don’t understand the world unless you work those jobs.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  This is exactly why I posted in the first place.
Beltalowda 4y ago
> although someone has to do that work I think this is the real crux of the matter: not everyone has the aptitude or interest to be a programmer or whatnot, and that's perfectly fine! The whole "lift yourself out of poverty by learning X" is not necessarily bad advice – it's good advice actually, and I did it myself – but when you're talking about society as a whole it's missing the point that: ... even if everyone learns all the skills in the world, we're still going to need people at grocery stores, and support agents, and warehouse workers, and that kind of thing. So no matter which way, we still need to have a conversation about how to organize things so that everyone has a reasonably fair living wage (as well as what "fair" and "living wage" are, exactly).

this is why i think teen summer jobs squander potential. young adults should be learning skills instead of doing shitty jobs, although someone has to do that work.

ip26 4y ago

Summer jobs do teach skills. Customer service, working in a team, working independently... you take those things for granted, but a fourteen year old is not usually born with these things.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Those jobs also aren't effective teachers of skills. Some exceptionally engaged employees will pick them up. Most of the rest will pick up the attitude that it doesn't matter if you get fired from one jobby job because you can get hired to do the same thing across the street and then take your original job back once you're fired from the other place and your current manager has left for better opportunities. A strong concern for long-term professional reputation is for white-collar work and independent tradesmen.
- ip26 4y ago
  That’s an interesting perspective I hadn’t considered. How would you envision nudging “the rest” to pick up skills over their summer, assuming they weren’t working?
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    The "assuming they weren't working" adds a major wrinkle because my default suggestion would be to get them into better jobs where professionalism and responsibility actually matter. At least as far as teamwork (and possibly independent work) is concerned, sports or marching band are the first two summer opportunities to come to mind. However, that still leaves out customer service (and the effectiveness of that actually being picked up by most teenage employees is debatable, at best).

seibelj 4y ago

I could not possibly disagree harder. I started working in 8th grade and worked through high school and college. As my friends partied in college I remembered those shitty jobs and why I was in college, it was 100% a motivator for me to work very hard. My son is treated like a prince but he’s going to scoop ice cream and sell pizza slices or he isn’t getting an iota of help from me. You don’t understand the world unless you work those jobs.

thenerdhead 4y ago
This is exactly why I posted in the first place.

Beltalowda 4y ago

> although someone has to do that work I think this is the real crux of the matter: not everyone has the aptitude or interest to be a programmer or whatnot, and that's perfectly fine! The whole "lift yourself out of poverty by learning X" is not necessarily bad advice – it's good advice actually, and I did it myself – but when you're talking about society as a whole it's missing the point that: ... even if everyone learns all the skills in the world, we're still going to need people at grocery stores, and support agents, and warehouse workers, and that kind of thing. So no matter which way, we still need to have a conversation about how to organize things so that everyone has a reasonably fair living wage (as well as what "fair" and "living wage" are, exactly).