5 ms·

Part of education leading to a job requires you to actively seek education in a field that's hiring. The amount of young people I hear proclaiming how screwed

• samsolomon 11y ago
  I think the issue is that's just the accepted path. Get good grades in high school, so you can get into a good college. Get good grades in college to get a good job. At 18 most people don't have a clue what they are supposed to be doing. College is an easy choice—especially the stigma around those that don't go to college. There's also that ridiculous fact about how much college-educated people earn over their lifetime. What that doesn't take into account is the entire world changed after 2007. EDIT: Wrote a bit more about why people think they need to go to college a couple years ago. http://solomon.io/experience-deficiency/ http://solomon.io/experience-deficiency/
  • kenjackson 11y ago
    What happened in 2007? The iPhone?
    • Matachines 11y ago
      I think he means the recession (?)
      • pyre 11y ago
        While "after 2007" might be technically correct, most people associated the recession with 2008.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • ethanbond 11y ago
    It's not just that there's a stigma surrounding not going to college (which I think is exaggerated). It's that college, despite all of these problems and the obviously large amount of people getting screwed, is still the most sound investment a person can make in themselves. People have always, and will always, complain about terrible jobs. That doesn't mean they made a stupid mistake which had an obviously better path. It just means they have a bad job.
    • everyone 11y ago
      Also in college you make contacts in the domain of your subject, which is hugely important. For example I got my current job through one of my ex-lecturers.
• sageabilly 11y ago
  Exactly. One of my former best friends did exactly this: graduated with a bachelor's in 2008, took one look at the job market and decided to get a master's degree. In Library Science. At a private university. In NYC. She graduated in 2011 and is still continuously whining about how she can't find a job in her field (which is dying) and no one is hiring (in the areas she wants to live in) and she doesn't understand why people aren't lining up to hire her (despite the case she did zero interning or networking while in graduate school) see in case you didn't notice she got a Master's degree (and has zero soft or social skills) clearly that means she should just have a job handed to her! Education is a good jumping off point for a lot of people and for a lot of jobs. However at some point education stops being an additive process and starts being really self-serving. Additive education is like going to school to be a doctor- you learn and you learn and you learn and you learn and at the end of it you have learned enough in a controlled environment to go off and be a doctor on your own. Self serving education is like getting a PhD in Medieval Literature- the only thing you can do with that degree is either go off and teach Medieval Literature to other students or maybe, MAYBE get a job as a historian in Medieval Literature.
  • Matachines 11y ago
    I go to a private liberal arts school in NYC. This is pretty much everyone I go to school with outside the Comp Sci/Finance/Med School people.
  • TwiztidK 11y ago
    Maybe it doesn't get expressed to college students enough, but internships/co-ops/volunteering are extremely important. It's the difference between getting an awesome job soon after school and 5+ years after school. A few people I know have basically refused to get internships (as in they thought about applying to one, shrugged, and gave up). Meanwhile, I knew a girl who went to an extremely small, private, liberal arts college in a small town in the middle of no where and majored in "Sports Management". Meanwhile, she volunteered for the local ice rink's summer hockey camp and got a part time job working with a university's hockey team. She did two summer internships with different lower level professional hockey teams. Her first job out of school - assisting with an NHL team's youth hockey program. There is almost no way she would have gotten that job without her other experience.
• lotharbot 11y ago
  > "actively seek education in a field that's hiring" not exactly. One of the key points in this article is that certain "meta-skills" are as important, or moreso, than field-specific skills. You don't need a degree or formal education for most fields (outside of medicine, law, and engineering.) You can make a pretty decent living doing all sorts of things, if you can solve other peoples' problems, get stuff done, and handle pressure. You probably don't learn those things majoring in art history. But you might learn those things working as a janitor while you're paying your way through an art history degree.
• griffinmb 11y ago
  To be fair, a lot of people at 18 (including me) were really sold on the idea that "nobody cares what you majored in, just that you have a degree." My freshman year, I couldn't decide if I should major in something that 'made sense' or if I should dive into film. I decided to talk to the school guidance counselors. They encouraged me to get into film, spouted off statistics ("85% of people don't hold jobs in their major!"), and encouraged me to follow that passion. Well, I didn't realize at the time that, yeah, maybe 85% of the population didn't get their job because of their degree, but it's because the jobs they got were service-industry. It's definitely my fault for trusting them with that kind of decision, but I believed they were authorities on the subject. Anyway, I'm back to programming now, so I guess I'm part of the 85%.
  • eanzenberg 11y ago
    'To be fair, a lot of people at 18 (including me) were really sold on the idea that "nobody cares what you majored in, just that you have a degree."' Who's telling high schoolers this? I don't think it's ever been true in recent history. Unless they're applying lowest-common-denominator logic?
• ethanbond 11y ago
  Then maybe we should stop pushing the myth of "do what you love." There's nothing wrong with doing a job that you hate, going home, and using your acquired money to do what you love in your free time. The kids aren't creating this idea out of nowhere; this is handed down as the modern American dream from a generation that lived in an era of enormous lateral socioeconomic movement. We should probably stop looking down on people who do this (by choice or by necessity) and just embrace the fact that much of HN's readership is extraordinarily lucky that their job is their passion. Maybe if we taught that it's okay to have a job you dislike so long as it affords the things you do like, people would stop complaining that they didn't pull a winning lottery ticket like they were "supposed" to do.
  • crusso 11y ago
    "Do what you love" is incomplete. It's "Do what you love that allows you to make some kind of a living". If I had just done what I loved out of high school, I would have watched TV between efforts to get together with girls and alcohol.
  • jerf 11y ago
    "Then maybe we should stop pushing the myth of "do what you love." There's nothing wrong with doing a job that you hate," We should stop pushing the myth, yes, but we should not fall into the opposite extreme. The situation is in reality quite complicated and there are far more choices than "do what you love and be bankrupt" and "do what you hate and make money", and, for once, the complication works out in your favor. Job seekers: Make a list of your interests and talents. If you don't have a list, either think harder, or start trying some new things, stat. Order them vaguely by how much you like them. Now, go down the list, look out in the world, and ask what kind of living you can expect to make with that skill/talent/interest. Be realistic; for example, some musicians may make millions upon millions, but the median outcome is fairly poor. And be realistic about your level of talent/interest/dedication. Most people really ought to be able to find something that is both at least sort of interesting and at least sort of economically viable. After all, in the US, even "median" income is a pretty good outcome, especially if you don't hate your job. I practice what I preach. Technically, in a perfectly-aligned-for-jerf world, computer programmer is my second choice of job. My first-place job would be a music composer, preferably for games. (That's not just because "games are cool", but I actually like the idea of trying to create soundtracks that match up with the desired moods, and especially at the time games had much more interesting soundtracks than movies.) However, a sober and realistic examination of my skills, interests, and talents, matched up with my assessment of a rather high likelihood of total failure as a musician, along with the incredibly small number of slots available even under the best of circumstances, led me to discard that option, no matter how passionate about it I was. Everything in the 15 years since I graduated with my computer science degree has only reinforced my belief that I would have been a miserable economic failure as a composer. (It isn't necessarily "lack of talent", but that my talents led in a not-very-lucrative direction.)
• ruricolist 11y ago
  With the obvious proviso that by the time you graduate said career path may no longer exist.
• shampine 11y ago
  I think my case toes the line. I graduated in '09 with a BS in Applied Economics, most of my work was statistics/stata oriented. I had planned on going to law school. Well the floor fell out from under everything the summer before I graduated. What was I to do? No one wanted to hire me, all my work through college was in sysadmin/computer repair work. I was just a generalist and going for more school (MBA or law) didn't guarantee work, just more debt. It took me two years of rambling around and finally I went back towards what I was always good with, computers. Flash forward 6 years later and I'm a developer who is making a comfortable living. I'm glad I have my degree in econ, I love the field, but I do feel like there is window of us who did get screwed as we made choices on the current economy, not the future economy 4 years later.
  • up_and_up 11y ago
    > most of my work was statistics/stata oriented Your stats background could prob make you a lot of money if you could shift into data science. The stats + programming would be a good fit.
    • shampine 11y ago
      This is the direction that interests me most and what I will want to be doing in my 30s. Still have a ways to go as I started in the frontend and now I'm doing mostly full stack work.
• XorNot 11y ago
  Yes I just know my Masters in chemistry and my girlfriends Ph.D in the same were obviously unsound career paths. People drop the art major line constantly, but it's whole swathes of the sciences, engineering etc. that are out of work now.
  • thewarrior 11y ago
    I thought that the US had a STEM shortage ?
    • CydeWeys 11y ago
      "STEM" is so all-encompassing as to make a lot of generalizations about it useless, one of which being that we have a "STEM shortage". Yes, we have a shortage of some fields that fall under the STEM umbrella. Not so for other fields. It's not a useful statement to make.
      • logfromblammo 11y ago
        We have a "TE" shortage and a "SM" excess. The math field is being cannibalized by tech and finance, and the only sciences doing at all well are those with direct applications to healthcare or war materiel. So if you throw the existing 'M' in with the 'T', and replace it with an 'H' for Healthcare, then fold the remaining part of the 'S' into 'M' for Military, we might have a "METH shortage".
  • brandonmenc 11y ago
    I'm looking at some engineering jobs site now and there are almost 6,000 job postings for chemical engineers. Could you elaborate on what problems you've encountered trying to get a job in the field? I ask in seriousness - just trying to understand what exactly is going on out there. Like, what are potential employers saying to you? Like, is it a specialization thing?
    • streptomycin 11y ago
      chemistry != chemical engineering Chemical engineering is a booming field (although maybe a bit less with oil prices down lately, I've been out of the loop for a couple years). Chemistry isn't.
• d2xdy2 11y ago
  Even if you've done your due diligence to get a degree that should flow into a career path; you're still relatively screwed.
• nsxwolf 11y ago
  It's hard to blame high school kids for this failure, though. I don't know what's changed in the last 25 years, but when I was in high school, this was not a topic of discussion. There was an expectation that you would go to college, that you were to choose from a list of majors, and whatever you chose, someone apparently would be waiting for you to walk out of your graduation ceremony to offer you a job in that field. I knew many people in college that seemed to still have this idea in their senior year. They had given absolutely no thought to the employment process and how the degree in their chosen major was going to help or hinder. Even though it should have been very obvious to me that I should do something with computers, in high school I decided I wanted to be a physicist because it "sounded fun". It took me 2 years of college to realize I was terrible at it, and there were absolutely zero career prospects on the other end of that degree. It seemed I was destined to make coffee for a PHd for the rest of my life for maybe $20k a year. Then one day I was writing some code after school like I'd done every day of my life, and the lightbulb turned on and I felt pretty stupid about it. Luckily 2 years into a physics major is a good time to switch to comp sci. But who is handing out the correct advice to young people today? Is it getting to them? Are they processing it?
  • d357r0y3r 11y ago
    > you would go to college, that you were to choose from a list of majors, and whatever you chose, someone apparently would be waiting for you to walk out of your graduation ceremony to offer you a job in that field. Is this actually true, though? This kind of makes it sound like everyone who went to college in the 70s and 80s was on easy street, but I don't know if that's reality or nostalgia.
    • nsxwolf 11y ago
      Definitely not true, but it felt to me like that's the impression most of us had. Though, getting out of college in the mid to late 90s was a pretty great time for job prospects. Once it sank in that your Marine Biology degree wasn't going to get you a 6 figure job swimming with dolphins, there were plenty of fast growing companies eager to suck up any warm bodies.
  • 11y ago
• conanbatt 11y ago
  It is an ill-made system where colleges charge 100k of dollars without having to disclose or be responsible for dooming lots of people to debt and make a killing on it. And most of the people that make the decision to go to college do it before being old enough to vote, drink, and a bunch of other things that as a society they are deemed to be unfit to do. Of course people should be more aware of this,but instead of blaming people,finding ways to improve the system helps everyone. I strongly think colleges should have a legal requirement to disclose employment data to anyone picking any major.
• fapjacks 11y ago
  Maybe it's just that work as a matter of life or death is slowly becoming unsustainable. With the Great Wage Decoupling, there aren't tremendously many jobs that provide a decent living out there. Maybe it's time to implement basic income in the developed world.
• facepalm 11y ago
  I think liberal arts could prepare people well for various jobs. Writing well could be very useful in today's social media landscape, for example. So I think it is not the choice of major, but the associated expectations. They would still require some creative thinking to create their jobs. What I saw several times, for example, was people studying to become journalists. This was a couple of years ago when I was still a student myself. When I asked them about their goals, they mentioned writing for some popular newspaper. It boggled my mind that they would be studying journalism and not have their own blog and be unaware of the developments in media...
• dataker 11y ago
  Problem is that many of these majors used to offer a career path in the past, but presently face outrageous competition.
• alistairSH 11y ago
  I'll counter that with an anecdote. My wife's previous employer, a boutique consulting firm in DC, hires liberal arts majors almost exclusively. Very smart young adults... Dean's list, multiple languages (rare in the US), etc. And at pretty good salaries ($70k+ if I'm remembering correctly). Contrast that with a string of recent CS graduates I've interviewed this year. 80% or more have been woefully unprepared for work in the field. I'm not sure what they're being taught, but it certainly isn't anything remotely like computer science in the business world. Point being, if you're a mediocre student, your job prospects aren't that great, regardless of major. And if you're actually smart, the jobs are out there.
  • AtmaScout 11y ago
    Can you elaborate on being unprepared? Do they struggle with algorithms and data structures? Do they not grasp the computer at a lower level? I fully agree with the mediocrity part though.
    • alistairSH 11y ago
      A mix of all of the above. A few have been unable to discuss basic CS concepts to the point they should get refunds from their colleges. These were mostly smaller liberal arts schools. Most are unable to work through basic design problems on the whiteboard (not programming and don't require couplex algorithms). I'm not looking for perfect answers - I just want them to talk through their thought process and ask intelligent questions.
• jdmichal 11y ago
  Some number of these people only go to university because they are told they need a degree to get a good job. (The fact that they need the right degree to get a good job is strangely elided.) What we need is more trade schools, without the stigma that they are somehow a lesser choice than a university. Rather than being judged on how many prestigious scholars and elite businessmen graduated, their main criteria is typically job placement after graduation. That's good news; it aligns their interest to properly prepare you to have a professional career after graduation.
• jameshart 11y ago
  So, as I look round the business I work in, I see people who work in sales, marketing, quality assurance, analyst relations, product management, HR, middle management, procurement... I think most of them graduated from colleges. I doubt most of them majored in a subject that narrowed down their career choice to these roles, though. Some may even have art history degrees. Just because 'developer' as a job seems to be a good match for people who graduated from computer science or software engineering programs (and honestly, in some cases I'd dispute whether that's the case, too) doesn't mean every job should have a four year degree program that feeds directly into it, or that if your four year degree doesn't slot you directly into a workplace role it has no value.
  • tw04 11y ago
    It's not about whether your degree is a perfect fit for the job. Your degree is simply getting your foot in the door. Some people find another path to getting their foot in the door (IE: knowing someone who already works there). But if you don't have that luxury, a degree in an appropriate field is your next best chance.