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Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace?
SpuriousLogic writes "I work as a senior software engineer, and a fair amount of my time is spent interviewing new developers. I have seen a growing trend of what I would call 'TV reality' college graduates — kids who graduated school in the last few years and seem to have a view of the workplace that is very much fashioned by TV programs, where 22-year-olds lead billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jet around the world. Several years ago I worked at a company that did customization for the software they sold. It was not full-on consultant work, but some aspects of it were 'consulting light,' and did involve travel, some overseas. Almost every college graduate I interviewed fully expected to be sent overseas on their first assignment. They were very disappointed when told they were most likely to end up in places like Decater, IL and Cedar Rapids, IA, as only the most senior people fly overseas, because of the cost. Additionally, I see people in this age bracket expecting almost constant rewards. One new hire told me that he thought he had a good chance at an award because he had taught himself Enterprise Java Beans. When told that learning new tech is an expected part of being a developer, he argued that he had learned it by himself, and that made it different. So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students, and I want to ask this community: are you seeing the sorts of 'crashing down to Earth' expectations of college grads described here? Is working with this age bracket more challenging than others? Do they produce work that is above or below your expectations of a recent college grad?" We discussed a similar question from the point of view of the young employees a few months back.
Yeah, it was over fifteen years into my career before I was sent anywhere interesting. And even then, you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
What most new college grads don't seem to understand is that everyone in the industry wants to do the fun stuff and go the fun places, and as a college grad, everyone in the industry has more experience than you do. You have to pay your dues like everyone else.
The cake is a pie
You know, Masters and Doctorate programs have nothing to do with the "real world" of non-academic jobs. There IS a lot that you don't learn in college, but you are expected to learn it on the job.
This may be true in the U.S. but its not true everywhere else. In many European countries, like my own home Sweden, a master's degree in engineering is not at all uncommon. In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required.
Business travel is awful. You fly somewhere really exciting and interesting - work your ass off, have zero social life, feel incredibly lonely as you wonder around your hotel, then you fly home. The important thing is to make up lots of stories of how great it was, all the crazy people you met, what a great bunch of lads your customers/colleagues are etc..
Too true. I don't think the whipper-snappers realize that business travel is for business, not pleasure. The times I have flown overseas, the work is so non-stop because of the expense of doing going overseas, that all I want to do is get the hell out of there and go home so I can get some sleep.
What about those of us who were never told by our parents we were good at anything, rather below average than precious snowflakes. Where do we get our sense of exelence and whatever else makes us think we should be paid huge amounts of moneys?
If you want an edge, pay attention to spelling and grammar. It works amazingly well as a differentiator.
I'm serious. Practice it everywhere; email, Warcraft guild chat, even Slashdot comments. It's surprising how many senior execs equate the quality of one's written language output with intelligence or the ability to do. If you apply a bit of polish in everything you do, then you end up looking polished yourself. When everyone you know can write 1337 code just like you, the only thing that will advance your software career better than fluency in Hindi is fluency in English. Rise to the top -- use a spell checker at the very least.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Yeah, it was over fifteen years into my career before I was sent anywhere interesting. And even then, you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
It was a bit longer for me, but I was working in OS development. It wasn't until I was finishing up a system for a specific customer that I got to go somewhere interesting, and that was my first international trip for business.
As others have posted, traveling for business can be a real grind: you are typically there to do a specific job as fast as humanly possible. I work all day at the client's office, get dinner, go back to the hotel and catch up on my email with the rest of the company, then go to sleep. Repeat all week and hopefully go home on Thursday so that I'll have Friday for dentist appointments and other personal tasks that can't be done on the weekend.
What most new college grads don't seem to understand is that everyone in the industry wants to do the fun stuff and go the fun places, and as a college grad, everyone in the industry has more experience than you do. You have to pay your dues like everyone else.
The only time I get to do "fun stuff" is when I arrange two back-to-back trips to stay over the weekend. I've done it several times, either by plan or when forced to do so by weather (and a canceled flight). But, trips to "fun places" are rare, especially when your clients are in company towns that have little else to see or do.
However, the part that some don't realize: you aren't going on a trip unless you have the skill, knowledge, or experience to meet a need at the remote location. Travel costs are far too high to send people on junkets. Furthermore, companies are becoming more comfortable with various "tele-presence" systems enabled by the 'Net, whether it's a conference bridge, NetMeeting/GotoMeeting, or even full-scale video-conferencing systems.
I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
Oh, I used to lie awake at nights, dreaming of being sent to Indianapolis. Or was it nightmares.
Little Rock was my favorite.... I actually have enjoyed not traveling for the last 3 years. Airports suck, economy class seats suck, most hotels - even the $250/night variety suck, rental cars suck, the food can be good, and it's interesting to meet the people sometimes, but hardly worth the rest. Side trips can be nice: Big Sur, the Swiss Alps, Oahu, those were cool, but on the whole, I'd rather stay home.
One problem is the "middle class", according to the Wall Street Journal, now starts at around $250K/yr. Few people will ever make that much money. But most college graduates think they will, or at least did until Q4 2008. There's been an upward creep in expectations during the boom. This happens during booms; it happened in 1922-1929. It's not an age thing; it's a boom thing.
The extreme form of this is seen in MBA students. The major MBA schools had (definitely "had") become feeder teams for consulting firms and Wall Street, which, for a while, really was seen as a path to becoming a multimillionaire before turning 30.. In New York City, finance employs 10% of the people, but pays 40% of the salaries. (Well, it did; those are 2007 numbers.)
Being in the robotics field, I saw the better robotics people going off to finance. But recently, I was over at Stanford, and was chatting with a grad student who'd been at Lehman Bros. and was back in computer science, which now looked more stable than finance. The traffic direction has reversed.
We might even see smart people going into manufacturing again. Which we need.
I'm going to give you the old-fart speech now, so you may tune out if you are disinterested in how business works.
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year - i.e. not on vacation, holiday, or out sick. If you are a gung-ho employee with a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic, of those 1800 you will already be spending about 20% unproductively - getting coffee/soda, going to the bathroom, chatting with co-workers about non-work stuff, surfing slashdot and doing adminstrative tasks like filling out your timecard or getting new pencil lead. We'll throw in a couple of days of training and round your productive hours to 1400. In all likelihood, you won't be 100% productive, especially right out of school. You'll take about 10-15% of a more advanced engineer's time, and a similar amount of your own, to figure out how we do what we do. You'll have to redo some things, sometimes two or three times, before you get it right. Counting the trainer's time against yours, you're going to lose about 40-50% of your time to learning the ropes, and another 10% to down time between assignments (meetings, startup, shutdown, etc). We're down to about 700 actual hours of production in your first year, and closer to 1000 your second and third, peaking near 1200 after that.
So you're "cost" to the company in your first year is about $100/hr. Since we have to add overhead to that it's closer to $130 fully burdened. The company, to survive and be worth the investors time (private or public) should be between 20% and 30% profitable before they pay taxes, so we'll need to bill your time at $160/hr. There are very, very few things which a fresh-out college student can do which is worth $160 and hour. What would you willingly pay a fresh-out college grad $160 an hour for (happy ending jokes aside)?
And you want to take some company time to explore cool stuff? At $1200/day in opportunity cost, I think your manager would much rather go to Aruba.
In case you feel I'm being flip, I'm not. I happen to be an engineer with 20 years of experience, 2 technical degrees, and I run a small consulting engineering firm. Fresh outs, by the way, bill at about $65-75/hr in the real world, and about 50% more in the biggest cities. Senior engineers at my level up to double that. Note that I'm ignoring high and low outliers in those figures; data is not the plural of anecdote. I recently hired a freshout. He's pretty smart, got a double technical major (engr and physics), and writes better than 90% of the engineers out there. He cost me about $25,000 out of my pocket the first year, and will barely break even this year - he might make a few thousand. Next year I'm hoping to make back my initial investment. Three years to break even, and he's not making $70k. That's easier to absorb in a large firm, by the way, due to sheer numbers and volume of workflow. "Fun" isn't really an option unless you land one of the very few cool jobs where all they do is fun stuff, or you work for a firm funded by VCs who don't watch the books (very rare), or your company just has piles of cash flowing in the door and can't figure out where to store it all (Google).
BTW - if you're going to be a good manager of technical people, you'd better be good technically as well as a good manager. You need to know your basic engineering backwards so that when an engineer comes to you and the answer they've come up with is wrong, you can both recognize it is wrong and explain - from basic principles - how to get them back on track. Once you're a manager, you don't have to know the answer to 1%, but you have to be able to get within 10% in your head (without a calculator or a computer). There are lots of bad managers our there, by the way. Don't become one.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
...and what's so funny is that he gets the reputation of being a horrible, cruel person.
Generally, he simply cuts straight to the point and says what everyone's thinking anyway "You're really a horrible singer and should think of some other career." People are just so shocked by his lack of euphemism and unwillingness to play by certain overly polite rules of social interaction. He's a staggeringly successful businessman in a business that is ephemeral, superficial, and entirely about aesthetics: if he doesn't apply his judgement quickly and accurately, he will not be successful. The people he's reviewing are simply the products he will be promoting, and he's (essentially) given over the ability to choose which product is most likely to be marketable to a giant focus-group-vote.* That takes some courage, so he's GOT to control it by weeding as aggressively as possible. It's NOT a charity, so as much as the poor little crippled kid with the abusive mommy and the amputee daddy might *want* to be a famous singer, pity isn't going to get butts in the seats night after night after night in some mediocre auditorium in Vegas on a 3 year contract. Further, I can imagine it's a HARSH business. It's all about image and everything, and if your precious little snowflake of self-image melts at his criticism, you probably don't have the strength of character to be on stage.
* although I personally believe that after Ruben Studdard, he controls the voting behind the scenes, at least to some degree.
I have only once heard him say something that (by my standards) crossed the line, and that was when he told some woman she was disgustingly fat and an atrocious singer...and she was, honestly. But there IS a concept called tact - this was the selection process and at a certain point simply saying "No, sorry" is enough. (Then again, two points: first, I'd probably be a little cross after listening to 00's of people caterwauling and then being annoyed that you don't 'appreciate' their awesomeness; second, in that sense there is a filter-value to being a little intimidating in the early shows, to weed out the unserious long before they waste his time.)
-Styopa