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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.
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.
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?