American Dream is Elusive for New Generation

Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by Tichy on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @11:17AM (#1494404)

To be fair, hunting a job while in another job is much trickier. It actually takes quite some time to write applications and so on (that's how I remember it anyway). Not saying it is impossible, but I can imagine that "just take any job" could be counter productive.

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by gaius on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @11:33AM (#1494449)

4-5 job applications per week you could manage while actually in full time work tho'...

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by capital_omega on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @11:39AM (#1494464)

Also, though a lot of people won't admit to it, he's putting himself in danger by taking a mediocre job. He can very easily be typecast into that sort of role for a long time.

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by PonyGumbo on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @11:49AM (#1494500)

Is it a bigger danger to work in a mediocre job than to have a two year span of unemployment on his resume?

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by Tichy on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @12:02PM (#1494541)

I'd say yes - I was pigeonholed as a Java Developer for 10 years...

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by tansey on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @12:27PM (#1494603)

Oh come on. Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps if you don't like that. Find a hot new language and play with it in your spare time. Start an open source project with it. Contribute to the community. Then apply to jobs with that knowledge and skill set on your resume, and you'll break out of that role. Just have to want it.

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by ihumanable on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @02:56PM (#1495058)

Agreed, I worked in .Net and Java for a few years, decided I wanted to get back to PHP, started up an open source project, started talking about it and mastering the language in my free time. Now I work a PHP job that I love and I like to think having a couple thousand lines of example code out in the wild gave me an edge.

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Re:American Dream is Elusive for New Generation by capital_omega on Wednesday July 07, 2010 @05:19PM (#1495515)

I don't know, but I think both are bad. If I were him, I'd probably bump the college degree by a couple years.

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