You complain about people just wanting to exist and live and enjoy time with their friends and family? And that they don't have grand dreams of starting a business, running it, doing a bunch of shit that's secondary to their actual interests?
Here's the thing: no one should have to start their own business to be successful in life. Not all people are cut out for it. And just because you're a 20-something guy who's willing to spend 60-80 hours a week working to change the world with a social networking site for cat photographers so that some VC can make bank doesn't mean that other people are somehow inferior because they don't want to.
Not everyone can be a special snowflake, and that's fine. Some people want to work a 9 to 5 job and then head home to cook dinner with their loved ones. In the past that's been possible, but increasingly for our generation it's becoming harder and harder. And that's a societal failure.
I work for a giant corporate behemoth, I just so happen to love my job. :)
> You complain about people just wanting to exist and live and enjoy time with their friends and family? And that they don't have grand dreams of starting a business, running it, doing a bunch of shit that's secondary to their actual interests?
The thing is, they don't even think that far ahead.
If they wanted to live the standard "get a job, get married, get a house" sort of thing, I can understand that, but so many young adults aren't even thinking that far into the future.
> Not everyone can be a special snowflake, and that's fine. Some people want to work a 9 to 5 job and then head home to cook dinner with their loved ones. In the past that's been possible, but increasingly for our generation it's becoming harder and harder. And that's a societal failure.
Bullshit at the last part. Those of us with passion are pushing the envelope every day. We will continue to automate and refine and improve efficiency. It is not a societal failure, society is changing.
Go back 120 years. "Some people just want to work the field, go inside to their wife and kids, and relax. Not go to the city, start work in a factory and claw their way up to management."
Go back thousands of years.
"Some people don't want to have to settle down on a farm and work a field, they just want to migrate with the herds like they have always done."
Those who have ambition forever change society itself.
I, for one, agree with him because that's what I've observed: numerous 20-somethings working at dead-end, menial jobs after graduation because they didn't adequately prepare for something more demanding. And many of them aren't thrilled to be merely subsisting. They want more, but they don't know how to get it, and they don't really own the responsibility for doing so anyway.
Somehow at some point they got the mistaken impression that if they got a degree they'd graduate, and be instantly awarded with that six-figure 9-5 job. And they'd live happily ever after.
So yeah, for that group they're a little disappointed to graduate and discover that the median income of someone with a bachelor's degree (as I recall) is $40,000/yr. And if they have an especially common degree and especially mediocre academic performance perhaps they can't even get that job. Oh, and they are surprised to discover they have to work their butts off to find ANY job, and then that most jobs are just "work" not "play."
I have no aspiration to necessarily work for a start-up or work 60 hours a week. But I do have a plan, and I do take responsibility for making my life what I want it to be. I have goals and aspirations and a long-term plan how to accomplish them. Most of our peers do not.
My hope is to be able to make a decent living (say $50,000/yr) working 25-30 hours a week so I can spend lots of time on my own interests and with my family. So I didn't hear him saying that we all have to want to work for start-ups or work 60 hours a week or anything. He was merely pointing out that many of our peers don't know what they want, or how to get it on top of being unemployed or underemployed...and they blame others for their situation rather than taking responsibility for their life.
If you mean by that "aren't willing to do anything -at all- to achieve, well, anything really" then I agree with you.
> My hope is to be able to make a decent living (say $50,000/yr) working 25-30 hours a week so I can spend lots of time on my own interests and with my family.
That's certainly achievable I would think. However, be prepared for a lot of rejection. 40 (not 60) hour weeks + actual effort (dare I say it ... drive) is not just a requirement at startups.
Yes and no.
I would argue that being a productive citizen that has much to give to others (kindness, companionship, food, money, etc.) is the fundamental mark of adulthood. I am blessed to live/work in a world where I can do that very well without horrendous scrambling, due to a successful and enlightened employer.
If such is a good thing, is not offering good employment under highly civilized working conditions to many adults an achievement worth great accolades?
Just take a moment to consider. I am sure startups are mind-bogglingly amazing, but did a startup make your car? Your computer? Did a startup pave the roads you drive on?
Startups are good. Big companies are good. We need both.
I attribute this to changes in "higher" education. High school isn't about academics most places for most people; And college isn't either. High school for most people most places is about socializing and being a place for busy parents to send their kids for the work day. College is just a place to put off getting a job, and a place to party and continue socializing.
Their is a myth in college that "C's get degrees" and all you need is "a piece of paper." Students believe that as long as they have a degree in anything they'll be able to get a good job. So they select the easiest degree that matches their interests and abilities. Of course, not all degrees are equally as valuable to employers. And there's only so much demand for various specialties. But most students aren't familiar with the BLS statistics on which jobs are in demand now, how much they pay on average, what the jobs associated with various degrees entailed, and what the predicted outlook is for various professions. They just assume that a degree, any degree, is all they need and riches await. So they graduate to discover that numerous peers also pursued their easy "soft" degree in college, got average grades, and are now competing for the same jobs. The employers can't tell one applicant from another when they're all so average, so they just pick one and the rest go to work as waiters, taxi drivers, gas station attendants, etc.
In short: we're producing far more graduates in certain fields than the market requires; and far less in other fields than the market demands. And we can't really expect this to change until we start educating students in high school and college about how many jobs are available in various fields, and what they pay. We need to also work to defeat the myth that everyone "needs" a college education and that all you need is a degree, any degree, to get a good job. Some people aren't cut out for college and would be happier earning great money as an electrician, or machinist, mechanic, plumber, etc. And those who are a good fit for college would be more effective if they selected more quantitative degrees which match their interests and abilities. In other words, those who do college should not look at it as a time to put off going to work, or a time to party--they should look at it as the few precious years they have to prepare themselves as best they can to get a good job...take the hardest classes they can, expand their horizons, and distinguish themselves from their peers (do undergraduate research, do more than required, get better grades than required, diversify, etc.).
The other element is that our peer group plays the victim a lot. They don't own their own lives, happiness, or success. Granted, this is a broad statement, but many of them really place the blame for things on others. They blame someone else (the government, evil corporations, etc) for their lack of a job. They blame others for their inability to follow their dreams or carry out big aspirations (like your friend).
The truth is that for all of us, we need to take responsibility for making our lives what we want them to be. We can't blame others for not telling us how worthless a Film & TV degree is, or for not giving us a great job, or for not supporting our brilliant venture.
In short, I've blathered on at length when your post did an excellent job of succinctly saying the same thing. Thank you for your comment.
Shouldn't it be the other way around in an ideal world?
Why has the economy been created in the first place? As an end in itself? Or was it to make life easier for everybody?
In my opinion, if the system fails to enable a fullfilled life for the majority of the people, the system needs to be changed.
It's easy to say people should not acquire worthless Film & TV degrees, when you yourself have a C.S. degree, only because computers have been your passion since the age of 8.
I would not want to spend the majority of my precious time on earth with something I do not like to do. And of course I think other people shouldn't either.
Economies are not created in any traditional sense (though ours is highly managed, for better or for worse).
They come into being as a natural part of human behavior.
For instance, we all place value on our time. If you ask me to do something, I will most likely ask for some form of reciprocation. Now maybe if I really like you, feeling good about helping you is payment enough itself, but there is a finite limit to that.
Even favors have an economic component to them. If you help a friend move, you reasonably expect him to help you move at some point in the future. Quid pro quo.
Our system of currency is a highly abstracted away formalization of those basic ideas.
Call providing some positive good or service "value".
You get reciprocated for providing value to others.
We use currency as a medium of exchange to represent this.
At times, it is easy to see this exchange. If you go watch a local band, you pay for a ticket, a portion of that ticket goes to the venue for providing you with a quality place to watch a performance, and part of the ticket price goes to the band for providing you with entertainment that you derived personal value from experiencing.
Other times, well, things are a bit more abstracted way. :) (And at some point it becomes arguable if value is provided at all, but that is a separate discussion!)
> It's easy to say people should not acquire worthless Film & TV degrees, when you yourself have a C.S. degree, only because computers have been your passion since the age of 8.
My argument is that people should acquire a degree that enabled them to provide value to society.
> I would not want to spend the majority of my precious time on earth with something I do not like to do. And of course I think other people shouldn't either.
The later half of the 20th century is the first time it was possible for a large number of people to have even a hope of doing work that they enjoyed.
That said, ask the people who laid your sewer pipes, built your building, pave your roads, how much they enjoy being out at 4am in the rain and snow working.
Ask those mining the rare earth minerals that are used to build our technology if they enjoy their jobs.
Middle class Americans have this romantic ideal of jobs being something someone enjoys. We are all spoiled and need to admit to that. But hey, it is a nice goal to make it so that everyone can enjoy their job right?
So here comes the funny part.
We are automating away the miserable drudge work jobs, and people are now worried.
Because it turns out the middle class fantasy of singing joys at work and coming home to a giant house with 2 (or 3 now days) cars and all that other assorted crud is not maintainable on a large scale.
I don't have a solution to this, really no one does. But we have to accept that we have made our bed and now we are going to lay down in it.
I do not think that you can compare those kinds of jobs with modern jobs.
Modern jobs require intensive training. Sometimes studying the subject for multiple years only on a theoretical basis.
This does not work if you do not like what you do, in my opinion.
I myself have tried to obtain a degree in a field that I did not like. I failed miserably. It eventually made me depressed, something I do not wish upon anyone.
> "Why do people have to adjust to the economy? Shouldn't it be the other way around in an ideal world?"
As Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change." This has been and still is a basic truth of the world. Creatures that expect (much less demand) their environment or others to adapt to them always suffer. That's not to say that all suffering has its root here, but the economy was never "created" to do anything, especially make life easier for everybody. Economic forces emerge naturally from basic human interactions, and there is no single authority who can tweak the knobs on "the system" to change it for the betterment of everyone.
> "I would not want to spend the majority of my precious time on earth with something I do not like to do. And of course I think other people shouldn't either."
This is precisely the attitude that most older generations complain about when they belittle milennials. Many of these people worked in boring, sometimes pointless jobs to be able to pay their bills. They understood that work is called work because it is not necessarily fun. Fun is what you do when you get home from work, on your own time.
We are fortunate to live in an era where many people can find jobs that are inherently satisfying. We live in an economy that has many opportunities for creative minds and challenging problems for analytical minds. Most of these problems can be solved indoors, in an air conditioned room, without having to physically exert yourself or put yourself in any danger.
The economy will not adjust to you. The economy cares about what you have to offer it, and what you can purchase from it. It does not care what you demand from it without offering anything in return.
The world does not exist to provide you with enjoyment. If you can make a living doing what you love to do, like many of us here, that's a fantastic added bonus but realize -- it isn't the nature of life to be able to do what you enjoy 24/7 (or 8/5). This is why we have hobbies and relationships and recreation.
The expectation that life will be working 9-5 at a job you love then coming home to a dream version of your domicile of choice and a wonderful spouse/partner/dog/cat and spending your evenings drinking tea/coffee/wine/beer/whiskey debating politics/technology/art/music/literature while gazing over a picturesque sunset/oceanscape/bikini model/forest and sighing gently over how great everything turned out -- that expectation destroys happiness. Life plays out roughly according to the choices you make and is colored by luck. You can change your level of fulfillment by adjusting your expectations or working harder/differently or both. This might sound a little eastern, but what I think we need is a dose of gratitude. You're (probably) alive, (possibly) healthy, (presumably) not living on the street, (hypothetically) employed, (likely) have one or more people in your life who love you... be grateful. I expect this point to be misunderstood, but note for the record this is not the "things could be worse!" argument. It's exactly the opposite argument: "look how good things already are!".
So you work a job that isn't exhilarating? So what. Your job isn't your life, your life is your life.
Why not?
Why does the world exist in your opinion? In my opinion there is no reason, at least none of which we are able to understand.
So why not make the best out of our time here?
An enjoyable working place is especially important, because this is where we spend most of our time.
> If you can make a living doing what you love to do, like many of us here, that's a fantastic added bonus but realize -- it isn't the nature of life to be able to do what you enjoy 24/7 (or 8/5).
Demanding this from others is one thing, doing this yourself is another one.
There were multiple stages in my life where I had to do work that I did not see a sense in and they always made me depressed and I didn't really do a good job at them even though I tried really hard.
Now I do what I love and I am really good at it. That this is computer science (something that is considered valuable at this specific place in time) is a complete coincidence.
Different people are motivated to different degrees, to do different things. A list of anecdotes won't convince me that there's any sort of trend in either direction.
We're basically still inside of a global economic recession and no amount of drive and passion can fix that for everybody. There are certainly some edge cases who can make entrepreneurship work but when you have 25% unemployment for a certain age group you have to assume that there's something else in play beyond a lack of motivation.
Before there were massive corporations employing everyone, people typically did work for themselves in some way shape or form.
Heck go to other countries, look at how many street vendors there are, people going door to door selling food, trinkets, hand made creations.
Why is our attitude that "some giant corporation should hire me to work 9-5"?
Why should that happen? Just because, by some economic anomaly, that is how it worked for 60 or 70 years?
Corporations are very inefficient, but less so now than in times past.
We all have heard stories of a secretary whose sole job was to take mailed in checks, open the envelope, take the check out, and type it into a computer, or copy it down onto some form.
Or even worse, employees whose job was to take items coming in on one computer screen and copy them to another computer screen.
Even more antiquated, the guy pulling the same lever in the factory every 5 seconds.
And we have all heard stories (or encountered first hand) corporate employees whose sole job was to go to meetings and discuss things and then write papers that got read by no one and ignored. (A lot of these types exist around the IT sectors in large companies, writing "strategy" papers on integrating some piece of software that consist of Power Point slides that have little to no meaning.)
Those are all examples of waste. Those jobs are gone, because they should be gone. They contributed nothing to society except to fill a void that existed solely because of inefficiencies in how large companies were run.
So now the people who would have filled those jobs need to find something that actually contributes to society.
That is sort of what money is supposed represent after all, how much value someone has provided through goods or service.
I'll accept increasing amounts of automation and efficiency as a reason for the reduced number of open positions but the idea that this generation is somehow more lazy than any other is ludicrous.
And finally the idea of "contributing to society" is so nebulous I don't know where to begin. Is someone who makes a really good latte contributing to society? Is an investment banker contributing? Kim Kardashian? Zynga?
The way we have defined it in an open capitalistic market is that if someone is willing to pay you money, you are providing value!
(Societal value is obviously slightly different, since people will pay for things like hitmen, who are obviously providing value to one party but taking away a near infinite amount of value from another.)
And yes it is sort of a circular definition.
> Who said anything about corporations? Hiring people to do work has been a basic part of the human experience for thousands of years. Unless you can run your entire business on your own you're going to need help, and so you give someone else money to do what you can't.
So what we need is a certain % of people who are willing to be entrepreneurs, thereby keeping others employed.
Thus one has to ask:
• Are entrepreneurs being provided with enough incentive and possibilities to open their businesses?
• Has something changed from a societal perspective that has decreased the percentage of people who have an entrepreneurial mindset?
Obviously the first the government (and private industry) can help solve, but the second, well, that is a bit harder of a problem!
Having said that, I do believe there was a time in this country when going to college meant you were a motivated person who could expect a high likelihood of success finding a good job after graduating. This seems to be different now. More people go to college now, which could either represent an increase in the number of people who are motivated or a decrease in the proportion of people who go to college despite being unmotivated. A smaller proportion of college graduates are successful in finding a good job, which could either mean that it has changed in lock-step with the diminishing level of student motivation or that there are motivated students who now have more trouble finding good jobs.
My anecdotal sense of both of these things is that increasing college attendance is a sign of more young people being more motivated than ever rather than a sign of unmotivated people increasingly attending college, and that the market for good jobs for college graduates has lagged behind the number of motivated graduates competing for them. I think there was a time that people with humanities degrees from good schools were widely thought by businesses to be highly intelligent, hard-working, and imminently employable. Now I see people scoff at such degrees as the useless outcome of bad decision-making. Perhaps the new reality is that far more people need to be motivated to develop the passion and drive required to succeed in a business of their own making, but I personally think it's a shame that there seems to be far less room these days for people who just want to work hard for someone else.
I think it is something those of us on sites like this one, and in our field in general do not notice, we tend to surround ourselves with highly driven and motivated people, but we really are the exception to the rule.
Roughly 60% of the young women I have dated (generally aged 22 and up, college graduates) had no real future focus. They weren't looking forward to or striving for any sort of goal. They were just sort of existing.
Switching tracks a bit, I remember having a conversation with a man about my age, he had an undergraduate degree in psychology and a masters in a related field. He was talking about how poorly developed the social skills of many young adults in this area is (true, Puget Sound is a tech haven and a lack of social skills go along with that) and how much he would love to start up a program to teach social skills to engineers. And hey, I agreed, that is a great idea, there is a large market for that in the area, he would have customers lining up around the block!
So I asked him why he hadn't done it yet. "Because the government has cut funding to social programs and there is no way I could get money for it."
He then proceeded to spend the next 20 or so minutes complaining about how it was the governments fault that he couldn't achieve his dream.
When I recommended a small business loan, or even writing up a business proposal and seeking private funding, he brushed my suggestions aside and went back to complaining about how he needed government help to get his idea up off the ground.
Everyone on this site knows that if he really had aspirations, he would find a way to make them happen. He's living in an area surrounded by people with 6 figure income and plenty of 7 figure incomes a few miles away, private fund raising alone would easily pay for his minimal expenses to get started.
But he wasn't passionate enough to actually do anything, and he is one of the few people I have encountered who have any passion at all.
I have had friends (my age group) tell me that I need to stop being so aggressive, stop being so perfectionist, stop working so hard. "Why do you try to do such a good job at everything you do? There is no need for that."
Then I walk over to my friends who are in the tech sector. We strive for the best, we talk about what we want to happen in the future, what our dreams our, what we are working towards, what house we want to buy (if any), what projects we want to work on.
And we are the lazy ones who don't have enough initiative to found our own start up! (And we all feel guilty about it, we damn well know we should)
Then of course there is the Y Combinator crowd, who are fueled by nothing but drive and passion.
So, going back to the beginning.
A lot of the young adults who have "given up hope" never had any hope to begin with. They sort of wanted a job somewhere, but they didn't want it more than anything else. They didn't desire it, they didn't need it, and they sure as heck didn't make a plan of how exactly to get it.