11 ms·

I did a lot of driving forklifts, construction, moving, factory work, etc when junior in the job market after graduating near the top of my class with strong in

• otikik 1y ago
  A pot? They gave you a pot??
• palmotea 1y ago
  > Adjusting expectations is important. If you start with the expectation that all you will have is a pot to piss in then it is all up from there. You're just coaching people to be passive in the face of a hostile society, and that's bad, because it lets society off the hook for providing for its citizens. Also isn't it strange that's mainly expected of the people at the bottom? Maybe the shareholders should start to expect the number won't keep going up to the max? If it's 2025, and you need to convince yourself that all you may get is "pot to piss in," you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. After all, isn't it "all up from there"?
  • ty6853 1y ago
    It would be nice if society will help you, but you should expect that they will not, especially if you are a childless adult which is the one class of people society will actually tax back below the poverty line.
  • psunavy03 1y ago
    > you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. . . . which is literally never the correct answer.
    • ty6853 1y ago
      I don't know that it's the wrong answer, but I am not flippantly going to go tell someone to go get machine gunned by the national guard, especially when I won't be joining them. If they are going to come to that conclusion, I'll let them get to that on their own.
    • palmotea 1y ago
      >> you should be working to burn it all the fuck down to the ground. > ...which is literally never the correct answer. But it's the answer chosen all the time. If "entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out," some (usually distributed) group made the decision to burn those new-grads plans to the ground. Why should they be insulated from similar decisions? Working "to burn it all the fuck down to the ground" is just spreading that "love" to those groups. Those groups should be threatened with that, because otherwise they're not going to restrain themselves.
      • spacemadness 1y ago
        You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there.
        • palmotea 1y ago
          > You have to understand lots of people on HN want to be one of those people on top eventually so they will bend over backwards to apologize for the executive class until they supposedly get there. Oh, I totally understand that. HN is full of workers LARPing as tycoons; advocating for policies, attitudes, and ideology that are most likely going to end up being harmful to their own interests.
          • ty6853 1y ago
            There are also a lot of people totally oblivious to the local minima locations of the working class life. Like the fact that a young, elderly, or childless person may be able to realize the benefits of revolution for either themselves or at least their unborn or adult children, a very large segment of middle age society has young children who paradoxically would be better off from the revolution but may be more likely to die in the process than others due to the fact they cannot survive the thin margins of survival that the others can survive on during a lean revolutionary time. Given that born young children can die but unborn children cannot, and that adult children are more resilient, the middle age worker have always been some of the most resistant to revolution, but not because they are bootlickers.
  • jimbokun 1y ago
    This is bad advice because as an individual you have close to zero influence on recreating society from scratch. Best to be pragmatic in your personal decisions while contributing to your larger political ideals.
• iteria 1y ago
  I graduated into a bad market and I took a shitty job 5 states away with low pay. I was basically a warm body while I waited out the clock on being considered a recent grad. I'm so lucky I had 3 internships so I could fake being an experienced junior and truly start my career. A lot of my peers were too good for those kinds of jobs and while they started their careers at the same time, they didn't make industry and collect paychecks while they did it, so I think I made the correct choice about how to spend those 18months.
• Loudergood 1y ago
  Student loans generally don't wait, and most people wail while they're working the shitty jobs.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Why is why one shouldn’t take on large amounts of debt for questionable return.
    • michaelmrose 1y ago
      What should they do then?
      • tekla 1y ago
        Get good grades and scholarships
      • lotsofpulp 1y ago
        Government funded schools with lower tuition (possibly even community college), more rigorous degrees with higher likelihoods of stable pay (e.g. medical/engineering), trade schools/apprenticeships.
        • eyesofgod 1y ago
          [dead]
        • dttze 1y ago
          They did that. Then those jobs still went away. So fuck them, right?
          • lotsofpulp 1y ago
            That’s why you choose lower tuition options so debt levels are manageable even with jobs that pay less.
• aredox 1y ago
  >I've found a lot of employers admire people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. That's what they'd say to your face, but statistics show that anything than a spotless carreer means you'll never recover. Once you fall behind your peers, you will never be promoted as much as them nor be paid as much.
• close04 1y ago
  For a lot of students out there now the reality of the "opportunity cost" is skewed. They will invest enormous amounts of time and effort in being the best in uni even if this alone may not bring them a guaranteed leg up over the competition when they face the adult working world. My academic career was always revolving around the top but never quite at the top. So eventually I gave up on investing more effort for diminishing returns and focused on having an advantage the others weren't pursuing. I started working very early, with some embarrassingly shitty jobs at first, each of which allowed me to get the next slightly less embarrassingly shitty job subsequently and so on. I'm glossing over what could have been a long string of lucky breaks that probably made all the difference. Anyway, by the time we finished university my colleagues who were right at the top got catapulted into the working world all the way to the level I had years before. Not quite ground level but not far. And I can still see that handicap in most of their careers even now, decades later.
  • ty6853 1y ago
    A lot of truth to that. Although I graduated well after the dot com days, at that time you usually had to be near the top just to get an internship. You could probably let academics slip a bit after that.
• KennyBlanken 1y ago
  Please stop with this nonsense you can 'work your way up' or that if only you work hard enough your efforts will be rewarded. That's long, long gone. Companies don't care if you work hard or not. You're disposable to them. If you work hard, you only get given more work. By turning employment into "gig" work, they've shifted as much of the risk and costs onto workers, too. Companies have weaponized employment practices and now they're just burning everything to the ground because they figure there will always be someone desperate enough. Turns out that doesn't quite work - Amazon for example has had internal memos circulating that say in various communities they're pissing off or injuring so many people they are having trouble finding workers. "Gig" companies care so little, will suspend or cancel workers at the drop of a hat, intentionally or unintentionally. Even Uber's CEO, when he tried going 'undercover' as a driver to see what it was like, admitted he was scared he'd get a less than 5 star rating because it almost instantly torpedos you, especially if you're new. Because the "customer is always right", these companies offer no way to challenge a customer's complaint even if it's obvious nonsense. Why investigate anything, which costs money, if you've got a long line of people desperate to make $6 delivering a cheesebuger 5 miles? Our legislators let silicon valley roll right over a century worth of worker protections because it was "innovative" (ie they got lots of lobbyist cash.) Voters let them do it because they want their delivered cheeseburger, groceries or makeup as cheap as possible....and voters don't care about the "losers" who work those jobs. It's not them, after all...
• happytoexplain 1y ago
  There is a very valid point you are mostly sticking to, but your last sentence is essentially "employers admire people who don't complain", which I'm going to have to push back on. Yes, not complaining is an excellent principle to have generally, but it matters why something bad is happening. A large proportion of people don't just think the economy is bad because, well, it happens, we're all trying our best - they see people and policies making it bad. There is a huge conversation about the details and realities of that perception, but that's irrelevant to the perception's existence. For example: If I am underpaid and overworked because my employer and I and all the people doing their best for the economy are all suffering together under unavoidable circumstances, I am going to stay tough, keep my head up, count my blessings, etc. If I am underpaid and overworked because policy-makers are enabling it and our employers are deciding to shift a disproportionate share of the societal suffering onto employees and we are all allowing a culture of overwork and underpayment to seep in - I'm going to do something you are uncharitably describing as "wailing".
• michaelmrose 1y ago
  What can easily happen is that you take the shit work to survive but it takes so much of your time and so much out of you and you fall behind and miss opportunities and it becomes impossible to climb out of the hole.
• ajsixjxjxbxb 1y ago
  > people who were willing to wipe old peoples' asses when the economy is bad rather than wale about the circumstances. Isn’t there some quote about old men planting trees whose shade they’ll never know? Was that just a myth or did those generations actually exist?
  • ty6853 1y ago
    The vast majority of trees are planted because the value of a sapling ismore than a seedling. It doesn't matter that you will never know the shade, and that the sapling is worthless for industrial purposes, you can profit quite quickly. To be more explicit, the time value of something closer is higher than one further, so you can actually induce under even a hypercapitalist society any arbitrarily long delay investment with 0 'real' payoff until the end.
  • otikik 1y ago
    Unclear origin, here's some investigation: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/04/29/tree-shade/
• Breza 1y ago
  I respect that. I graduated during the Great Recession. Ended up working for extremely low wages out of college and ultimately went to grad school after getting nowhere in trying to find a better position.