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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.
....mom and dad always told them they were incredibly special, and would do amazing things.
It never occurred to them that there's a hell of a lot more jobs that are sheer drudgery than are a thrill a minute.
In the almost seven years since I graduated from college, I've never been sent overseas for work. I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
But I always had a job during college, too. And because of that, the only thing I expected after graduation was a better salary (but not amazingly better).
Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality. Some even a bit more.
Anyway, you get what you teach. Many are taught that capitalism is all and that anything comes at a price. Would it then be strange that the same person puts a price on his/her ability (whether deserved or not is immaterial to the principle).
This is probably true. The reason being, is that students recently graduating who are around my age are children of the baby boomers. The baby boomers were a rather prosperous generation, so in general their kids had a lot of comforts and opportunity that they take for granted. Almost everybody I knew in college didn't know the value of hard work, and expected their privilege and excellence to be rewarded at face value, probably because they never HAD to work hard, because their baby boomer parents had provided them with everything they need. I really do blame the baby boomers. They grew up in a sort of fantasy world, where they could preach peace, love, and not war, and ignore the realities of the world. And so, their children will most likely have the same attitude.
My mum's a primary school teacher, so I got to hear all about the crazy fads that sweep through the education system as regularly as forest fires.
Education fads are a bit like management fads, or the hype-waves that sweep IT; some self-important tosser somewhere in academia comes up with a stupid idea, some government pinheads buy into it, and before you know it, it's all over like a bad rash.
The movement to boost pupils' self-esteem was a recent big one, which according to a recent piece on the BBC, took off in America. The idea, is that kids get praised all the time as a means of positive reinforcement -- with the obvious drawbacks.
But then again, it could be the Dunning-Kruger Effect (where the incompetent are unable to see their own incompetence), which is as strong now as it always has been.
They've been systematically lied to. Western youth has been aggressively fed a vision of fun, laid back jobs that inexplicably pay huge amounts, coupled with an excessive consumer lifestyle.
Remember the apartments they lived in in Friends? Remember what they did for a living? Exactly.
Its why there was so much consumer debt - people thought they were entitled to a lifestyle beyond their means, and were willing to take loans to get it.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Speaking from the viewpoint of a 21 year old IT "professional"... Its the parents/teachers fault. We have been told from a very early age that having education sets us apart from the rest. You end up with people that think that because they got 90s in school, they are more qualified to do a job that someone has been doing for 20 years. Its stupid, even i think so. Perhaps if we hadn't been so coddled as kids, the workplace wouldn't be such a huge step for my generation.
You do have a shot:
If you do a good job at one of those for a while, I think there's a decent chance of turning it into a paying job eventually.
Students find that the real world does not match their ideals and expectations!
I think no matter what age bracket you fit into, you or someone you knew as a post-student entering the workforce for the first time had their expectations shattered.
It's neither shocking nor news, and it certainly doesn't make you narcissistic. It makes you inexperienced, which is kind of the whole thing, isn't it?
On the other hand, there are more young people succeeding that do make it that far that quickly nowadays, so maybe you could say that the variance is increasing - more people expecting greatness and being shocked, but also more people going directly to greatness.
Furthermore, the example of one prospective employee thinking that what were in reality fairly standard and expected skills made him a unique snowflake doesn't mean he and every other post-student is narcissistic. More likely, in school he WAS cream of the crop, teaching himself new skills and so on. What he doesn't realize is that the people he's comparing himself to are now working at McDonald's; he now needs to compete against the much smaller group of people like himself. Depending on the school, he may have never met anyone else from this group.
Anyway, not narcissism, not egotism... just a mix of inexperience, naivete, and optimism/idealism.
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.
The article is based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. The person who wrote the slashdot summary (named, strangely enough, SpuriousLogic) relates some more anecdotal evidence. Now slashdotters are requested to supply even more anecdotal evidence.
I teach physics at a community college. Any generalization you can make about my students will be true about some of them and false about some others. Yes, I have encountered some students whose self-esteem seems unrealistically high. Yes, I have also encountered some other students whose self-esteem seemed to me to be unrealistically low.
If you want to show a trend over time, like increasing narcissism, you need quantitative data from two different times, and you need the random and systematic errors on those two data-points to be small enough that they can be shown to be unequal with a high level of confidence.
My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything. I'm only persuaded to the contrary if solid quantitative evidence shows up to the contrary. My default hypothesis is that the self-esteem movement has had absolutely no effect on students' self-esteem, or on their achievement, or on anything else. Students tend to be pretty realistic. They look and compare themselves with other students. They know if they got an F on their physics exam and their lab partner didn't.
Find free books.
Might as well replace "students" with "people". The whole concept that this is somehow limited to graduates of whatever reeks of the "dirty intellectuals" cultural revolution mentality.
It's not graduates that are getting narcissistic, it's much of our society that's changing this way, of which they are but a subset. If you think that the people who don't finish high school and suckle on the NYC welfare tit for much of their life are any less narcissistic, you've got a dose of reality coming...
Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.
Uh, wut? How does not having a solid family structure make you more narcissistic? Personally I have found that people that had to fend for themselves and didn't have mommy at arms reach more humbled and harder working.
Well, I've seen an awful lot of situations where two guys are doing exactly the same job but one guy is getting paid a whole lot more because of "seniority". That really doesn't seem fair to me...
While I understand where you're coming from, this argument is very disingenuous at best. Basically, you're saying there's no value to someone having more work experience in a field (or several fields). I can't count the number of times I've seen a problem arise (or even a request for suggestions) where the younger people throw out solutions that are quite simply moronic. Or they'll cost a ton to implement. Sure, it happens with "senior" staff, too, but oftentimes their answers tend to be on the more practical side. And it's largely because they're more familiar with the myriad aspects involved. Or they are a major part of the institutional knowledge that is required to competently resolve the situation. Unfortunately, many people never seem to realize this. And they're often the ones pulling the group down as a whole. So is it any surprise that they're the ones who tend to make less?
I'm 18, and I'm about to leave my secondary school and head off to university (assuming I get my grades). I've always had an interest in tech an computers - so I learnt (or started learning) C/C++ at around 14 to try and get a step ahead of just the typical 'wannabes'. I now consider myself, four years later, to be a pretty competent coder. Besides that though, I don't consider myself 'special' in any way or form what-so-ever.
In fact, the only 'special' thing about what I just mentioned is the age I was when I did it - what I actually did (self teaching, as per the java beans example) is painfully uninteresting. Yet people I meet routinely single this out as 'strange' and 'amazing' (people in other fields, that is).
I don't share their enthusiasm - why is self-teaching so amazing? Am I really that cool for doing the simplest thing ever - teaching myself. Or are the other people I'm being judged against too fucking retarded to teach themselves?
I think that's the main scary thing this article touches on (and something I've experienced) - self teaching is now some kind of oddity. I'm pleased I learnt C/C++ when I did: Not because of what it is, but apparently, in this new age of retardation, self taught *anything* is some amazing feat to be behold. I think that's the scarier prospect than overly narcissistic students/graduates
It's not until we all started working and actually failed at something that we got knocked back down to reality.
I've taught for over 20 year, and have watched the rise of entitlement and expectation on the part of children and parents. And the inability of educators to disabuse students of this. And the media's willingness to capitalize on this. Children have been taught that this is what to expect, praised for expecting it, denied exposure to the mundane realities to follow, and inculcated into the cult of 'TV reality' that SL so rightly describes. I can tell you... my best interns are mothers in their late 30s-40s who are looking to improve opportunities for themselves, and thereby their children. That said, the solution is easy. And it is not merely turning post graduation employment opportunities into a nightmare of failure. We can manage expectations. We can raise the bar. We can expect more from students in high schools than standardized scores, and continue that level of expectation into college. Rule one for anyone that I know to be a self-motivated successful individual is that failure is a requirement. They don't put it that way. If you've never failed, you have never tested yourself or pushed yourself to the extreme of your abilities. You've never tried something radically new, if you've never failed. You expect success and you anticipate the attainment of your expectations if you've never pushed yourself. Children learn to push themselves from the models that they observe in their parents, teachers and social contacts... so if grads aren't what we expect, then we, collectively, have not been setting a good example. Blaming the victims of our collective failure is easier than our solving the problem from the ground up... and if we don't, then we're actually the same as those we're deriding. IMHO of course.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2013.808365
The cool kids are working on LLVM and L4.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
When the delta cost between an modest office and a cube is around $2k/year, I frankly have a hard time seeing why a $50k professional shouldn't have one if he wants it. If he asked you for $2k additional salary to work for you, you'd give it to him. So why not a $2k office?
That he's expected to settle for a cube is almost pure PHB. It says that the organization is more interested in the petty politics of oneupmanship than the are in their employees' comfort and productivity.
On the other hand, my eyes head for the ceiling when the guy who has been there two weeks starts explaining the half dozen major changes we should make to the business. Spend six months learning how to do it my way you greenie! When you're fully trained on the job, I'll be interested in your opinions on how to improve it.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of capitalism, not the goal. The principle is that if I value your skills more than I value X dollars per year, then that's what I'll be willing to pay you. If you won't work for less than X + 10000 dollars per year and that's more than I value your skills, we don't have a deal and I'll keep my money.
If you want something without giving anything in return, what you are talking about isn't capitalism.
Note: By you, I don't mean you, I mean them.
There was no special trait about Bill Gates that led him to the riches he has today, unless hard work (like it or not, the guy has spent a lot of time and effort to get where he is today) and knowing when a good opportunity was passing his way (hello, QDOS!) are somehow special traits.
A virtuous man ensures fairness of opportunity, not fairness of outcome. Attempting to create a fairness of outcome--in other words, creating the expectation that the world owes you something--is the first step toward a terminally fucked society.
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Mod parent up
Travel (even international/intercontinental) gets very old, very quickly when you're doing it constantly. Travel for work is not like holiday travel; all you see is the inside of another identikit hotel and another identikit office, and the little you see of your exotic location is the taxi between them.
And catching an 0600 flight every Monday, followed by a 9+hour day in the office *hurts* after about a month.
I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest.
If he would view working on open-source compilers/kernels as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working on such software in the first place.
Everything that you described sounds horrible. How are you supposed to get any work done when you're constantly teaching the other guy? It would probably be in your best interests to pack up and move to a better job.
The older generation always scoffs at the younger generation. There is always a large component of kids-these-days to these types of arguments. That being said, as a 40 year old college professor who's been doing this for 8 years, I do see a shift in the behavior of students, primarily the average-to-below-average student. The bright students who are motivated and mature don't seem to suffer from the problems I'm about to describe. One big problem is that many students simply are unwilling to do more than a fixed amount of work that they don't want to do. In college they place aspects of their lives which are not academic at a higher priority and get annoyed when their performance reflects this. I see more and more of this. The main things are: socializing, work, and family. It's not that I didn't have those thing when I was in college, it's just that academics always came first. Many students simply refuse to dedicate the time they need to do well; it's not that they're dumb.
A lot of students really do have the precious-snowflake chip on their shoulders. A junior faculty member in my department who has only been teaching for a couple of years and who is very student-focused told a student who was struggling in one of his classes that her main reason for not doing well was that she was not working hard enough (and he was right). How did she take it? She went to the dean and filed a complaint against the professor. This same student is always passing notes and talking to another student in one of my classes. I have confronted them in class and they will shoot me dirty looks, shut up for a while, and start back up again the next class. The professor I mentioned above has spent hours and hours with another student trying to help her with the subject material and to show her appreciation, she accused him of "destroying her passion" for her major.
The precious-snowflake syndrome is strongly tied to the immaturity problem which plagues a lot of college students. I think students are simply putting off growing up, and I am regularly dealing with high-school crap in, for example, sophomore-level science classes (courses in the students' major even!) which I simply never had to deal with before.
When I am in one of my more cynical moods, I take great pleasure in the idea that these kids are in for a really rude awakening after they graduate in the current economic climate. Maybe it will be the splash of cold water in the face that they need to grow the f*ck up and realize that the world does not exist solely for their own entertainment, and that simply gracing me with their presence in class does not get them an automatic B.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
"Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality."
Unfortunately, its worse that than. A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Ironically as business is such a competitive environment, narcissistic behavior gives a competitive advantage, so they force to the top. It also sadly means that society as a whole is structured to reward the behaviors of the NPD minority, to the detriment to the majority of people. The core problem is narcissistic people by definition lack a lot of empathy. They are wrapped up in their own views and only want people around them to agree with them. They will get angry at anyone who opposes them even if that opposition is to tell them something which would help their company.
The way society as a whole is structured is why every country is run like a Plutocracy (ruled by people with money) even though some people in some countries are told they have a democracy. Its not a real democracy, anywhere in the world, as all career politicians are middle class wage earners regardless of which party they belong to as they all belong to the same groups of people with power and money, so don't represent the majority of people. Worse still, since the financial collapse, its highlighting we are near the extremes of a Plutocracy bordering into at times a Kleptocracy, (Ruled by thieves), where they help themselves and their rich friends to millions of tax payers money in their attempt to prop up and maintain their rich lifestyles.
Unfortunately, these are also the people in power, they make the laws, which is why so few will be punished for their behavior. Which takes us back to society as a whole is structured to reward these behaviors.
I come from poor white trash, but I worked hard - got a Ph.D. from a top English university (I grew up in Canada), and now I work in DC as an overpaid consultant. I drive a fully paid for BMW, am looking out my window at an awesome view of the Capitol Building as I type this.
Hard work does indeed pay off, but you also need to make smart long term decisions with it.
Regarding the nurse and teacher - they do what they do because they like it. I understand, I volunteer 700+ hours as a firefighter in one of the rural communities here.
Work hard, but find a balance - that's the key to success / happiness.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
"The boys i mean are not refined
They go with girls who buck and bite
They do not give a fuck for luck
They hump them thirteen times a night
One hangs a hat upon her tit
One carves a cross on her behind
They do not give a shit for wit
The boys i mean are not refined
They come with girls who bite and buck
Who cannot read and cannot write
Who laugh like they would fall apart
And masturbate with dynamite
The boys i mean are not refined
They cannot chat of that and this
They do not give a fart for art
They kill like you would take a piss
They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance"
-- E. E. Cummings, 1926ish
I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it? Ok, there is the money and having a less difficult time at getting a job, but, I see it as a tragedy if a company some time to explore cool stuff because it's worried about micro-efficiency. Considering this, I'm reminded of something a friend (double major CE & Chemistry) once told me: Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again. I'm sure that's not true for all situations, but I do think I'd be disappointed to not apply what I've learned to what I'm interested in.
That's why as part of the interview team you need to set up some programming tests that constitute basic pass or fail. Like: do basic CRUD in a pseudo language of your choice. Reverse a string of characters in a pseudo code. You'd be surprised at the proportion of "MS" degreed people who can -barely- get through the string reversal. But when you get someone who's a true coder, it's a breeze and a joy watching him do it and talk about it. And he will not suck as a full time coworker.
"....mom and dad always told them they were incredibly special, and would do amazing things."
There's a great line from that movie about the math teacher Jaime Escalante, Stand and Deliver. In the movie, Escalante is arguing with an Anglo teacher, who is worried that Escalante is raising their expectations too much. She was one of the "villains" in the film, but she had a great line, one that should be stamped on the brain of every teacher in the world. I can't find the exact quote so I'll have to paraphrase it from memory here:
"
You've convinced them that they're all geniuses, that they can all be Einstein and Newton. But the truth is, most are ordinary, and one day they'll realize that despite what you say, they're nothing special. And they'll hate you for it.
Our school systems tell our kids that they all have the potential for greatness. Not just being good at something, but great at something. And that's simply not true. The truth is, most of us are ordinary, and with hard work, we can become competent, or even solid. And that's just fine. That's the way of things. As the saying goes, if everyone was special, no one would be. And yet, the "self-esteem" movement in schools tells kids that they're all potential writers, artists, engineers, presidents, etc. Very few of us go on to do anything like that. Most of us lead middle-class lives with middle-class jobs, with middle-class pains and joys. Many of us don't even get that far. Not because of any conspiracy, or bad schools, but because that's the state of humanity. That's what we are. A few bright minds, a lot of workers, and some dim bulbs. John Lennon was wrong. We don't all shine on. Very few of us do. Unfortunately, too many teachers preach Lennon's line at students. You don't want to discourage students from trying to reach higher, but you also want them to be realistic about the world.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That's the alternative to capitalism. The only one.
Hahaha
"Everything has a price" is a consequence of scarcity economics and greed.
Really? You have access to an infinite energy machine? No? Well then.. I suppose scarcity exists and isn't an invention of evil capitalists to put down the proletariat. Since scarcity exists then that means there is a price to produce anything, and that fact is where "everything has a price" comes from. To seriously believe otherwise is to not only deny basic economics, but our current understanding of physics. TANSTAAFL
I was raised on the command line, bitch
"Nemo me impune lacesset"
Yes - earn an MBA and presto! Instant NPD!
This is being reported all over the place. In fact, my wife read an article in Macleans (I think) years ago about this very thing. Overall, the false self-esteem forced upon these kids by our so called "education system" in North America has brought about a new horror in education. As in, most students today are what is commonly referred to as "mark mercenaries." They also have a gross tendency to lie or twist words or ... to get what they want. I've seen it used time and time again in attempts to screw over profs, TAs, etc because of a perceived wrong. That perceived wrong typically being not paying enough attention to the student or giving them a bad grade (that they earned). In fact, a recent example is a TA got questioned for not giving help to a student. What actually happened is that this student didn't even as for help. Likely in some twisted reality in this students head, the TA should have constantly come up to this student asking him/her if (s)he needed help. Because, that's what happens in highschool right?
And what makes it worse? TV programs that, including reality TV, that glorify people getting a free ride. So, now with the delusional aspect to the general mentality of todays youth added to there false self-esteem, they actually honestly believe that they deserve what they think they deserve. Regardless of the reality of the situation.
And what makes that worse? Universities/Colleges/etc are indirectly encouraging that. Because, if they did anything to stop that, then the students wouldn't take there (service) courses and the departments would be in big trouble. Both through the lower grades and the complaints that admin would surely get and the lower enrolment rates.
Right now, what we should expect is for this to get worse for a long time to come. Because, the Universities/etc (because they are now run like businesses and NOT educational institutions) have a vested interest in caving to these power drunk students. And those students are the *vast* majority of the student population.
I quake for our future...
I've had to deal with interns coming into the technology field after being coddled at college for a few years. I've tried to be friendly, polite and honest. Mostly that's been appreciated after a few months in 'the real workplace'.
I also took the time to talk to these interns at the end of their internship to go over how they would represent their work on their resumes. Invariably they didn't see what they really did. What they saw as a series of menial tasks was really "Performed X with minimal supervision" and "Completed project Y using blah blah blah". They weren't prepared to comprehend what a real project was.
One of the truly sad things was their lack of ability to troubleshoot. I know I've said this in the past but I feel it bears repeating. Everything these kids have done has been multiple choice. Their tests, their games, everything has presented them with a list of choices. Our games gave us a problem and then we were on our own to come up with what might work as a solution. Does anyone remember "You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." and a command prompt? Not a lot of pre-chosen answers there. I spent quite a bit of time helping them learn how to solve problems.
Lastly, here's the advice I have yet to see an intern use. "Find the job that no one wants to do, do it well, and you'll be employed for life." Seriously, everyone wants the fun and happy jobs. But someone has to clean the crap out of the corners and keep the place running. Fun and happy candidates are lined up out the door and around the corner. The one who is willing to do the jobs that require doing is going to stand out.
Now get off my intarwebz.
it's not a failing of capitalism at all, if anything it's them failing at capitalism - they don't understand what their skills are worth, and are being punished by the market for it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Apparently douchebag-syndrome runs rampant in colleges where students
The words college and student are highly relevant in your nonsense.
The educational system is not keeping up with the complexity of the world. Even though so much can be achieved now by a few simple gestures of the arm-a simple point and click can start a factory on the other side of the earth-the technology required a long and dedicated effort to implement.
I was talking to someone working on cell-phone software. A cell phone is just a little thing held in the hand so how big can the software be? Hundreds of millions of lines. Try writing that in time to catch the next market cycle, which is coming up in only a few months-it's hard work and high risk. Teamwork is required. Most of the procedures are standardized so the whole thing is doable, but no one is going to really stand out. If they need someone to stand out, it could be too risky-what if that person missed a few days or weeks?
Maybe ten years ago this complexity would be cutting edge, but now it's run-of-the-mill, yet schools have their hands full just getting people to learn basic concepts. Only a few students may have an opportunity to see how work is done in the real world-the seemingly endless calculations and the long lists of tiny functions to implement.
On the other hand, the high tech industry makes it easy for a nondescript insider to take advantage of the perks. There are so many people and the pay for designers versus third world assembly people is so vastly different that it is understandable for a mentality of get it while you can. So let people set their own compensation targets, and see if they can justify them.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
How can I get this? Are there courses I can go on?
Lesson one: Never let your boss know you might be as smart as him - don't even allow the possibility that you might be smarter.
Lesson two: Suck up - whatever they want to hear, tell them that. Never forget lesson one.
Lesson three: As you begin to rise through the organization, mold yourself in the image of those who control your promotions. Play golf if they do, wear the same style of clothes, etc. but always maintain a respectful deference to their superior position, don't have the same or better clubs, play at cheaper courses (allow them to do you the favor of inviting you to their "better" club), tone the clothes down just a notch to reflect your lower salary, if they drive a BMW 7, you buy a used 3, you can still talk BMWs... if this is sounding a lot like lesson 2, it is - and never forget lesson 1.
Lesson 4: if you still have a soul, lose it. Anyone you have power over who might possibly compete with you in the future must be repressed or eliminated, discretely.
If you've gotten this far, I'm sure you can figure out the rest for yourself. It doesn't hurt to job hop 4 or 5 times so you can have an impressive resume story to tell on introductions, nothing is as boring as someone who left school, started as a mid-level tech and worked their way up to Vice President at the same company after 8 years - what could this person possibly have to offer, they've never "been" anywhere else....
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
I too want to do cool stuff, but the reality is that there is cool stuff and stuff that will make the company money. You may be lucky and be able to land a job at a company that does both, but don't expect it. The companies I worked for, that did cool stuff didn't last long because it was too cutting and the market wasn't ready for it.
Often you aren't in management because you were forced there, but because you wanted more pay (pay usually corresponds to responsibility) or you were fed up of being a lab rat or equivalent.
I am still hoping I will get my dream job, but I realise that it is all down to luck and hard work.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The reason schools are making their engineering programs do more interesting-sounding things are because engineering and CS enrollments, especially among US citizens, are dropping rapidly. So schools are trying to find creative ways to interest people in majoring in those areas; "training for boring cubicle job", funnily enough, doesn't entice people.
The only other solution, really, is the capitalist one: offer so much money that people will go into the field even if it does sound boring. But you need to offer a lot more than current going rates for that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Nope, sorry. Operational experience trumps specs every time, especially in networking. I'm naturally inclined to side with the oldster and join in the kid-bashing, but I've seen too many cases where following the spec instead of actual current practice was a colossal mistake. Without knowing more of the details, I'd go with the kid in most cases like this.
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Pretty much any mainstream economist will tell you that productivity has increased enormously over the past century, due to a combination of factors, technology probably being the biggest. Productivity increases decrease the level of scarcity for any fixed basket of goods to which they apply, because more stuff is produced than previously without an increase in resources.
Of course, you can take that "productivity dividend" in various forms. One way to maintain the illusion of scarcity is to increase your baseline of what you "need", so you always need the things that have just barely become affordable. Then scarcity is definitionally constant, because what you're really doing is holding scarcity fixed and varying your basket of goods accordingly.
The netbook trend shows the opposite way you can take the productivity dividend: hold fixed the things you "need", and enjoy the ever-decreasing scarcity by having to give fewer resources (i.e. hours of work) to get those same goods. Applied to other areas, it's quite possible to reduce the amount of work people have to do on average, as long as you increase the "need" baseline slower than the gains from better productivity decrease scarcity. Typically people haven't done that: do Americans use the productivity increases of the past 50 years to work fewer hours? No, they generally use them to increase material consumption; e.g. the average house size has nearly doubled. But that isn't entirely necessary.
Of course, Bertrand Russell went over all of this in 1932, so it's not particularly novel.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
because it's a dirt simple CS 101 exercise. You need a loop, array indexing, swapping values. If a candidate can't bang that out on the whiteboard with his eyes closed, there should be major red flags in hiring him. And trust me, people with nice looking resumes will actually have trouble with it.
And someone who did graduate, and today manages an IT company, I have some sad news for you. All that knowledge you acquired on college ? That is just the BASE of that you need at corporate . When you get hired, you are green. Not only in terms of knowledge, but in terms of company practices, market practices (many) and so on. Think of it as continued education. You went to junior, high school, college and now you are getting educated on the corporate environment.
You don't expect to jump from junior school to high-tech R&D. You know you have other steps before that.
When you finish college you are not ready. You are just closer. Keep that in mind, and make the most of your time when you join a company to LEARN. Learn from your tasks, learn from your co-workers, learn from your manager. As much as we like to joke about managers, they are making more money then you, so they gotta know something you don't (not necessarily technical).
You also need to faction in that, when you join a company, you are an unknown. The company will only invest so much money on you until they know they will have a good return.
This things are only natural. Unfortunately, most schools fail to teach this to their students, and the only source of "knowledge" they have are TV shows and such. This is not a fail of the students, but a fail of the schools.
morcego
"Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality. Some even a bit more.
Anyway, you get what you teach. Many are taught that capitalism is all and that anything comes at a price."
I don't see colleges teaching capitalism--far from it. But what schools ARE teaching are how SPECIAL they (the kids) are and that equal outcomes are more important than equal opportunity. It starts with dumbing down competitive sports and giving every person, whether they win or lose, a trophy. It's holding graduation ceremonies every time they pass a grade. It's not wanting to recognize valedictorians because someone's feelings might get hurt. We award the outcome, not the effort. And the parents all go along with this. So is it no wonder when they become "adults" they don't think they HAVE to put in any effort and they should get a bonus whether they earned it or not.
What we should be praising the child for is hard work, and letting them learn to lose gracefully. They need to learn that no one OWES them anything and they need to work hard and do their best.
But I'll go one further regarding the hiring--they get what the PAY for. Why don't you (employers) try hiring some of us older workers out there, looking for work, who not only have the skills, but whom you won't have to remind to not wear flip-flops or tube tops to work? And by "older" I mean over 40! I get really high ratings when I work contract, but I'll be damned if I can get a permanent gig. There's a lot of us who would be HAPPY to work for your company, even at a lessor wage, just to have some benefits and vacation time. We know what we're doing and you wouldn't have to babysit us or make sure we weren't goofing off. We get our projects done professionally and on-time. And contrary to popular belief, we LIKE getting to learn new things or upgrading our skills. And we're not likely to be running off to your competitors in a couple of years.
As you can see this is a personal sore spot with me. I have had supervisors go to bat for me and try to get me employed with their company. Unfortunately they weren't the decision makers and those in charge don't want to have to hire on an IT person if they can get away with a contractor. For those companies who are looking (usually for someone with 1-2 years experience)--well, if I don't get an interview I never get to show them what I can do to help them or their business. (And I do know the tactics of only putting the last 10 years of meaningful employment and not putting down a date of graduation.) But all they have to do is ask for a transcript or force the entry graduation dates on an online form and they can do the math pretty quick. (I've become very tempted to put in a "accidental typo" of 1991 instead of 1981.)
If you've never been modded as "flamebait" or "troll," you've never tried to argue a minority viewpoint here!
That was my experience as well. I did reasonably well in my computer science courses and busted my ass, but I certainly wasn't a 4.0 student. What set me apart was that I had a job working for my university developing real applications that shipped to real people, and I had real deadlines. So I spent a significant amount of time outside the classroom learning things not taught in the classroom and finding opportunities to apply what I'd learned.
... those were things I had to learn myself.
And even then, that just got me in the door at a big company. I was doing QA and tools work for a couple of years. I had free reign to explore new and interesting ideas, but I was still shackled to QA. There were a lot of times toward the end where I just got depressed, doing the same repetitive testing, over and over again, feeling my talent wasting away.
Eventually, I found a problem that was plaguing the company's product that I could latch on to and designed and implemented a solution during a down period in our QA cycle. And even then, I had to get it in front of the right people, that is, people interested in hiring me to work on interesting problems. And even then, I had great timing on my side. They just happened to need someone to take over a major project whose previous maintainer had moved on.
But I managed to get my project into a shipping product. And from that point, it was a (relatively) short jump to moving to the right organization within the company. And now I work on a great project within a great product. I go to work every day without worrying about whether I'll be interested in what I'm doing. I just always am. But I didn't get that overnight, without proving to other people that I was worth the time of day. It's true that some graduates do go straight into working on interesting problems and shipping code, but if you're not fortunate enough to be one of them, you have to make your own career path.
The whole process of making that jump was (for me) incredibly long, arduous and stressful, full of insecurity and doubt. When I wasn't implementing my solution, I was busy worrying about whether I was wasting my time or whether anyone would take me seriously. And when I had a demo-able implementation, I had to design presentations, set up meetings, and justify my design choices in front of people who were way the hell more experienced than me. But it was an incredibly rewarding experience.
Bottom line, my education didn't prepare me for any of that. The fact that I wasn't entitled to work on the exciting stuff, that I had to do the non-engineering grunt work of selling my solution
Or at least, they traditionally did, and we haven't really figured out as a whole what we want to transition to.
Historically, only a small percentage of people got university degrees. Professors were (and in many places still are) first and foremost researchers; their real job is not teaching, but advancing their field and publishing their results. A secondary job is research mentorship: they advise and supervise graduate students as the next generation of researchers. A tertiary job is teaching of undergraduate material, to historically only a small percentage of the population that had a need to learn advanced-level stuff from an expert in the field. Those people were generally expected, furthermore, to be interested in and to benefit from a well-rounded education rather than only training in their specific area, e.g. to become scientists who also had an understanding of ethics and history.
Today, it's more or less expected in many areas that you have a college degree. As a result, a lot of people go to university mainly as a sort of certification that qualifies them for jobs. They don't necessarily want the traditional liberal education, even the science version of it; they want vocational training. But universities were not really set up to provide that, and their staff are entirely the wrong ones to provide it: the people publishing CS research papers and the people who would be good at teaching a vocational programming class that prepares one for a role as C++ programmer in industry are only occasionally the same.
That's why we historically had separate trade schools and vocational schools, which did focus on practical skills, and had teachers who were focused on teaching such skills. But there's been a sort of prestige treadmill so companies want you to have a University Degree for a job that actually need vocational training, not a well-rounded liberal-arts education with mentorship from a PhD researcher.
There's a lot of possible solutions, of course. One is to go back to the old model, where universities do research and teach a small percentage of the population, and vocationally focused institutions teach most people. The most likely, though, is probably a gradual morphing of universities into a superset of the two kinds of institutions. Already it's becoming common to hire lecturers to teach introductory classes, and some schools are offering variations on degrees to let students opt between more traditional university majors or more applied vocational majors; often this also leads to a parallel split between staff who are mainly "teaching faculty" versus "research faculty".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10