7 ms·

Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree

31 points by wallflower 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago
One of the things people don't like to talk about is how the economy handles the oversupply of college graduates: use bright line rules to get people out of the job market. Two candidates, a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not. The former has a scarlet letter on his resume, and people with lesser credentials from the next class will be hired over him. The practical effect of this is to normalize the hiring pipeline quickly after a recession. But it has the effect of just cutting huge numbers of people, who happened to be unlucky to graduate in a down year, out of the market entirely. If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.
- lsc 13y ago
  >If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will. This is not my perception at all. I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough. If you are willing to work for retail wages, the standards go way down, and there are more employers than you think who want to hire programmers for little more than retail wages. The deal is that you work for shit wages for a while; if you are good, you can then take that experience (remember, your title was 'programmer' or something) and use it to get a real job, as now you have X years experience working as a programmer, even if you got paid absolute shit during that time.
  - dopamean 13y ago
    > I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough. This is precisely what I'm hoping to do now.
- LyndsySimon 13y ago
  > "a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not." Assuming the 2012 grad doesn't have a year's experience, you don't think that the pool of those who have been passed over by hiring managers for the past year (as they presumably have) might be slightly less rich than the "fresh" pool of graduates from this year? If you were a hiring manager, would you spend your time sorting through them, or would you work your way through the new class?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    The 2013 pool as a whole would be richer, but if you're in a situation where hiring was down dramatically in 2012 but picked up for 2013, then there will be candidates in 2012 that are better than the ones you would have to hire if you only limited yourself to 2013. You can see this very clearly in numbers-driving hiring pipelines in finance, consulting, and law. This year's 50th percentile candidates are getting hired by the big companies, while last year's 70th percentile candidates are pushed entirely out of the market. You see the same phenomenon across the job market, though, just in less easily quantifiable ways.
    - chantech 13y ago
      Seems like an inefficiency and a chance for a talented recruiter to get better talent.
chantech 13y ago
Article took way too long to get to the crux of the problem: 1. Choose your majors carefully and plan your career early - A degree in communications doesn't really make you employable. . 2. These people aren't willing to relocate to a less than desirable area to get that first opportunity
- ebiester 13y ago
  So, let's say that you're getting poor grades in pre-med. You're already 30,000 in debt. Is it better to continue in a degree where you have no chance of further advancement (no medical school will take you), drop out and have absolutely no career leads and a pile of debt, or get a second rate degree? This is the problem -- we've raised the bar for failure so high because of the cost of going to college. We've made it so that college degrees of any kind are a requirement to advance into white collar work. What's the solution when someone can't hack it in STEM?
  - chantech 13y ago
    Sunk costs are sunk costs. You quit and move on to something that doesn't incur more debt. One option is joining the military where you can get real-world experience and they'll pay a significant portion of future education. Another is taking base courses at a significantly cheaper community college until you understand what you want to do and whether you have the natural ability for it. The core problem is taking on 30k of debt without the commitment and/or natural ability necessary to complete the degree.
    - reader5000 13y ago
      The core problem is exploiting inelastic demand in charging 30k for something that could be provided at 2k.
      - eru 13y ago
        You are not paying for the education, you are paying for the signalling. And the signalling is basically auction.
cliveowen 13y ago
Am I the only one who thinks that we reached a point of nearly maximum efficiency? Think about it, that would explain everything. The article clearly states that employers aren't interested in college graduates that finished two years ago if they didn't gather experience in the meantime. They'll happily hire the new kids straight out of college. If they can afford to pass over to thousands of graduates then it means they're just not needed. Even the latest crop of graduates is having a hard time finding a job. As I see it, there's no shortage of graduates (STEM of otherwise), conversely, there's an oversupply of graduates. A while ago I read an article that claimed that lost jobs aren't coming back and this only means, again, that many jobs and (thus workers) are not needed anymore. We can do more (or the same) with less. College graduates are taking jobs once reserved to high school graduates and dropouts, thus pushing these last groups into the ranks of unemployment. What if the global economic recession was just what was needed to cut useless jobs and turn companies into nimble and extremely efficient machines?
- rayiner 13y ago
  It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less developed place like China or Brazil than you will here. There is just less competition and consumer expectations are lower.
  - cliveowen 13y ago
    I would be with you if goods production somehow halted and we weren't able to get our hand on those very goods: less workers->less production->scarcity->unsatisfied demand->soaring prices that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.
    - rayiner 13y ago
nostrademons 13y ago
I think the key here is "without taking advantage of other opportunities". If you're unemployed for a couple years and you don't do anything, then you're signaling something very important to an employer: passivity. A fresh grad with no experience has no experience, but there's also no information to indicate that they won't be a good employee. A two-year unemployed worker has no experience and has two years worth of unsuccessful choices. Which would you hire? The way to beat that cycle is to do something - other than looking for jobs - with that time. I've got gaps of 4 months and 6 months on my resume (actually more like a year and a half if you count a "startup" as unemployment, but I don't), and it's never been a problem - because I was finishing up the rewrite of a 100,000 user website with the first gap, and open-sourcing the remnants of my startup with the second. I've got friends with 2-3 years of funemployment on their resumes, but they did things like starting a non-profit in Vietnam or Peace Corps work in Peru, and ended up at the very tops of their fields. Unemployment by itself doesn't result in poor career prospects, but not going after what you want and seizing the opportunities that are available to you does.
- ams6110 13y ago
  I agree, I didn't sense a big revelation in this piece so I stopped reading after I got this was a sympathy piece about young kids who expect to have a gold-plated career handed to them because they showed up at a college recruiting session.
- reader5000 13y ago
  If you run a 100,000 user website, why acquire a degree in the first place?
  - mangala 13y ago
    Don't you know that on Hacker News the answer to every social problem is either make everyone code up a massively-successful website or become an engineer in the bay area?
- jrarredondo 13y ago
  I agree. Basically, do something. Don't just sit there. Too much reality for some.
lsc 13y ago
>But the end result was disheartening: Mr. Wells was told, he said, that company policy required him to have at least two years of experience in the field before he could be hired. The interesting bit here is that it's a transparent, obvious lie. If it were the truth, he wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place. I mean, his lack of experience undoubtedly hurt him, but if you get the interview, (and if a 'high level recruiter' meets you in person, it's an interview.) nothing that is on your resume disqualifies you.
- peterlongnguyen 13y ago
  Sounds like it might be a sit-down-for-coffee styled chat, as opposed to anything formal.
  - potatolicious 13y ago
    Right, but the point stands - if someone is with hiring authority at a company responds to your job search, you have not yet been disqualified. So if it was clear on his resume/communication that he had less than 2 years experience, the "we require 2 years" is an excuse, not the real reason. If the recruiter knew he lacked the experience, and if the experience was a hard, unyielding barrier, then the recruiter would not even bother.
    - kolektiv 13y ago
      True, as someone who's done a bit of hiring, if you're meeting someone, you're still considering them as possible - you don't waste your time many times before getting pickier. Two years isn't a hard and fast rule - it never will be - you meet a brilliant candidate with 23 months and you won't hire them? Of course not. It's just a proxy. We want someone with about the skills that you should have acquired in two years. We've all met people who have those skills with much less experience - and we'd hire them. Yes it's an excuse in a way to say then that this is why you weren't hired. Not a lie as such though - just the "reason".
      - 13y ago
seivan 13y ago
Makes me feel bad, my SO has a communications degree, although jobs would be easy to acquire in Singapore, but we're planning to move live together in Europe..
- eru 13y ago
  Singapore has recently made work visas much harder to acquire. But I agree, it still is a decent place to live, and the economy is doing better than Europe. (I moved here from Britain last year.)
  - seivan 13y ago
    My SO is from Singapore, and they tend to give jobs to degree holders without any hitch (pay grade is a different question).
    - eru 13y ago
      See http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/employment-pass/before-you-apply/Pages/default.aspx http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/employme...
      - seivan 13y ago
        OH, I did work there, I've left :) My point was missed I suspect. I said it's easy for Crap-degree holders to get job in Singapore, vs the rest of the world.
plg 13y ago
newsflash : University is not job training (except for professional programs like engineering, physical therapy, etc) ... University is _education_ I think what we are (re)discovering is that _education_ is a luxury, for the wealthy class. What the bottom 90% of the country needs is job training, not education. Or at least job training _first_ ... and education as a hobby. Germany is getting it right: http://goo.gl/aRhvk http://goo.gl/aRhvk (recent article from The Economist). They have a society where what we refer to pejoratively as "vocational training" is a valued segment of society, and many kids coming out of school gladly and enthusiastically choose that path instead of the academic track. Somehow in north america we have adopted a culture where going and getting an honours degree in English Lit from Yale at $240,000 USD (4 x $60,000/yr) is valued more than going to college and becoming a licensed electrician or plumber, for example. Like I said... education is for the (already) wealthy, privileged class. It's time that the middle class stop pretending otherwise. All we are doing is getting ourselves into debt. Instead we should train for jobs. Get educated in your spare time. University is not job training.
- rollo_tommasi 13y ago
  I think you're broadly right but your specific example is a bit off. An unexceptional English lit major at Yale will walk into any number of prestigious and potentially lucrative jobs in publishing, finance, consulting, nonprofit work, politics, etc, whereas an unexceptional English lit major - or even a business major - from Expensive Second-Tier Private U will have all those doors slammed in her face. It's the latter group whose expectations need adjusting.
  - plg 13y ago
    Yeah my example is off because anyone who goes to Yale is already wealthy in the first place. On a related rant ... obviously there is no real difference between a Yale education and a state school education ... academically speaking. What you get at Yale is the social network and the "badge" ... so (as you say) you can walk into any job on Wall St., Publishing, Consulting, etc, and have an immediate "in"... just because of the badge and the social connections. The idea that there us upward mobility in today's society is a farce.
bbeckman 13y ago
I understand this situation all too well. I quit my software development job in 2011 to finish my computer science degree. After a few months of enjoying my time off, a former boss of mine recruits me to do part-time development work for him. My current position pays extremely well, but it is unfulfilling maintenance work. So, while I'm grateful to have it, with graduation approaching I've started seriously looking for jobs. So far, it has been very difficult to even get call backs from recruiters. My suspicion is that it looks bad to potential employers when somebody goes back to school in their late 20s (or later).
- jrarredondo 13y ago
  Going back to school does not automatically make you "look bad" at all. It shows your commitment to education and to finish what you started. There has to be some other reason you are not being called back. Maybe it's a bad resume, or your targeting is not good, heck, as we have seen in previous posts last week here, it may be that your name is "Kim"! (Look it up), or its your location or skill set presentation. I find it hard to believe you cannot find a rewarding job in software these days! Assuming you are good, it has to be your presentation (in whichever format, paper, voice or email).
- UK-AL 13y ago
  Its common to back to school in your late 20s for business school.
  - nilkn 13y ago
    But he's not going back to school for an MBA.

31 points by wallflower 13y ago

One of the things people don't like to talk about is how the economy handles the oversupply of college graduates: use bright line rules to get people out of the job market. Two candidates, a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not. The former has a scarlet letter on his resume, and people with lesser credentials from the next class will be hired over him. The practical effect of this is to normalize the hiring pipeline quickly after a recession. But it has the effect of just cutting huge numbers of people, who happened to be unlucky to graduate in a down year, out of the market entirely. If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.

lsc 13y ago
>If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will. This is not my perception at all. I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough. If you are willing to work for retail wages, the standards go way down, and there are more employers than you think who want to hire programmers for little more than retail wages. The deal is that you work for shit wages for a while; if you are good, you can then take that experience (remember, your title was 'programmer' or something) and use it to get a real job, as now you have X years experience working as a programmer, even if you got paid absolute shit during that time.
- dopamean 13y ago
  > I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough. This is precisely what I'm hoping to do now.
LyndsySimon 13y ago
> "a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not." Assuming the 2012 grad doesn't have a year's experience, you don't think that the pool of those who have been passed over by hiring managers for the past year (as they presumably have) might be slightly less rich than the "fresh" pool of graduates from this year? If you were a hiring manager, would you spend your time sorting through them, or would you work your way through the new class?
- rayiner 13y ago
  The 2013 pool as a whole would be richer, but if you're in a situation where hiring was down dramatically in 2012 but picked up for 2013, then there will be candidates in 2012 that are better than the ones you would have to hire if you only limited yourself to 2013. You can see this very clearly in numbers-driving hiring pipelines in finance, consulting, and law. This year's 50th percentile candidates are getting hired by the big companies, while last year's 70th percentile candidates are pushed entirely out of the market. You see the same phenomenon across the job market, though, just in less easily quantifiable ways.
  - chantech 13y ago
    Seems like an inefficiency and a chance for a talented recruiter to get better talent.

chantech 13y ago

Article took way too long to get to the crux of the problem: 1. Choose your majors carefully and plan your career early - A degree in communications doesn't really make you employable. . 2. These people aren't willing to relocate to a less than desirable area to get that first opportunity

ebiester 13y ago
So, let's say that you're getting poor grades in pre-med. You're already 30,000 in debt. Is it better to continue in a degree where you have no chance of further advancement (no medical school will take you), drop out and have absolutely no career leads and a pile of debt, or get a second rate degree? This is the problem -- we've raised the bar for failure so high because of the cost of going to college. We've made it so that college degrees of any kind are a requirement to advance into white collar work. What's the solution when someone can't hack it in STEM?
- chantech 13y ago
  Sunk costs are sunk costs. You quit and move on to something that doesn't incur more debt. One option is joining the military where you can get real-world experience and they'll pay a significant portion of future education. Another is taking base courses at a significantly cheaper community college until you understand what you want to do and whether you have the natural ability for it. The core problem is taking on 30k of debt without the commitment and/or natural ability necessary to complete the degree.
  - reader5000 13y ago
    The core problem is exploiting inelastic demand in charging 30k for something that could be provided at 2k.
    - eru 13y ago
      You are not paying for the education, you are paying for the signalling. And the signalling is basically auction.

cliveowen 13y ago

Am I the only one who thinks that we reached a point of nearly maximum efficiency? Think about it, that would explain everything. The article clearly states that employers aren't interested in college graduates that finished two years ago if they didn't gather experience in the meantime. They'll happily hire the new kids straight out of college. If they can afford to pass over to thousands of graduates then it means they're just not needed. Even the latest crop of graduates is having a hard time finding a job. As I see it, there's no shortage of graduates (STEM of otherwise), conversely, there's an oversupply of graduates. A while ago I read an article that claimed that lost jobs aren't coming back and this only means, again, that many jobs and (thus workers) are not needed anymore. We can do more (or the same) with less. College graduates are taking jobs once reserved to high school graduates and dropouts, thus pushing these last groups into the ranks of unemployment. What if the global economic recession was just what was needed to cut useless jobs and turn companies into nimble and extremely efficient machines?

rayiner 13y ago
It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less developed place like China or Brazil than you will here. There is just less competition and consumer expectations are lower.
- cliveowen 13y ago
  I would be with you if goods production somehow halted and we weren't able to get our hand on those very goods: less workers->less production->scarcity->unsatisfied demand->soaring prices that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.
  - rayiner 13y ago

nostrademons 13y ago

I think the key here is "without taking advantage of other opportunities". If you're unemployed for a couple years and you don't do anything, then you're signaling something very important to an employer: passivity. A fresh grad with no experience has no experience, but there's also no information to indicate that they won't be a good employee. A two-year unemployed worker has no experience and has two years worth of unsuccessful choices. Which would you hire? The way to beat that cycle is to do something - other than looking for jobs - with that time. I've got gaps of 4 months and 6 months on my resume (actually more like a year and a half if you count a "startup" as unemployment, but I don't), and it's never been a problem - because I was finishing up the rewrite of a 100,000 user website with the first gap, and open-sourcing the remnants of my startup with the second. I've got friends with 2-3 years of funemployment on their resumes, but they did things like starting a non-profit in Vietnam or Peace Corps work in Peru, and ended up at the very tops of their fields. Unemployment by itself doesn't result in poor career prospects, but not going after what you want and seizing the opportunities that are available to you does.

ams6110 13y ago
I agree, I didn't sense a big revelation in this piece so I stopped reading after I got this was a sympathy piece about young kids who expect to have a gold-plated career handed to them because they showed up at a college recruiting session.
reader5000 13y ago
If you run a 100,000 user website, why acquire a degree in the first place?
- mangala 13y ago
  Don't you know that on Hacker News the answer to every social problem is either make everyone code up a massively-successful website or become an engineer in the bay area?
jrarredondo 13y ago
I agree. Basically, do something. Don't just sit there. Too much reality for some.

lsc 13y ago

>But the end result was disheartening: Mr. Wells was told, he said, that company policy required him to have at least two years of experience in the field before he could be hired. The interesting bit here is that it's a transparent, obvious lie. If it were the truth, he wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place. I mean, his lack of experience undoubtedly hurt him, but if you get the interview, (and if a 'high level recruiter' meets you in person, it's an interview.) nothing that is on your resume disqualifies you.

peterlongnguyen 13y ago
Sounds like it might be a sit-down-for-coffee styled chat, as opposed to anything formal.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  Right, but the point stands - if someone is with hiring authority at a company responds to your job search, you have not yet been disqualified. So if it was clear on his resume/communication that he had less than 2 years experience, the "we require 2 years" is an excuse, not the real reason. If the recruiter knew he lacked the experience, and if the experience was a hard, unyielding barrier, then the recruiter would not even bother.
  - kolektiv 13y ago
    True, as someone who's done a bit of hiring, if you're meeting someone, you're still considering them as possible - you don't waste your time many times before getting pickier. Two years isn't a hard and fast rule - it never will be - you meet a brilliant candidate with 23 months and you won't hire them? Of course not. It's just a proxy. We want someone with about the skills that you should have acquired in two years. We've all met people who have those skills with much less experience - and we'd hire them. Yes it's an excuse in a way to say then that this is why you weren't hired. Not a lie as such though - just the "reason".
    - 13y ago

seivan 13y ago

Makes me feel bad, my SO has a communications degree, although jobs would be easy to acquire in Singapore, but we're planning to move live together in Europe..

eru 13y ago
Singapore has recently made work visas much harder to acquire. But I agree, it still is a decent place to live, and the economy is doing better than Europe. (I moved here from Britain last year.)
- seivan 13y ago
  My SO is from Singapore, and they tend to give jobs to degree holders without any hitch (pay grade is a different question).
  - eru 13y ago
    See http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/employment-pass/before-you-apply/Pages/default.aspx http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-visas/employme...
    - seivan 13y ago
      OH, I did work there, I've left :) My point was missed I suspect. I said it's easy for Crap-degree holders to get job in Singapore, vs the rest of the world.

plg 13y ago

newsflash : University is not job training (except for professional programs like engineering, physical therapy, etc) ... University is _education_ I think what we are (re)discovering is that _education_ is a luxury, for the wealthy class. What the bottom 90% of the country needs is job training, not education. Or at least job training _first_ ... and education as a hobby. Germany is getting it right: http://goo.gl/aRhvk http://goo.gl/aRhvk (recent article from The Economist). They have a society where what we refer to pejoratively as "vocational training" is a valued segment of society, and many kids coming out of school gladly and enthusiastically choose that path instead of the academic track. Somehow in north america we have adopted a culture where going and getting an honours degree in English Lit from Yale at $240,000 USD (4 x $60,000/yr) is valued more than going to college and becoming a licensed electrician or plumber, for example. Like I said... education is for the (already) wealthy, privileged class. It's time that the middle class stop pretending otherwise. All we are doing is getting ourselves into debt. Instead we should train for jobs. Get educated in your spare time. University is not job training.

rollo_tommasi 13y ago
I think you're broadly right but your specific example is a bit off. An unexceptional English lit major at Yale will walk into any number of prestigious and potentially lucrative jobs in publishing, finance, consulting, nonprofit work, politics, etc, whereas an unexceptional English lit major - or even a business major - from Expensive Second-Tier Private U will have all those doors slammed in her face. It's the latter group whose expectations need adjusting.
- plg 13y ago
  Yeah my example is off because anyone who goes to Yale is already wealthy in the first place. On a related rant ... obviously there is no real difference between a Yale education and a state school education ... academically speaking. What you get at Yale is the social network and the "badge" ... so (as you say) you can walk into any job on Wall St., Publishing, Consulting, etc, and have an immediate "in"... just because of the badge and the social connections. The idea that there us upward mobility in today's society is a farce.

bbeckman 13y ago

I understand this situation all too well. I quit my software development job in 2011 to finish my computer science degree. After a few months of enjoying my time off, a former boss of mine recruits me to do part-time development work for him. My current position pays extremely well, but it is unfulfilling maintenance work. So, while I'm grateful to have it, with graduation approaching I've started seriously looking for jobs. So far, it has been very difficult to even get call backs from recruiters. My suspicion is that it looks bad to potential employers when somebody goes back to school in their late 20s (or later).

jrarredondo 13y ago
Going back to school does not automatically make you "look bad" at all. It shows your commitment to education and to finish what you started. There has to be some other reason you are not being called back. Maybe it's a bad resume, or your targeting is not good, heck, as we have seen in previous posts last week here, it may be that your name is "Kim"! (Look it up), or its your location or skill set presentation. I find it hard to believe you cannot find a rewarding job in software these days! Assuming you are good, it has to be your presentation (in whichever format, paper, voice or email).
UK-AL 13y ago
Its common to back to school in your late 20s for business school.
- nilkn 13y ago
  But he's not going back to school for an MBA.