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This may mark me out as an asshole, but I don't have very much sympathy. Back when I was about 15 and still in school, a bunch of our classmates dropped out to
by s_kilk 11y ago
This may mark me out as an asshole, but I don't have very much sympathy.
Back when I was about 15 and still in school, a bunch of our classmates dropped out to go working in construction jobs after completing the Junior Certificate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Certificate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junior_Certificate). At the time Ireland was enjoying a boom in construction, so there was decent money to be made for anyone willing to stop their education and haul bricks around a field all day.
To my friends and I this was a transparently idiotic strategy, grasping at an easy short-term gain which no-one believed would last more than a few years. But of course we were made out to be the real chumps for staying in school.
Fast forward to now and every one of the dropouts is un-employed, having enjoyed a few short years of decent wages and then witnessed their livelihoods disappear into an economic black hole around 2008.
- Apocryphon 11y agoWhat happens when the tech bubble bursts? Yes, certainly we live in the information age, and there will always be a need for tech workers, but the demand will fall with the economy. So isn't there an element to short-term gain for people who went into tech simply because of the past decade?
- s_kilk 11y agoWhat happens when the medicine bubble bursts? Or the engineering bubble? We could say this about any profession, that the good times may end some day. That doesn't make the decision of those young men any less short-sighted. They had every chance at _not_ being under-educated labourers, but they chose explicitly to take that path, even when most around them advised that the construction bubble was in serious danger of collapse in the near future. Maybe I too will be destitute some day, but that's a different story.