4 ms·

Similar articles have surfaced a lot recently with the publication of the BLS's new labor statistics, so I'll repeat what I've said before. I recently turned 2

• kiba 14y ago
  This is all an ancedote and does not provide any actual insight in our generation. You need a study to back it up.
  • moocow01 14y ago
    Any observation/opinion is based on a collection of anecdotes. Studies are fine but I don't think they are needed to express an opinion on an internet board.
  • ZephyrP 14y ago
    Come, come. You know that all I'm saying is that you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever. You simply should not use them to frame your chance of success. I'll reiterate my central idea here -- your life is yours to create. I'm of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, they will inevitably spread into other areas of your life. However, if you'd prefer a more naturalistic explanation -- if you are unrelenting the Central Limit Theorem will work in your advantage. The most notable Scientists are not the smartest, they are the ones who have published the most.
• kpennell 14y ago
  Great note. Any chance you borrowed some of this from the Waking Life scene on existentialism?
  • ZephyrP 14y ago
    All of this stuff is discussed in Being and Nothingness by Sarte and Fear and Trembling by Camus, which Robert Solomon extensively discusses.
• blahedo 14y ago
  It's very easy to transform "I work hard, and am successful" into "I work hard, therefore I am successful," but this is a dangerous fallacy, as it leads directly into "That person is unsuccessful, therefore they aren't working hard enough." Statements such as the above are spoken from a position of privilege. There are many, many people out there who do work hard and yet do not enjoy success; the fact that you can adduce examples of the form "that person is unsuccessful and is not working hard enough" is not evidence for your claim either.
  • ZephyrP 14y ago
    I have certainly been afforded no privilege in my youth, although I understand that you reason this is post-hoc sophistry -- it seems like you're setting up an impossible goalpost for my position. But in the interest of fairness, I'll speak plainly and say I know a lot of people who work hard, virtually all of them are successful by their own standards. I know a lot of people who don't, only some of them are successful.
    • blahedo 14y ago
      The privilege I'm referring to need not have anything to do with class (or race or gender for that matter), but just the privilege of having been successful. Many people work very hard and yet do not achieve that. The fact of your success, while correlated to your hard work and undoubtedly facilitated by your hard work, is nonetheless not the sure result of hard work; the ability to be able to even postulate a direct causal relationship is a luxury afforded you by the fact that you did, in fact, succeed. (See also: confirmation bias, survivor bias.) Not to detract from your success, of course! Good for you. But don't use it as a platform from which to claim that unsuccessful people would achieve more success if only they just worked at it a bit more.
    • krschultz 14y ago
      It's not an impossible goalpost, you are just making a huge generalization and applying it to nearly everyone. Understand that the market for software developers is HOT. If you are able to program a computer then there is no recession for you right now. If you had instead focused really hard on becoming an expert in architecture or civil engineering rather than a computer programmer, you would be singing a different tune right now. I know many people in the construction related fields who do engineering work as difficult as computer science who keep finding themselves unemployed. They are unemployed not becuase they were laid off, they are unemployed because the company they worked for literally went bankrupt becuase nobody is building anymore. Those people would be better off putting in a middling effort as a programmer than killing themselves to be experts in construction. So hard work in their case is not leading to success. Now 5-10 years ago when they picked construction as their field, it made a whole lot of sense. Are we in the same place as programmers? 10-15 years from now will you look back and say, crap it looked like a good choice in 2012, but I really wish I had focused on X instead? Time will tell.
• MartinCron 14y ago
  I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces I think that's generally good advice, but potentially dismissive. A lot of the actual data around this has shown that the circumstances of your birth, as manifest in when you enter the workplace, have a huge lifetime impact. People who enter during downturns, on average, never catch up. There's something that feels kind of distasteful about making it all about personal responsibility when the reality is far more complex than that.
  • ZephyrP 14y ago
    I'll save the potentially lengthy discussion and direct you here -- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877585 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3877585
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • MartinCron 14y ago
      I see where you're coming from. My background isn't that much different from yours, and yet a have a different perspective. Reasonable people can disagree, I guess.
• dmix 14y ago
  > but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure. When I was 20 I used to laugh at of my friends for being this way. Now 5 years later, they're in the same position complaining about the job market and its getting kind of sad. None of them put effort into learning any new skillset no matter how much I recommend them to. And these are kids all coming from good middle class upbringing. This is of course purely anecdotal, but I'm hesitant to believe that this narrative is about a bunch of kids trying their hearts out to get work and a job market that doesn't want them. Maybe a certain percentage but more often than not I see a lack of motivation to learn a skillset society actually needs.
• reader5000 14y ago
  To be fair, this is a direct result of the cultural zeitgeist of "get good grades, graduate college = worry free middle class livin!" that is deeply embedded in American thinking, from parents to educators and constantly instilled in young people. You can't really blame kids who are brought up through the meaninglessness doldrums of public education with the constant reassurance that all will be well if the Good Grades are achieved for not actualizing self-independence or even figuring out what that would entail. Besides "societal forces" are real. We're not living off our own land anymore. Policy decisions in e.g. China very much affect whether or not American college graduate A gets hired. So between the reality of economic dependency and the model of dependency as dominant doctrine in America, it's not completely fair to blame abysmal youth labor stats on kids being lazy video game addicts.
• scythe 14y ago
  If I may try to clarify what you're saying. There is a term in psychology called the locus of control. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control People who consider themselves responsible for their situation are said to have an internal locus of control. People who do not consider themselves responsible for their situation are said to have an external locus of control. It is important to note that internality and externality represent two ends of a continuum, not an either/or typology. We notice, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control#Applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control#Applications "In industrial and organizational psychology, it has been found that internals are more likely to take positive action to change their jobs (rather than merely talk about occupational change) than externals." Herein lies the data everyone's crying out for, I think.
• bicknergseng 14y ago
  While I could be persuaded to agree with some parts of what you said (I'm 23 and made that 100k mistake, but have already paid it off), I think you are missing a major point and probably wrong on the whole as a result. You're assuming that everyone is like you, that everyone is able perceive the maze and to navigate themselves to the finish. I imagine most of the HN audience is in this boat. The reality is that most people can't do that. Most people are only able to accomplish something if you tell them what it is, show them how to do it, and help them along as they do it. This probably won't change anytime soon. It's not something that gets better with education, but the fact of the matter is that Society told our generation that if you go to college and work hard then you will do well, or if you save up and invest wisely you will have money for retirement. This simply isn't the case anymore.
  • kpennell 14y ago
    Agreed. Do we want to punish those who aren't savvy and well-connected?
• mahyarm 14y ago
  I am fortunate to have a skill that I am passonate about. I am fortunate to be technically inclined. I'm fortunate to have a skill that is experiencing a shortage and has a large amount of demand by very wealthy customers. I'm fortunate to be born in Canada, so by virtue of a birth lottery, I can easily teach myself this in demand skill and work in the country experiencing such a shortage. I'm fortunate that the country I work in has relatively restrictive immigration policies that increase my wage, except for Canadians. I'm fortunate to work in an industry where I can go start a company with a few friends and possibly become a multi-millionaire. We could all be very passionate musicians, actors, and dancers and be in a very different box economically. Our superstars become billionaires, not millionaires. There were many lazy boomers, gen Xers back then too, it's nothing unique to our generation.
  • ZephyrP 14y ago
    I see this attitude persistently reoccur in developers everywhere. Perhaps owing to their more academic interests, developers were punished for their perceived arrogance when younger and have now learned to adopt a mentality of weakness. As if somehow learning to code was some sort of cosmic mistake on your behalf? You're fortunate? Really? "Oh yeah, my professional success is luck, I was out drinking one night and woke up the next day writing compilers!". No, I refuse to accept that notion. It may not be 'politically correct' to say this, but I believe you are to a very large extent responsible for your personal success and failures (At least growing up in the industrial world). The radical success of large population groups in countries with virtually no natural resources (Japan) and abject failure of countries more resource blessed than any other (Congo) is more than enough statistical evidence to support the notion that, yes, planning and hard work fixes hard luck. But to address your Music jab, let me tell you a story. A good friend of mine is named Max, he's only a few months older than me and it's certainly true that he is very passionate about music, he lives for it you could say. He is one of the hardest working people I know. He possesses no special skill, in fact, he just started learning to play guitar. However, he wanted to be involved very badly, so much so that he worked hard to learn to program and hustled by writing artistic music apps. That little bit of hustle and horizontal thinking got him far, really far. Now he plays with the eminent artist Bjork and regularly posts pictures of living the dream (At least of many 20 year old boys :). He was just playing on the Colbert Show on January 30th! Through hard work and intellectual pursuit, he has succeeded where so many others have failed, without connections and without privilege. I also have two other friends, whose names you will not know and probably will never know who play many instruments quite well, both coming from decidedly upper middle class backgrounds, both of course claiming to have worked very hard, but all and all did nothing meaningful throughout my entire time knowing them. One of them is an English Major, the other a Nissan Lot Technician in Arizona. Sure, you might be saying, "Oh, great, yet another anecdote", but I have a feeling that eventually you're going to see so many anecdotes that they stop being anecdotes.
• scarmig 14y ago
  If I knew someone who was in a hard place, and they were stuck in a rut about how terrible their life was because of their parents/race/class background/asshole boss/whatever, I'd parrot your advice to them. When individuals believe they have the ability to effect change in their own life, they become more able to. This is borne out by statistics and experience. I question, though, whether that spiel is appropriate here. Most people who haven't met success and are stuck in that blaming-external-factors rut don't post on Hacker News. In an abstract sense, a sufficiently motivated person can accomplish nearly anything. But I use the phrase "sufficiently motivated" purposefully, because that kind of person bears a resemblance to the fabled compiler. It's true that there are a series of actions that can lead an unprivileged person to whatever level of success you imagine. More than that, such an unprivileged person exists, at least often enough to be relevant. But it passes over key structural issues by pushing all responsibility to the individuals who are stuck in some unhappy situation and ignores the reality that the average person can't be expected to have above-average judgment and motivation. Taking the point to the extreme: Frederick Douglass was born a slave and worked himself up to the point where he was a world renowned intellectual. Diocletian was born a slave but eventually became Emperor of Rome.* Despite those facts, it's not controversial to say that we can't blame slaves for their misfortunes, even though through enough perseverance and skill it was theoretically possible for any slave to end up in a tolerable place. For an individual seeking success, it's best to focus on yourself and self-improvement. But that fact doesn't change the reality that some people have to focus an exceptional (and unrealistic) amount on self-improvement in order to get what comes to other people with little effort. * Interestingly enough, the ancient Romans practiced manumission for their best slaves with some regularity, holding up the freedman as an example of what a slave could achieve if he worked hard enough for his master.