Re:American Dream Fades for Generation Y Professionals
by angersock on Sunday December 23, 2012 @04:04PM
(#4960663)
(Last Sunday I spent two hours powersnaking out a clogged commercial sewer line, so believe me that I have sympathy for shit jobs.)
I completely agree with you both that we shouldn't condemn people to work annoying jobs and that we shouldn't be corporate drones (regardless of pay).
I think that the key to fixing a lot of this is to have it easier to move around and find interesting work--if I get sick of writing code, I should be able to find a gig doing plumbing, or carpentry, or stacking, or whatnot, until I'm ready to code again.
I think that the problem we're dancing around as a society is that physical jobs are not selected-for by the market as much as they once were (due to either automation or foreign labor), and professional jobs are a few JSON blobs and sorting algorithms away from being deprecated.
We need to figure out how to deal with an educated, intelligent, and most importantly easily-bored citizenry. It's no longer enough to say "Well, everybody has to work jobs they hate, so suck it up!". If we can't solve around that, well, we're in trouble.
I completely agree with you both that we shouldn't condemn people to work annoying jobs and that we shouldn't be corporate drones (regardless of pay).
I think that the key to fixing a lot of this is to have it easier to move around and find interesting work--if I get sick of writing code, I should be able to find a gig doing plumbing, or carpentry, or stacking, or whatnot, until I'm ready to code again.
I think that the problem we're dancing around as a society is that physical jobs are not selected-for by the market as much as they once were (due to either automation or foreign labor), and professional jobs are a few JSON blobs and sorting algorithms away from being deprecated.
We need to figure out how to deal with an educated, intelligent, and most importantly easily-bored citizenry. It's no longer enough to say "Well, everybody has to work jobs they hate, so suck it up!". If we can't solve around that, well, we're in trouble.