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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.
... until the bosses have the same mindset, at which point we're all screwed.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
....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).
So what do I get? A ferrari? week in Tahiti?
Does the geek cred I gain by posting on Slashdot mean I automatically become CTO?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
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.
Perhaps I'm just more realistic than the average college graduate, but I'd really just...like a job. I knew, coming in, that whatever I learned in college was just the tip of the iceberg; if getting a BS in Computer Science really prepared you for everything you might see in the "real world" then why are there Masters and Doctorate programs? I will admit that a lot of my fellow college students thought that they are geniuses for one reason or another, but I'm under no such delusions. Hell, in this economy, I'd just like a steady IT job; but it has been remarkably hard to find one with the market flooded with more experienced individuals.
I graduated with a CS bachelors a few years ago thinking I would have a good shot at doing some compiler design or maybe kernel hacking.. despite the fact that I had only done these kind of things in a sterile learning environment that did not at all simulate the level of complexity involved in modern languages and operating systems.. So when I got out of school, I found out that, rather being able to get a job doing these kinds of things, I was lucky to get a web app programming job.
I'm not bitter. I should have realized this from the beginning. But I really wish someone would have pointed out to me that this was what the job market was actually like, so that I could have gone the EE route instead.
Do you still wear an onion on your belt?
A big part of life is seeing your options narrow as you grow older. There was a time when it was a (very remote) possibility that I could make the Olympic team. Now, I'm simply too old. On the plus, I now have a wonderful wife and daughter so I now know I'm not going to spend my entire life alone (there was a time when that was also a possibility).
So, some guy fresh out of college thinks he might be the next Bill Gates? Maybe he will be. Who are you to say that he won't? It does happen. A few years down the road, when this guy's options have narrowed, you and he might both agree that it's just not going to happen.
But why the need to stomp on some guy's dreams right this second? Particularly when, as you describe it, that dream involves something as simple as not wanting to live in Decater, IL or Cedar Rapids, IA. There are an awful lot of people who do manage to "live the dream" of not having to live in the Midwest. And, if all your new employees really want to live in Los Angeles, why not open a branch office in Los Angeles?
But the real issue here seems to be seniority based pay. The article linked by the summary mentions college graduates wanting more than "entry level" pay. 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 (it also doesn't seem fair that management pays itself so much more than the people doing the actual work, but that's another topic).
Anyway, it may be overwhelmingly naive but it's hardly narcissistic to expect the same pay for the same job - and, reading between the lines, that seems to be the real issue here. "How dare those young whippersnappers expect to be paid as much as me - the 'senior' developer?" Maybe they're up to the job and maybe they aren't - but is that really any different than some old guy thinking he has what it takes to be a "senior" developer when he really doesn't?
I deserve your job, because my mommy and daddy said I was very speshul!
They just don't realize that the show is, "The Office".
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.
I think it's more of a cultural thing. I've seen people of all ages kinda expect primadonna treatment for some reason or another.
I'd also go so far to say that other cultures such as asians (of which I am also part of and have lived in for several years) are brought up to expect to work hard first and reap benefits sometime after they've proven their worth. It's actually quite confusing for us when we work for an organization that is anything other than a meritocracy.
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.
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.
Its not just the college graduates. We have the same problem with high school graduates for blue collar jobs.
Live to be Moderated
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.
Every new generation is bound to feel superior to the previous, being fresh and inexperienced and self-confident in their sparkling new standards. Every previous generation will feel that the new children are annoying little pests wearing too-big boots. This is to be expected, and the attitudes usually fade over time as the new generation gets hit with reality and the older ones come to stand them.
Of course, this really is the one of the first times that it comes up in the software fields, as the field is relatively new.
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.
At least while they're there they can watch some Thunderball!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dl9puZ4q7UI
'Nuff said.
... and schools. Parents don't teach their kids that some things are just simply part of life. You have to do it whether you like it or not. You have to do it even if you don't get an allowance or a gold star. Some things are worth doing even if you don't feel good about doing it.
Schools affirm this by removing competition and focus on making sure kids feel good about themselves. This is reflected in a recent survey where US kids scored lower on things like math, but felt that had done well on the test. Non-US students felt that they had not done well on the test, but scored higher. In other words, stupid US kids feel really good about themselves. Heck, they've been rewarded not for getting things right, but for trying! Why wouldn't they expect to get constant affirmation in the professional world?
Bring back competition. Bring back winning and loosing. Bring back hard work. Dump the ego-centric psychology.
Most people have no idea about anything, or how anything works.
The more skills the more education they obtain the less they try to gain the knowledge of the world around them, making nice little pocket worlds that almost everyone lives in.
We simply don't want to believe the things we know are true.
My generation (The college students/graduates) are the worst. Because of Google and Microsoft we think we're all going to become rich tomorrow if we go into the tech career path, but most of us have no idea how those companies filled niches in the world and the non-coding brilliance it took for them to rise to the top.
We expect our pay out to be like our video streams, done downloading before we've started to watch, when reality is that it's slower than a 56K client downloading from another 56K client.
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
I recently graduated after going back to school in my thirties. Yes, my expectation was at least to get a job making more than I did before I was downsized and went back to college. I do however work at a tech company now and I would have taken any position available. I had to make some hard decisions about that too. You have to take the good and the bad, that is just the way it is with the economy now. I just took a job that I am overqualified for, the salary is not that great, but I can live comfortably on it because I have other sources of income and investments because I am older and did prepare for the future. And the only reason I have that is because I had to make some seriously hard decisions, like selling the house my husband and I lived in when he was alive, cars etc. The good part is that the company is growing, it is a ten minute commute and the work is interesting, so far. I figure give it a year, if it doesn't get any better or I do not get a promotion, I will go to grad school at night and work there until something better comes along or I find something better once the economy gets a little better. I actually feel very lucky and happy about my new job! Honestly, the people are very nice there and seem to have good bosses so far. I really did not have any pie in the sky or rose colored glasses scenarios in my mind when I got out, probably because I was already screwed over a few times money wise by other companies because I didn't have the degree, they were not forking over the cash even though I should have been making at least 10K more, LOL At least now with the degree, I have the leverage to go somewhere else and make more money. :)
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
Quote at bottom of /. page:
"You will be advanced socially, without any special effort on your part."
Well, there you go.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I have read similar comments by young people before. I believe it was in the Amazon reviews of Generation Me, which I discovered via an article on danah boyd's blog. boyd says she has found the same thing in her research (she studies young people's use of social software).
I know this reply isn't particularly exciting, but I can say I have not seen this happen. The grads I meet are excited, interested, and humble. Maybe we just hire the good ones?
Seriously, if you think they are bad in the work place, try being in an environment where they aren't fired if they can't mesh with the rest of the group. I'm fine with self confidence, but the arrogance of some of the students is more than frustrating. Since they think they have it all under control, they don't care about learning some of the lessons that college tries to teach them.
I still see a lot of concern about how many programing languages you know, not how well you can think and solve problems. Oh my, you've worked with 6 languages, including Javascript!
Please tell me it gets better. I am scared.
This generation have been fed on heroic IT success stories, like how a couple of college DNFs in a garage start up a company, and are billionaires before their 30, amongst other IT legends.
These are kids that do not recall a time where there were no computers in homes, typically. The younger kids, about age 20, do not know a world without the internet. They've also grown up aware of the worlds most pressing issues, overpopulation, global warming, general doom and gloom, and the now ubiquitous message that we simply don't have a future if we don't do something about it.
(Where my bunch are lazy and self-indulgent. But I kinda like that) Given that, there's little surprise there are are high expectations of gains from entering the IT industry, along with a ever decreasing tolerance for tedium and BS. I've observed this in the fresh out of school age group following my lot.
I don't think this is a bad thing however. I find many of them actually refreshingly motivated and willing to change things, rather suck-it-up and keep your head down and wait for your opportunity to move up. In comparison my age group (born circa 1980) is rather lazy.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
http://www.whywork.org/
See especially:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."
See also:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
On the other hand:
"Blame It on Mr. Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled"
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118358476840657463.html
And, extending that theme:
"Blame the Bailouts on Mister Rogers?"
http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/12/12/blame-the-crisis-on-mister-rogers/
Maybe there are deeper issues here on all sides? From:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72330a22bcae8928?
Consider who could pay for food or water (or copyrighted content or patented
processes) in thirty years, if robotics continues to develop just at the
current rate over the last thirty years.
Check out clerks?
"Your supermarket cashier may not know a kiwano from a tamarillo, but
Veggie Vision does."
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/machin...
Cab drivers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge
Heart Surgeons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Surgical
Airline pilots?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot
Nurses?
"Robot nurse escorts and schmoozes the elderly"
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I know people from CMU and community college, and the CMU people do tend to have their heads up their butts. The community college people have much lower expectations. If you hire the people with the highest grades from the best schools, yes they're going think like that. Try hiring students from non-ivy league schools (yes that includes new Ivy) and see if they have a more down to earth attitude. Or maybe even give people who have real life experience (working as a dishwasher) credit for that on their job applications. Talk to their former employers and see what there attitude is like. Maybe you're hiring the wrong employees because you're analysing job applications wrong.
It's not until we all started working and actually failed at something that we got knocked back down to reality.
"I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint"
- Hesiod, 8th century BC
Comment of the year
Uh, guy? I think you're the one they're talking about in the article.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"In my college advanced VB class"
I stopped reading your comment there.
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
I think that especially in the US (but to a lesser extent everywhere else too, given that the economy is by large part a service economy rather than a production one), you HAVE to be narcissistic to compete with all the other narcissistic people on the market, inflated self esteem is sort of expected. Non-narcissistic people are often dismissed as not having enough self esteem, when in fact they are just honest and realistic.
We learn from history that we learn nothing from history - Tom Veneziano
I see a little of that 20-something narcissism here and there, but it's not universal. What I see more of is what I would call intellectual stubbornness. Every so often I'll interview someone I think has potential and, even if they don't get hired for that job, I'll keep them on a short list for future openings. Along with that give them some suggestions for areas of focus that would give them an edge on the next interview. Do this, this and this and the next time we have an opening I don't have to advertise it, just hire out of the pool. Saves me sorting through the resume slush pile.
At first I was subtle about the suggestions, but very few would pick up on them. Even when I would contact them quarterly to see how they were doing, trying to show them they really were on the short list. I finally had to quit being subtle and just give them the right answers. But even when I did that, it's amazing how few would give me that answer back. One I suggested they get familiar with a non-MSFT development framework. Any one. Zend, Cake, Rails...anything. They didn't have to develop an app, just learn about one. An hour of reading. And the next time we talked they were in another .NET class. Then acted surprised when they didn't get that job, either. ????
That I do see that a lot in young people. They're convinced they have the right answers and won't budge or take a suggestion. There's no curiosity or willingness to explore. they seem really regimented in their thinking. Something I found profoundly saddening personally and, as hiring authority, really freaking annoying.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
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.
http://www.humandevolution.com/
om namo bhagavate vasudevaya
Even though the town sucks, spell it right :P
Fraternities and other student organizations encourage networking. Most of which is with unemployed people who still receive an allowance from mom and dad.
I always had a job in IT through college. It taught me that humility, rather than narcissism, is rewarded. If you're a good programmer/tech let your work speak for you instead of your words.
The game.
The arrogance of educated workers isn't anything particularly new however it is something that seems to drift from field to field along with educational trends. A couple of years ago I read an article on how something like over 60% of CEO's would not hire anyone with an MBA on account of how disastrous former employees had been. At the time, and as a generality (no I'm not talking about you, Mr. MBA who happens to read slashdot) MBA graduates tended to assume that because of their diploma, they knew how to run a department or company better than people without the equivalence in education, but many years of experience. Now this trend is starting to apply to programmers. They expect that with their degrees and certifications, they will be better workers, and thus given better opportunities than people many years their senior. Now I'm not saying we are all supposed to LIKE Bill Gates, or anything, but his high school diploma has certainly gotten him far. No amount of education will ever replace work experience. Learning new or even old out-dated languages is part of any intense IT job, and only with experience will you be good at troubleshooting and reverse engineering the kind of poorly documented stuff that you will be expected to do. Personally, I have the same level of education as Bill Gates and have dropped out of college twice, but that hasn't prevented glamourous opportunities from coming my way. On account of my skill, experience, and knowledge of my companies products, I've been flown to Edmonton (okay... it's really not THAT glamourous), while some of my colleagues have been to Vancouver several times. Now I'm not saying higher education won't get me farther in life, but not having higher education has certainly not prevented hard work and experience from contributing to an interesting career. Any college graduate should know that your education will get you nowhere without hard work and level headedness, and that an inflated ego will only hold you back. I don't think it's necessarily fair to entirely blame the baby-boomers for this scourge of arrogant graduates, but as a trend, I certainly suspect they didn't help. The boomers did grow up in a time where education guaranteed a more exciting career and life. Then 'everybody' went to school and we wound up with Generation X. You'd somehow hope that this younger generation (of which I am pretty much a part) would have caught on. Let's just blame videogames and short-attention span TV instead.
Hey, this has got to be job security for those of us with years of experience under our belts in the industry, realistic expectations of what jobs actually entail, legacy skills in addition to bleeding-edge stuff, and a proven track record of projects brought in to completion (including the documentation).
So why am I looking for work right now too?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
American society will cripple you, and then make fun of you for limping.
We, loosely construed, make fun of young people who do things for purely idealistic reasons ('I just want to write beautiful code and improve people's lives,'/'Shut up, Moonglow, go back to your yurt,') and then are dismayed to end up with a crop of careerists. Some may have unrealistic expectations, but I have not been in a start-up that wasn't rife with them...and, to be honest, I think most advances in our state come from a combination of practical knowledge and expectations that will seem unrealistic until they're not met. ('Sixty percent literacy? thou'rt moone-mad.' 'Hands-washing will prevent the Lying-in Fever? Yeah right.')
I guess the question of culpability really starts to come in when those expectations aren't met. In my arrogant and correct opinion, cursing the darkness is fine, as is believing that the world owes you a living---just so long as the air-flow doesn't blow out the candle you've lit, just as long as you understand that the world probably will have to be dunned for that living it owes you.
Your comment sounds like someone who's been in the 'corporate' world a long time. And by corporate, I exclude Google, Facebook, Slide, Twitter, Amazon, Ning, etc.
As a fairly recent grad (5 years ago), I'm enormously unimpressed with companies posting positions for people with 10+ years of [x] development. The notion that having done something for a long time makes you a better person to be doing it seems fundamentally flawed, at least in the case of most software engineering.
I could see it not necessarily being true for, say, piloting fighter jets or performing brain surgery, but I'd challenge any 'experienced' engineer to build a 'better' Facebook than the narcissistic 20 year-olds did.
When it comes to office politics, client-interaction or one's general interpersonal conduct, sure, maybe the 30+ crowd has a hand-up.. But thinking that just because they've been developing, say, routing logic for the last ten years doesn't mean their approach hasn't become narrow-minded, bitter, and generally disingenuous.
New engineers want to write cool, new stuff for the same reason you want to write cool, new stuff, and there's no reason why they won't be just as good at it. The notion that the need to somehow 'prove' themselves by writing test code for a few years, or by supporting web apps is simply the kind of ageism that will cause any decent young engineer to avoid your company at all costs.
An unrelated, but illustrative, example would probably be most of the North American auto industry. Impose a strict, age-experience based hierarchy, and it becomes clear why we haven't produced a good car for a very, very long time.
I'm sure very generation found the next challenging because of differing viewpoints. Most of the older staff realize once the grow up a bit they'll be all right.
My experience is many simply do not understand that it is simply not technical knowledge that is needed for a job. You send experienced people overseas because you know they can do the job when things go wrong. You've worked with them, you trust them; an they have the scars from dealing with problems. Of course, they know overseas travel is a pain in the butt and would just as soon let the new hires suffer through it.
Most whining I chalk up to youth. I've known some friends in other companies say the new hires were upset over the small raises this year; and didn't understand when the experienced staff's reaction was STFU and be happy we got any this year. Eventually they'll learn.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You won't have that problem for long. The kids graduating this year will be thankful they have a job at all.
I remember seniors in '92 shitting brick about looking for job, and I'd think this year is way, way worse.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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.
When the hell did companies start hiring someone with out 5+ years [insert language/tech]?
I am fortunate to have the opportunity to beat them down before they graduate. The Fortune 500 company I work for will only hire co-op students if the applicant is "fresh out of school" so they already have an idea of how our corporate culture works and what the expectations are for each job level. This serves to be the weed out point for students coming into the company and they have a good idea if they want to continue working in the established culture. It works well for both sides of the equation.
--I like turtles...
After university I had some interviews with some software houses for employment, mostly because it was "the normal thing to do", but I didn't like their working environment. I wanted to work from home but they didn't agree, and the salary wasn't good. So, I refused to be employed and instead started my own software business which is very successful, and I have three collegues from my university. I cannot understand why other people go to become employees for a boss when they can start their own business. I would expect other graduates like me to go to interviews after university because "it's the normal thing to do", but I cannot imagine in what terrible situation one must be to actually agree to become employed for someone else.
Word to the wise. If you can't discuss something in your field outside of your class work, you failed college regardless of what your final GPA was.
yeah it's a b**ch to interview with me. ;-)
I've always thought the best and most important part of the interview was when I get to ask things like:
Why are manhole covers round?
How many ping pong balls can you fit in a shoebox?
If you don't pass the airline seat test I don't recommend hiring you.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
This is no narcissism that the article is describing here, and I have no clue whatsoever how the author proposes that this should be 'solved'.
It's been a few years since I was fresh out of university, but I think it is healthy for a graduate to have expectations of being pushed. Pushed to learn new things, pushed to travel and use the skills that they have spent many years acquiring. The reality is rather more depressing and it's an organisation's loss. You get shoved on to a 'Graduate Scheme' where you end up doing lots of dreary tasks that should really be done by management, and all on a salary that looks OK to a new graduate but is slave labour in the grand scheme of things. There is nothing wrong with expecting to use the skills and knowledge you have spent time, effort and money acquiring. While learning is important an organisation has no right whatsoever to expect that it will get free skills because a new graduate should just be automatically eager to do so - but gets nothing in return. Organisations also stupidly perpetuate the myth by giving graduates much grander job titles as well. The rule that you are not owed anything in real life works both ways, and many organisations have become somewhat narcissistic themselves - they don't want to compete, they want a nice easy cash cow, they want to cut costs but keep revenue rising and they want their employees to act like they are doing them a favour and it's all just 'expected'. If you want to retain the best people and survive then do everything you can to do so. If you don't then go away and die, but don't whinge as if you're owed something.
Few companies get this though because it shows their current management and leadership up for what it is - inept and lacking in requisite knowledge. If you get graduates who are disatisfied at working in your company then the simplest explanation is usually the truth - you're a shit organisation to work for who is not getting enough out of their employees.
Self-teaching is a necessity for computing. There are so many obscure software packages that they can't have a diploma for everyone of them. Employers now demand you're familiar with CompanyX ProductY VersionZ. The only way to learn it is to get the manual and code away, simply because there's no alternative.
On the other hand if you were a surgeon and you taught yourself how to do vascular surgery you'd be a damned idiot given the alternatives available to you. This is probably why people in other fields are amazed.
A few tips
+ Lynda.com and many others offer video tutes - these are a good way to learn.
+ Get a proper education - self-teaching there's a lot you miss - and also learn on the job. You learn far more and you get a better sense of priorities. I'd take someone with 2 years industry experience over someone with a 4 year degree.
Believe me, I have no where near that attitude. I'd just like a web developer position. Graduating into THIS job market is not fun.
Just a point: "always", in this case, has not been for very long. Those who grew up recently watched more TV than previous generations, including that those who grew up more than half a century ago and didn't watch much or any TV at all.
The company picks who to interview and they most likely pick someone from a expensive private school. The parents of these kids pay a lot of money for the degree and so they expect a lot. That expectation often transfers to the kid. Try filtering out your picks by concentrating on schools with high competition and pick the best. Also there is nothing wrong with confidence, passion and drive.
But then again. I work on a campus, as a professional, but I also teach a visualisation subject to the school of mathematical sciences.
One of the main reason why I still do the teaching is because I can hand pick those students that I want to work with me in the HPC space. I've noticed that it is the smarter of the group that end up being the 'nicer' ones and more down to earth.
That old saying of 'empty vessels make the most noise' could never be truer.
.
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?
This has been going on since the dot com days. Kids walk in asking (closer to expecting) about bonuses, cell phones, travel, and perks in general. There is never thought that such things have to be earned, more that they're owed that for showing up.
That aside, it is not true of every one I've interviewed. Still lots of well grounded kids out there. But there is always distance between school and reality. Like why everyone is not on latest version of every software package. Why your work PC is weaker than the one you got for yourself 2 years ago. Why the product you worked on thinking is the greatest thing since sliced bread hasn't taken over the world, etc
Although, has there ever been days when kids graduated with an we're not worthy attitude?
As usual I think you are all wrong. You're observing some of the additional causes but missing the main point.
Of course people who are brought up with special high self-esteem are going to value themselves highly, that's what we wanted. That's not a problem, that's a plus.
The missing part is an understanding of the world. Where all the consumer stuff comes from and why; How money (not wealth) is created and destroyed, who pulls the strings and what their interests are.
Especially absent in an American education appears to be any real historical study, apart from the myth-like legends of the 'forefathers' who founded the 'free homeland'.
If students were provided with an education that placed the US consumptive lifestlye firmly in the correct contexts, especially
historical
geographic (relative populations, global resource & waste flows)
cultural (crediting various people for thier achievements, and acknowledging the weaknesses in the US approach)
then they'd have a better idea of what was going on around them and why.
The overall undercurrent of "U-S-A!", fear and brutal violence that pervades the culture stands not as a replacement to an understanding of the human condition (which isn't so hard imho) but as a deliberately imposed barrier (cf. "The Power of Nightmares"), which stands only because of ignorance.
The other disturbing facet of US life (for me) is that somehow the people who fought a war to establish their own government, by them and of them and for them, now laugh at it and deride it at any opportunity.
I find this absolutely intolerable when the public service at large is the only institution which provides services to the people with no hidden agenda; it's not for profit, or converts, or good PR.
The idea that something is 'good enough for government work' implies that the government has and should have the worst, lowest quality standards in the entire society, which is outrageous.
You have a group of capitalist crony liars who actively undermined or destroyed all the useful institutions and purged the service of the best staff, raided the treasury and handed it to private companies, then you all think the government / public service is crappy. This is called "blaming the victim".
It seems to me that the responses here are an expression of the
US Machismo "every man for himself" attitude as you all laugh and sneer at the poor kids, who after all are only asking for a slice of the pie society (not just their parents) promised them, before it's all gone.
"The American way of life is not negotiable". Raised to swear allegience to the flag in sacred rituals, taught to revere passed presidents as almost superhuman, of course they will trust what they are told!
Honestly, you people always miss the wood for the trees. Remember the five whys of requirements solicitaion?
"The kids are greedy"
Why?
"Because they were told 'Greed is Good'."
Why?
"Because the CEA recommended a growth model in 1946"
Why?
"Because the 'powers that be' wanted enough money to maintain WWII forces even after the war (guns or butter)"
Why?
"Because they wanted to be able to use military force anywhere in the world at short notice"
Why?
"Because greedy, evil men always seek to expand their control for its own sake".
Teach the kids in primary school about the nature of the greedy evil men around them, instead of xenophobic bullshit and they will understand the modern workplace a lot better.
While I am not hiring developers, I do find the same problems with junior network admin applicants. Many of the new-hires do not want to be bothered with end users - they want to be locked in a data center plugging away at servers.
I tell all my new hires - your first year or so will be nothing but working with end users - that's how you get an appreciation for the needs of the people who actually make this company money. I'm not letting a junior network admin near a production SAN, router, or firewall without some front-line experience first.
The young guys and gals I interview have very little work experience during college. During my college years, I volunteered my network services to non-profits and churches - these contacts eventually got me paid consulting gigs, and then full-time work. Work experience during college is more valuable than anything else - it shows you know your stuff, you are motivated, that you can work with people - and it makes you aware of the realities of the workplace.
I feel old after writing this post....
-ted
What a wonderfully ironic and serendipitous spelling error!
Add an "or" in the right place and you get "Decoratur" -- Latin for "He is honored/glorified".
Even better would be "Se decorant" : "They glorify themselves" -- I think that sums it up pretty nicely.
jdb2
It's more likely the effect of colleges overselling themselves to justify extortionate tuition fees.
There's probably an aspect that is being overlooked, and that is that there is no guarantee that after 10, 20 years of hard work your will be rewarded.
Too many people are chewed only to be spit out by the "machine".
So people tend to grab what they can the faster they can (wallstreet, anyone?)
Young people were told that they would be rewarded for putting the effort of going to college, right? Where is it then? If you make about the same money/benefits doing difficult work why should you do it? Different work, same reward.
And I'm talking about making a living, not doing something for pleasure. If you happen to like what you do for a living that shouldn't matter.
Wow!
If I were handing out awards, I'd give you one for the amount of effort required to transform your thinly disguised personal hate-on into a bogus rhetorical question capable of passing through the Slashdot filters. Why not just post something about how, "young, single mothers are a drain on the social security net"?
There's nothing new about the phenomenon of expectations among young people being out of sync with reality. The funny thing is that when people believe they deserve something, they often get it. Perhaps that's the thing which bugs you the most; have you set your sights too low?
There is a middle ground between wishful thinking and high expectations, and it's called, "Reality".
What's going to drive you absolutely mad, is that when an over-seas spot opens up at some conference, there is a much higher chance of it being given to the boy who believes he deserves it rather than to you.
-FL
The original post may be based on incidental observations, meaning it is true for some people, but I don't think that a generalization can be drawn. In my own work, I see some young grads who are lazy, some who are full-bore energetic self-starters with realistic understanding and expectations, and everything in between.
"TV reality college graduates" has some truth behind it, because TV can glamorize your appreciation of things, or else over-romanticize them into unreality. For instance, who would have thought that being a chef would be glamorous, but the Food Network has propelled chefdom into stardom and cooking schools into sought after trades - that's glamour. But how many people have romanticized about being a TV or sports celebs thinking that they too can be a star, only to have reality bite back when you try to get your big break.
IT and tech jobs have been glamorized to some extent on TV, and so have business-MBA-entrepreneur models, so no surprise then that someone who is fundamentally immature and unrealistic might seek to be a "22-year-old who leads billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jets around the world". I think three things are about to change those attitudes:
1 - With the world economy in a meltdown, and major banks and financiers dissolved, being a money-grubbing MBAstard is about to get less glamorous. Anybody looking to be that 22 yearold billionaire will get some serious ego deflation in the coming job market.
2 - If you want to work from the tech rather than the business side, well guess what, lots of companies cannot afford tech right now, so, no soup for you! Just like the wannabee starlets who wait tables, you might only find employment these days doing the same, or accepting get-dirty infrastructure work that the government is now starting to fund. Nothing like digging a ditch to burst your bubble.
3 - All new industries have a certain dynamism that is inherently glamorous. The PC revolution made lots of MS millionaires. The dot-com era made lots of dot-com millionaires. The net-Google era is making its own millionaires. But these major emerging technologies and societal transformations are already here, and their entrepreneurial heyday might be over, or at least in a lull, until some other new major tech and industry comes along, such as perhaps green energy. With the current worldwide economic slump, glitzy make-millions jobs for young grads riding the wave of a new industry just aren't there right now, at least not in computers and tech, as far as I can see.
Thank you. The author of the grandparent post might want to learn a bit about qualitative research before jumping to conclusions ("My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything") in the absence of quantitative evidence that might be impossible to gather and might not be relevant anyway. Social science ain't physics. Those who think it is or should be can do terrible damage, as we have seen with the inappropriate use of economic equations for risk that contributed to the current crisis.
Wow, you got to work for 40 years without being "right-sized", "downsized", "made redundant", "aligned with strategic conditions", or otherwise sacked? No wonder it didn't take a party hat to motivate you.
Perhaps the people in other fields are being polite and showing interest in what you've done, as well as a degree of being impressed by you teaching yourself to program. Well done, keep learning, keep going for it, but also remember to listen and learn from others as well.
Clearly it's made you feel good that people have told you you're doing well. Perhaps also learn these social skills to help you in situations you'll find yourself in at university and beyond - consider how to find the positive in your peers rather than referring to them as "fucking retarded". Try to see things from their perspective, they may have some valuable insights to offer you.
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"
Perhaps this is one of the reasons why a certain amount of work experience (some of it can be any work at all) is mandatory to get an engineering degree in some places.
I couldn't possibly agree more. The work environment in the vast majority of businesses is oppressive, to say the least. It is truly tragic that American businesses have adopted a culture that is opposed to telecommuting. But it's not just telecommuting. For a "capitalist" society, our businesses are completely unable to evaluate employees based on cost/performance, and instead work to weed out differences even when they are ultimately more productive.
With the current economic crisis, more recent graduates will choose to go into business for themselves rather than navigate the murky waters of corporate America. It is not easy, and requires a wide skillset far outside the narrowly-defined regimen of a CS degree. And while it will be difficult for many of them, it is vital to a functional market that businesses (even large ones) be deprived of human capital when the work environment and compensation they offer are not in line with the market.
Unfortunately, it is also not good for the economy as a whole when talented, educated people choose to be under-employed in small businesses rather than having access to the vast physical capital of corporate America. In a functional economy, (absent intervention, cronyism and bail-outs) that capital would eventually be re-allocated to successful small businesses more able to make effective use of it. I'm not so sure about ours, though.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Yea the baby boomers had it easy. Never went to bed at night worrying if their city might go up in a mushroom cloud at night. How soon people forget...
Think Deeply.
While TV may have had a role in shaping recent graduates' mindsets, the Universities have done more than their share as well.
In my business program, it was stressed that you should go on international assignments as it shows commitment to your company and often leads to greater career growth in the long-run. The schools themselves never indicate whether it is senior or entry-level employees who get to participate in these opportunities, thus students make inferences that it's the low-man on the totem pole that has to go to BFE for awhile.
If anything, the willingness to go abroad and take initiative should be appreciated, not viewed as narcissistic. Otherwise, contact nearby Universities and explain the situation so the perceived problem can be repaired at the source.
Why is the question. I think it has to do with several things all working together in the worst possible way.
1. Parenting. Baby Boomers may not be as hard towards their kids, but too often they are just the opposite, which, in some ways, is worse. The Boomers themselves were spoiled by their parents, the "class of 1946", who went through the Depression and then got their asses shot off in WW2. They wanted their kids to never have to do without, and to always have it better and easier, because they remember their own childhoods of the 1930s, and how miserable that was. suburbia was developed so they could live in cartoons of country homes, and the automobile, once the province of the rich and then the middle class, soon became required and the entire society was redesigned around those infernal gas guzzling death monsters.
So, the boomers raised their kids even easier, and spent the 1980s and 90s blowing vast amounts of smoke up their kids asses as they drove them to soccer practice in giant SUVs. These kids feel entitled to this success: it is al they have ever known. It was all based on this one time gift of 3 trillion barrels of oil which will soon cease to be energetically viable as a fuel, but that's a different point.
So, part 1: The Parents spoiled these little fuckers. Horribly.
2. TV. The television is just fiction. As adults we know this, but as children we don't necessarily get it. And even when we do "get it" there is an emotional component in TV that resonates with parts of the brain that are built Not To Get It, which is why we find a show "scary" or "sexy" or whatever lizard brain response the advertisers are trying to pull out of the public. The TV also shows a distorted view of "normalcy". For every "Roseanne" there's a Huxtable or Fresh Prince or dozen other "upward" viewing families presented as "normal". This inculcates a set of false epxectations.
so, 2: they have false expectations of what "normalcy" is.
3. The American School system tracks to university. Very frankly, most of the people who go to university SHOULDN'T. They are idiots. They should never have even gone to High School. They should have gone to a trade school and learned a useful skill. Unfortunately, the USA deskilled itself in the 1970s with its de-industrialisation process, and all the skilled work went overseas. All that was left was the skilled work that couldn't be exported, such as farming, carpentry, plumbing, HVAC, shoe repair, car repair.
And each of those has also seen pressure to deskill as well. Many suburban or exurban white kids would do farmwork in the summer for extra money. Now it is all left to illegal immigrants.
Carpentry, outside of finish or cabinetry, is also left to immigrants who work more cheaply.
Plumbing and HVAC still has work, but the pay has stagnated and the ability for freelance work has suffered greatly. shoe repair has disappeared with the advent of Nike and the export of the shoe industry to Malaysia.
Car repair has been deskilled through technology. It used to be if your transmission made noise, they would take it apart and fix it. Now, they just pull the tranny and stick in a new one. Diagnosis is done by computer, not experience. Raises are given to people who bring in more business for expensive diagnostics. In the mean time, cars have changed as well - tuning a distributor cap is no longer needed.
At the same time, nonproductive work was deeply rewarded - parasites of all stripes flooded the finance industry with results we are dealing with today. Other equally stupid jobs have become "careers". Production assistants. Assistant Administrator for coordination of health insurance sales reps. Don't get me started on the jillions of "psychology" and "public relations" majors pumped into the economy every year.
At the same time, if the kid doesn't go to school, there is NOTHING the school can do. There used to be truancy laws, but those are gone now, or simply not enfor
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
"The sound of the engines and the smell of the grain,
We go riding on the abolition grain train
Steven A. Douglas was a great debater,
But Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator
Denominator, go Decatur, go Decatur,
It's the great I Am
abominate her, go Decatur, why did we hate her?
It's the great I Am"
Bow-ties are cool.
Your post here, as well as your listing of experience, only proves that you are exactly the example narcissist for the article. "advanced VB"? Are you kidding? Is this like "advanced dirt eating" or "advanced mud pie making"?
You probably should have focused more on an SQL class since your sig of SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good' would only return the word 'good' and not any results. That is, if the syntax was even correct.
After being in the work world for a couple decades, I've observed the same thing. But ... nothing has changed! New graduates remind me of myself and my friends, many years ago. New graduates are not any worse than they were two decades ago, only that now I'm old enough to recognize the folly that we all once had.
What is missing is the same thing missing from most people newly joining the work force. They have little to no investment in the company. They are entering a field where they have little knowledge of what goes on, and where funding comes from. They enter, thinking there's an everflowing pot of money and they just want a share of it. They view management as top-heavy, who do little and skim money from everything. I would guess that most new graduates take a job with the thought, "This will look good on my resume" and rarely "This will be a great career."
After working for a while and possibly being forced to help write grants, they start to see just why managers exist. They start to realize that if they want to do well, they must help the company do well, too. And they're usually happy they get to program instead of hunt down funding like managers generally have to do.
It's very rare to have someone new in the workforce that has any investment in the company hiring him. And in hindsight, this certainly looks like a form of narcissism, but it's just inexperience of how the flow of money moves around.
It's simply foolish to ignore the suggestions of new hires. By the time that I'm fully "trained" on the job, if there actually is training, I will be completely unmotivated to attempt to try to change the practices of the 40 other people in my department.
Instead I will be doing one of two things, depending on the state of the company at the time. If the company (and my salary) is growing, I will be working to entrench my position and responsibilities, so that I can kick my feet up every afternoon and demand an assistant along with everyone else in the company. If the company is not growing, I will be padding my resume with new skills and searching for someplace else to work. Depending on how inefficient your practices are, "someplace else" is likely to be your competitor who is more willing to listen to my suggestions.
This is how white-collar corporate America works. To pretend otherwise is naive.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
There is no doubt in my mind from reading your post that you're one of the people this article is talking about.
The 'I deserve' generation is really going to be royally burnt by this recession a nice dose of reality for all of you (and sadly me too)
I'm in my early 40's and the world has been going to hell because of "those damned kids" ever since I was one of them. The recession will wipe out any sense of entitlement. Beyond that, those who are good workers and competent at what they do will excel. Those that aren't will find another line of work, or be made to.
The current generation of twentysomethings seems to have quite a bit of entrepreneurial spirit, which makes me feel good about the future.
Some company just let go of a top-notch salesman? Holy crap, they sound pretty stupid to me.
Going through a Ph.D. program when you are in your 20s isn't working hard. Mining coal for forty years is hard. Which is why you opted out of that lifestyle. Don't kid yourself, wanker.
The Pygmalion effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect refers to situations in which students perform better than other students simply because they are expected to do so. So while these kids are in school, they may be doing great as they are being encouraged to do so. However, once they enter the work force the positive reinforcement and higher expectations are removed and the student (now employee) with expectations of self sufficiency.
Now I've seen my share of employees get hired and one thing that I've noticed is that during interviews the employer is often very positive and encouraging about the company/work environment; but then once the candidate is hired, they find out the truth that fellow employees are quite negative about the environment.
Maybe we're breeding a generation of kids that need to be "coddled" and receive continuous positive reinforcement, as the "tough love" is gone.
I'm sure by "xenophobic bullshit" you mean the "us versus them" "war on terror", preceded by the red scare. But there are different types of xenophobia, not all of which benefit the military/industrial complex.
Profit-seeking producers in a capitalistic society will seek to 1) monopolize natural resources and 2) use them to create low-quality products for as wide a market as possible. US companies are basically the experiment that proves this model almost without exception.
It's obvious how global military adventurism helps to realize this goal. It's not so obvious how opening the borders and importing third-worlders to the US creates a new market of consumers for American cheeze-whiz-inspired mass-produced garbage, opens foreign countries' resources to American control, and furthers the same goal of maximizing corporate profits.
Xenophobia can be quite healthy for Americans when it isn't being used to manipulate them against their own interests.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
to toss in the fact that if they aren't getting what they think is fair it probably is discrimination because some colleges seem to instill that into their students. It works especially well on women and minorities. It really blows my mind that something as simple as assigning a task within a big project to a fairly new hire could actually have had "Racial overtones" to it. Sorry, but the "Junior" in your title is an indication of your experience and not a slight... working on the maintenance of new programs isn't because we doubt your skills because your a women it is because it has to be done and your the bottom of the seniority pile and have yet to prove yourself... and your not getting far fast with a chip on your shoulder.
I only blame TV/Movies so far. Some of the ideas they bring from school is what really blows my mind, let alone their politics, their ability to solve all the worlds problems but not a simple data mapping error, their ability to churn out text to their friends but not code.
My favorite is always when they discover all the deductions in their new "big" job and are pissed. Throw in having to contribute to their health care and retirement and I really wonder what some places feed them.
Fortunately the majority, like 90%, work out just fine. We have had a few downright problem children that are unfortunately going to afflict a few more businesses before they grow up.
Its not fair all the times, but its life, not because of who you are.
and yes... sometimes you have to stay late, get a tivo.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
"....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
Unwillingness to look things up is just a problem that a lot of people have. Perhaps you notice it more in younger programmers because people like that don't tend stick around long enough to become old programmers. I'm a young programmer, and I often find myself pointing a few older devs to API documentation (sometimes it's our own documentation, and sometimes I'm the one who wrote it in hopes that I wouldn't be getting these exact questions).
I find it interesting that the "Blame the Bailouts on Mr. Rogers?" author cites as Exhibit A of our "culture of narcissism" the nigh-legendary Mexican immigrant fruit picker who spoke no English and got a huge home loan. I repeat. MEXICAN. SPOKE NO ENGLISH.
Is it too much to expect the writer's own strawberry, er, cherry-picked references to support her basic thesis?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Why is it that when a company makes unreasonable demands of it's workers, we're told "Either compete in the marketplace for what you need or shut up," but when workers make unreasonable demands on the company, suddenly we hear about "precious snowflakes taking advantage and wrecking our economy?"
Look, if it doesn't matter what demands a company makes in the marketplace, then it doesn't matter what demands the engineers make either. If some of the younger employees are forcing their companies to cough up nap times, blankies and all the SpongeBob DVDs they can watch, then I say more power to them.
Maybe those who so fervently preach about the "realities of the marketplace" should try actually dealing with them for once.
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
I have not yet graduated from college and yet I was able to get a full-time position that I wasn't necessarily qualified for (I've never done e-commerce or used many of the technologies I've since learned; Truth-be-told, this is the first time in 10-15 years I've really used HTML) and that other CS graduates with more applicable experience applied for. The difference: because they "paid their dues in college" the other candidates either wouldn't be willing to do non-programming stuff (grunt work, IT support, etc.) or wouldn't accept pay below 60-70k for an entry-level position.
To answer the original question, no, you are not alone in your experiences. And the issue doesn't just apply to Computer Science, but almost all fields. I've heard the same complaints from managers in different locations, fields, and company sizes I've spoken to in the past few years. Many grads today feel their degree isn't just enough to get them in the door, but into a well-paid, cushy job that requires nothing more than sitting on their asses.
The reasons are easy enough to understand, though, and it's got nothing to do with precious snowflakes being pampered and told they were special. That's a red herring that I think tends to stem from people that weren't told that being jealous they missed out on that kind of praise. I think the breakdown goes a little like this:
End result? Engineers, computer scientists, medical workers, etc. that aren't very knowledgeable/capable in their field, that expect large sums of money and feel that small accomplishments are deserving of praise since they probably worked REALLY hard to complete said accomplishments, even though it's really easy for a competent member of the same field to do.
Why are manhole covers round? Only the ones that are designed to be removable from the same side of the opening that they are set into are round, the one that go through the hole when removed are ovoid.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The very first job I had after getting my BS degree in engineering was overseas. I got the assignment after only a couple of months with the organization. It was a significant assignment and not only was I responsible for lots of very expensive equipment, but there were lives at stake. I was only about 24 years old at the time too! Oh, the place was really exotic. It was deep in the tropics. You see this organization that employed me was the US Air Force and it was during a little thing called the Vietnam War. I spent over four years getting my Bachelor's Degree in engineering, but my real education was completed over there -- others come first, life is not always fair, but it is better than the alternative, and what you do or don't do right CAN really make a difference for good or bad.
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...
After I graduated with my brand, spanking new BS in Math, I initially worked for Office Depot as a "customer service specialist" - the lowest of the low.
I'd say that's pretty far from "reality tv generation" narcissism. But, then, I've never been big on reality tv.
I do understand where this poster is coming from here. I've seen first hand, even at that Office Depot job, people my age 'expecting' more than they ought to expect.
Being hopeful is important...but more so is working hard and being ambitious (but not arrogant).
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
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.
TeleConference!
But they're not the only ones likely to be tele-
conferencing... many of their senior colleagues
will (and - I feel - should) be queuing for the
teleconferencing room / line, as well.
In fact, here in AU, there are serious proposals
that tax payers fund teleconferencing systems -
rather than costly overseas "study trips" for MPs.
It's part of a long list of better ways to reduce
AU's rates of carbon emissions -and- improve our
cost per Km travelled (even when driving a car),
listed and discussed here:
Melbourne computer programmer, Geoff Hudson's
"The Manhattan Project for climate change"
Transcript:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2009/2514433.htm#transcript
PodcastMP3:
http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/03/orr_20090315.mp3
Audio runs about 13 min; its podcase ~6.3 MB
well worth a listen... if we could only get
Aussie MPs to consider it, we'd be right.
Re: Teleconferencing
If it's good enough for TV news and current
events, it's ready to be brought our, dusted
off & used in corporate & gov't circles...
ie, after suitable security enhancements are
added to otherwise fine models from the past.
We see it a lot when we put out notice to the CS department for internships. Last fall I interviewed about 20 candidates for 5 internship positions. We ended up filling two of those because that was all that we could find to work with. Most thought they could work 4 - 6 weeks on a project and because it was web based, that in 3 months it would be worth a billion dollars. A few thought they were coding experts. I remember one that have lectured me on how we were doomed to failure because we weren't using cloud computing and Ruby on Rails. And they knew that RoR was going to be the future (this was a couple years ago). We were and still are using vanilla PHP. The impression I got over and over again was the kids were looking towards what might be in a few months or years in terms of technology. Part of that is academia. They were more worried about using XYZ technology because that was "cool" or the "in" thing at the time on all the development blogs.
They lacked the experience and understanding that there are reasons why it is called "bleeding edge".
The two students that we did hire as interns were different than the others. One was a non-traditional student. Had a wife and 3-year old and trying to get this bachelors at 22. He needed a senior project and his only caveat was he would like to use Python. The reason being that was what he was using at work on a daily basis to create reports. We could work with him on that front and we did. We knew that time was a factor for him and there was no great reason not to use python.
The other had a 17 hour course load and kept a part-time job at McDonalds. Well long story short, he didn't work for McDonalds. He got the job done. By the summer, he was working for us part-time and now works full-time with us at a salary that made most of his peers jealous. And I'll be the first to admit, he may not be the best programmer on the planet from a talent point of view. But he gets the job done, is flexible, and works until he figures it out. I'd take five of him if I could find them.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The trouble that CS students find themselves is that there is a very, very large differential between the best and the average of their profession.
If you personally want to find out where you're at, join an Open Source project and see where you find yourself.
If you don't want to join an Open Source project because it's not fun for you anyway, then you're in the "average" category and adjust your career expectations accordingly.
Every company should be free to implement a military-style basic training for new college grads.
I went to Army basic training at Ft. Benning in the early 90's and I don't remember for sure - I might have been called a "precious snowflake" a few times - but no one ever tried real hard to boost my self-esteem. Oh, I got all kinds of compliments but they all ended with "maggot" and other choice nouns.
Stupid HR people are ruining work for everyone.
If you do what you always did, you get what you always got.
What the OP discusses is a common trait of the Millennial generation (basically anybody born around 1982 or later). There's plenty of research out there to show that this generation, while more civically minded, is also has a much greater sense of entitlement than ever seen before. A quick rise to the top, frequent feedback, and always looking for something better are all traits of this generation. You may want to read "The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation is Shaking Up the Workplace" by Ron Alsop, or "Millennials Incorporated" by Lisa Orrell for more information about how this generation is going to change the way business is done (or not done).
Why are manhole covers round? Only the ones that are designed to be removable from the same side of the opening that they are set into are round, the one that go through the hole when removed are ovoid.
Why aren't the ovoid ones rectangular?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
22 year-old that think they know everything and that the world should lie down at their feet? How long has this been going on?
At least since I turned 23.
This has nothing to do with TV, it's the natural reaction of a new college graduate when he/she collides with the real world.
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.
Well, yes it is, but our economy doesn't necessarily pay big money for just "working hard."
Take your coal miner example. I'm not a coal miner and have little experience in mining much of anything. That said, I'd argue that anybody with a strong back and a smattering of intelligence could be a coal miner. And the economy is full of people with strong backs and a smattering of intelligence, so you can't necessarily expect to be well paid for physical labor, no matter how hard the work is.
Part of it, I think, is that there's also not much incentive or social reward put on learning new materials at that age. I mean, I know it sounds kind of obvious to say, "Well, why didn't you just start teaching yourself to code in high school?" But in high school, we were in student dramas and band camps, and we had part-time jobs, and we were volunteering for non-profits to build up our resumes. A lot of us knew that we were going to college someday, but we weren't thinking about the skills we might need for college. A lot of us just flat out didn't have it inour heads to get the kind of head start that you did.
If I could go back in time and be my own high school counselor, I would ask Little Me, "What are you thinking about doing in college? Computers? Y'know, you're pretty smart. Maybe you should go pick up a book on programming and start learning alittle on your own. What book? Well, I'll bet if you go talk to the math teacher that does our low-level PASCAL class, he could give you some ideas." I bet that I would've really enjoyed it, especially if I had some basic idea of where to start looking, but I just didn't.
It's a really base thing to suggest that someone needs to TELL these kids to start preparing on their own, but... you know, kids are inexperienced. Or to be less kind, they're stupid. On the whole, they really don't know these things. It could really make a world of difference if someone would only suggest it to them at that age, but a lot of counselors aren't really equipped to deal with individual needs, either.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
Stick one of these up on the wall, and just go with it.
It really depends on where they came from. Some schools do a better job of setting expectations than others. A school with professors that have worked recently in the field will tend to put out students that know pretty much where they stand.
I think ultimately, a little narcissism is almost impossible to avoid with college students, primarily because they realize that they are subordinates, with "lesser" job titles and constant supervision. If they have any ambition at all, of course they're going to be a little "uppity".
I had one guy I supervised several years ago who, among a team of two other guys with roughly 4-5 years of experience, felt he should have 4-5 years of experience as well. So he would cite writing basic programs in high school, his college years, as well as his one month internship at Microsoft. When I look back on it, obviously the kid really didn't want to be the lowest animal on the totem pole, so even if it was pure narcissism, I would count it as more of a defense mechanism.
The main benefit of younger engineers is that they can be had for cheap because they're trying to establish their careers. The next benefit is that hopefully, they haven't got all the bad habits that come with working in the industry for several years. If their expectations bubble pops, they almost always quit, and they almost always float around without work for awhile and that usually brings them back down to earth. But you have to also expect that they're going to do everything they can to fluff themselves up, because they're coming into the thing with almost nothing, and they know they don't stand on even ground with a guy who might have 5 or 6 years of experience. They know that you're not going to weigh whether or not they can do the job vs. 6 years > 0 years, so yeah, they're going to do what they have to do. An experienced supervisor/manager/lead needs to expect that and work around it. Given a few years, they'll settle down some.
I have the distinct feeling that even if I'm the best programmer and best employee they have in the IT department, they wouldn't promote me simply because of my age and my looks.
You'll take this the wrong way, I know. I felt that way when I was 22 (I'm 37 now). The funny thing about experience is that you don't know the value of it until you have it. Simple things like having made a handful of mistakes in your past make it much easier to see them coming next time. Watching various managers, observing their styles and learning from their mistakes helps even more. Even if that wasn't true, surely you can understand that having a track record makes your managers more comfortable promoting you. The world really isn't just eagerly watching for an excuse to give you more money. You have to prove not just your intelligence but your work ethic over time.
I wish someone had sat me down when I was your age and explained that there is nothing wrong with being frustrated and even ranting now and then, but when your rants have more observations about what "WE" should do and fewer complaints about what "I" should get, you'll get more respect. Right now you're frustrated because people can't just tell your intrinsic value because you've worked on a couple of projects and done well. Eventually, you'll find that you're frustrated because you're having to deal with the ramifications of a decision your manager made that you warned him (or her) about at the time. When that has happened a lot of times over several years, your manager and your team will develop respect for your judgment. Business isn't like sports, where one good statistical year means you get a big new contract.
This is caused by parents that will not allow their children to fail... at anything.
In t-ball... there is no score and everyone gets a trophy.
There are no longer failing grades in school.
Helicopter parents send their kids to school and step in when little Johnny has a problem.
This is also the cause of the current administration's desire to bailout everything
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.
I'm going to graduate in less than two months. I'm not narcissitic at all. I know I reflect on myself too much to be absorbed in myself. I'm completely perfect.
But in all honesty, I've seen a number of my colleagues who think they're hot shit, who really aren't. They talk about how they're going to be hot-shot devs for some up-and-coming game company, but I'm betting they're going to be working 65 hours a week and burnout in a few years.
Me? I've got a pretty good job lined up with good benefits. I'm not expecting to travel at all, or be given rewards for doing a good job. I do expect that if I consistently do a good job and do better than expected of me that I'll be rewarded in some way. I'd much rather have a less super-star job and a relatively stress-free 40-45 hour work week. What does everyone else here think of that?
P.S. I hope someone got the reflective joke...
--<Mike>--
Who'd have thought that calling people "snowflakes" repeatedly would turn them into deuschbags.
your right, I had considered them, but in a pressurized vessel the corners would be a stress riser
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Narcissism-out-of-school was a huge problem for me personally, decades ago. I had good grades from good schools but could have used a better set of "mirror neurons".
In particular I remember always being vocal that code ought to be rewritten because it didn't look pretty. Learning-by-hard-knocks to have some respect for legacy-wisdom is such a painful memory, not least because being-rejected-by-team-mates due to such LACK of respect I now realize was justified.
I wonder what is the earliest age at which kids are capable of learning bargaining concepts ? "The Power of a Positive No" is such a great book, author Ury is still sharp. I speculate that he might round out his career with a children's book targeted at this age. The "BATNA for kids" course might start out with a screening of "Shipbreakers of Bangladesh", my favorite CBS video on global-economics.
In my geographical region (Philadelphia PA, USA) degreed nurses make as much as degreed senior developers (more when they work overtime). Teachers make almost as much as mid-level web developers depending on experience, and have 3 months off per year, and almost perfect job security (you literally have to get caught having sex with a student to get fired). Both jobs have crappy aspects, too -- I'm not dinging them, just pointing out that the pay is reasonable.
I am approaching the second half of my college career and will be transferring to the University of Michigan from Washtenaw Community College this fall. Within the past year I asked a question regarding CS degrees on Ask Metafilter and got some pretty interesting answers.
.NET platform, but it seemed somewhat dead end in the sense that (of course) I need a diversified knowledge of languages and etc. when looking at job postings. Perhaps it is a nagging fear that if I were to even anchor myself in a technology for a month, I would end up learning something completely useless once I seriously started to engage recruiters, unless they are looking for people that have drenched themselves in multiple technologies, for which I am OK with any day.
There seems to be consensus that a CS program, regardless of where it is, should focus on concepts rather than specific languages. Personally I have also wanted to, to put it figuratively, 'get my feet wet,' and work on getting capable of doing moderately intensive work on small scale projects in the realm of computer science. This is due to third party advice I have received in talking with computer science classmates and etc.
In other words, I have a goal of completely avoiding the situation you two laid out and described, and somehow graduating from the UoM hitting the ground running when it comes to preparing resumes and submitting them to X group, organization, etc. I am not at all expecting to be perfect and surely do not intend on inflating what I know or expectations.
Last summer I looked into the
Thus my question: what EXACTLY should a sophomore/junior/inbetween like me be looking into such that when he graduates he can confidently, with integrity to boot, write a resume and go into an interview that says, "I KNOW this, I can do this job, and you can pay me whatever for it, no trips across the ocean necessary."? Links to resources and etc are welcome.
Thanks!
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?
Universities are in the business of selling education to a market of prospective students who don't know what they'll need exactly. Usually they "up-sell" for a product that is a lot more than is actually needed.
We probably don't need 17 years of formal education (Kindergarten - 12th grade + 4 year degree) before somebody can do most technical jobs.
-- Support a free market in the field of government
This might have been a general question, but specifically, what technologies that do not seem to be going away any time soon should be looked into? Good open source projects (other than sourceforge and linux distros) should be looked into for practical examples of application? Books or articles that sum up what to be ready for? Solid blogs that can be seen as an indicator of where industry is going? Things of that nature... thanks again!
First, if you're going to rant to the whole world about going some place 'boring'. At least spell it right, it's Decatur, IL.
Second, while you may see Cedar Rapids and Decatur as 'boring' (and for the locale, they are) they are home to two companies that do some cool large stuff.(IMHO).
Rockwell Collins does a ton of contract work with the government and encourages all their employees to get a pilot's license.
Decatur is home to Caterpillar's off highway truck division (among others), at which the 797 (the world largest mining truck) is built. It was even a topic on one episode of Ultimate Factories.
Decatur also has ADM and is where The Informant was filmed about ADM's price fixing.
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
In tech, see, you don't need to "build a business" or "launch a product", just "convince some VCs".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Then your confidence is misplaced, much as one of those narcissistic college graduates. The phenomenon isn't new or even that big a deal. Who here really expects college students, most with little to no work experience outside of traditional high school employment like fast food or retail, to understand your work environment? How will the so-called "I deserve" attitude survive a few months of job hunting? They'll learn fast and cease to be the "I deserve" generation, just like the generations before them.
This idea that people have to work for years before moving up the ladder and it's all based on experience and not actual skill is bullshit and it needs to stop.
Uh, guy? I think you're the one they're talking about in the article.
I'm not sure you understood the rant. You're confusing competence with "experience".
More experience does not automatically translate into greater skill. If someone is already competent at a task, doing it over and over doesn't make them more successful at doing it. Requiring people to work for years before advancing is aimed squarely at protecting the staus quo and justify the continued employment of people already mentally retired.
What most people really mean when they talk about "experience" are the social skills and cultural knowledge that come through accumulated years of living. I could argue that WWII vets were way ahead of the curve by virtue of their life experience, so they didn't need the calendar time to achieve the same level of "experience". Many of them were "in charge" and successful at a young age. (I'm not equating the current 20-somethings with war veterans, just saying that a different life experience can produce different results.)
I would also argue that calendar-based "experience" is often not necessary for effectively accomplishing many things (perhaps until you get to upper management, then just for the politics) just as certifications and degrees do not absolutely predict competence or reflect experience. Some people with decades of "experience" just aren't any damn good at all for some jobs.
So if you think about it, the generalized assumption that is at the heart of "people have to work for years before moving up the ladder" is not useful as a basis for determining the value of an employee, a general evaluation of their skills, or their overall competency for a particular job. And it's bullshit. And it needs to stop.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
I started my first software engineering job for a Fortune-50 company at the age of 22. Expecting to do great things, I quickly became bored with "boring tasks" on "boring code". After 2 years I quit and ran off to grad. school. 6 years later I have a PhD. I can't say it was the best move I've ever made, but looking at my first job, it was actually a pretty good gig and not far off from what I'm doing +6 years and PhD! LOL. Live and learn. At least I enjoyed grad. school.
I'd say very few companies have a sense of loyalty to their employees, so it seems a bit unreasonable to expect the reverse without the quid pro quo. Maybe in a mom-and-pop shop, but not in a mega-corporation.
I'd say events of the past year or so have if anything validated the idea of "management as top-heavy, who do little and skim money from everything". Dozens of companies didn't fail because their employees were insufficiently invested in their companies; they failed because management fucked up, sometimes due to incompetence, and sometimes due to fraud.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I just recently had a run-in with just this sort of wünderkind... His "portfolio" was a list of URLs to some RAD-Frameworky PHP sites which, seeing as those had no relation to what he was applying for, was less than impressive. So we did the old "test program" bit. Nothing tricky, essentially a 1-to-2 hour mockup to show he knew what the hell a database was and how to use it.
That night, we get an email that the job is taking him too long, and he's not getting paid, so he's not doing it, but here's a zip file of half of yet another frameworky PHP turd, we can judge him from that.
So we did. Our new programmer is working out splendidly. Dunno what this kid's doing now though.
After ascertaining the necessary baseline of technological expertise, I try to direct all interviews toward trying to find out whether this person is an explorer and researcher, or a doctrinaire user of whatever is force-fed to them.
There is no short list. Anyone who falls into the second category is out.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Because, where I worked, this WAS how we worked. Our job consisted of parties, traveling (sometimes even booking a whole plane!), checking out the sexy new intern, drinking coffee, playing foosball, phoning some company, and sometimes programming a bit.
We were the link between a large Internet portal (now defunct) and all the major music labels (soon defunct ;).
Luckily I always get out, before the ship sinks (and I'm proud of it), so in my eyes, you can have such a job life. :P
(It was not my fault, that they mismanaged their company. I tried to change policies. But after being punished for actually trying to improve something, I stopped caring, and started to get out and take some insurance with me, in case they wanted to fuck with me.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
While I don't doubt there are many college students who can't hack it in their first few years, you cannot completely close your eyes to the 'gems' that may come from college. You stated: "... as only the most senior people fly overseas, because of the cost." I challenge you to change your thinking to "... as only the most talented fly overseas, because of the cost." Senior does not always mean better and depending on the education, drive, and desire a fresh student has... he or she may quickly surpass even your most senior staff. Be careful when grouping "all" college grads into this category because some (5% maybe) have every right to grow fast in the company.
I was recently promoted. There was no hard number attached to the promotion immediately, so when I met with my manager & the VP to discuss my new responsibilities I took the opportunity to put a number out there. A week later when the number was actually delivered to me it was more than 15% higher than the one I had suggested. My manager explained that they didn't want to reduce my salary just because I had misread the situation.
So, yes; within certain tolerances they will pay you only what they have to pay you to keep you as long as they need you. What you have to understand is that while this is just business it isn't always inhuman.
You have to think of yourself at all times as a single employee business who's interested in maintaining a relationship with a larger business to mutual benefit. When it ceases to be mutually beneficial then someone will end or change the relationship.
What a dork Iluvramen is. You actually had to take a programming class in a particular language? What a waste of time. When I got my degree in CS, they didn't teach programming languages. They taught concepts and theory. You were expected to learn programming a particular language on your own. In fact, all of our projects could be done in any language we wanted to, as long as they ran on the University's machines. And your whining about being 22 and not going to get a promotion? It's not your chronological age, but your emotional age that's holding you back. That you think you are the best programmer and employee smacks of self-centered-ness. Being a good employee has as much to do with your EQ - emotional quotient - as your IQ and programming abilities. I wouldn't promote you one half-step until you learned to respect your co-workers' abilities and strengths.
I'm a Senior Programmer myself, I've been in the business for over 16 years, and I find myself doing a lot of hiring as well.
One of the things I've found most valuable is to ignore the college credentials altogether. I look at previous jobs and look for consistency in what they are working on over the past few years or so. If they are focused on narrow range of tech that is relevant to what I'm hiring for, and that focus has a span of a certain amount of years then I will interview them. Otherwise they get put at the bottom.
In reality most of my best hires have not been college students at all. These are the people that usually learned there stuff early in life and went directly in to pragmatic use of that knowledge. Most of them are either influential in the Open Source community or are Self Employed and loving it.
I've rarely seen any good work come from a college grad. I usually have to spend at least a year to get them up to speed on how this job really works - how to learn the tech they need to know, what it takes to solve the many problems they will continue to face at random, and simply give them the bare tools and knowledge to do the job they were hired to do. In this field you are doing yourself a grave injustice to go to college instead of working. In the years you've spent learning you have lost the good positions to your peers who decided to get a jump on you and are now holding enough experience to make enough to pay for college out of pocket in one year -- yes even in this economy.
I do have one slight caveat to my speech here. I am a business owner as well. I run my own company so that I can get the jobs I want to work in. In essence I work for myself but without the freelancer label :). Oh, and I've never been to college a day in my life. I wasted some money on a correspondence course in Hardware Repair for a few months while I watched computers being outdated by the day it seemed, and I coded because it's what I've done since I was 12. I'm 30 now.
I also run the big projects out there. The ones that IBM, AT&T, Cisco, and Williams F1 Racing hire for. Those are just some of my clients. I'm not trying to be cocky, just trying to point out that this really works -- and it takes a lot of time and effort to get there, so don't waste it in college.
So to summarize, look for the applicants that have enough stable experience in the tech you are looking to use, college grads will probably disappoint you for the first few years but with enough effort on your part with anyone you can apprentice the type of worker you need and they will be what you need indefinitely .. college is a waste of time unless you are already working and don't give up any work experience while learning.
My sig is as boring as you...
I've been noticing the same trend for a while now, but on the other hand, if someone fresh out of college wants the perks, the travel, the cushy paycheck and so on, that's not necessarily a bad thing as long as they've set that for themselves as a goal to obtain. The problem lies with the bunch that wants to take a shortcut and want that stuff straight from the start. I've seen a few of those during interviews and actually explained that to them as the reason they didn't get the job.
The one I did hire also mentioned that he would like to be part of the team that deals with all the "cool" stuff, that gets to travel, gets company supplied phones and laptops, and gets that cushy paycheck -- except he said that that was a goal he had set for himself, and that he was more than willing to start at the bottom of the ladder - and that as long as the company treated him well, he'd to the same.
There is no sig...
This is nothing new just the same old generation gap that always rears its head when the old and young work together. You just pick the good ones manage their expectations and instill company principles. BTW, principles have to actually be principles not just random sets of rules but hings more basic like "we use financial business cases to make decisions" or "we don't do anything that negatively affects the public perception of the company" or whatever your particular ruling guidelines are.
In the meantime, try your best not to be the old fart who is determined that it must be done the way it was when you came up. It's about striking a balance and the companies that do that well will have a well integrated workforce that benefits from experience and new thinking all at the same time. Those that don't will become either young, chaotic, and spend themselves into bankruptcy or old and stodgy and unable to adapt until they too die.
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$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I know plenty of people who didn't really give up the mixture of idealism, narcissism, and aversion to being a cog in someone else's machine, even after graduating and entering the "real world". The trick, though, is that you can only really do it in an uncompromising way if you always have an out, so the moment you don't want to be that cog, you really have an alternative and can leave.
I may have a rather warped view of this, since a disproportionate number of my friends and acquaintances are Silicon Valley techies. It's not a free pass by any means--- the easiest way to pull in a good salary is still to work for some large tech company. But it's surprisingly easy to make enough off ad revenue to support a modest lifestyle without bosses or a "real job".
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
As someone who's watched this generation growing up (I'm 43), and who's friends all have kids, and who has been partnered with someone for several years with kids, I can say the fault lies with how we parent today (we meaning the American middle class). I'm definitely way over on the left and liberal, but am stunned that parents universally no longer punish their children *at all* (can't scar the kids now, can we?). Nor do schools (wouldn't want a lawsuit). No no no - you have to *encourage* them to behave appropriately. Which amounts in effect to beating them with the proverbial Carrot.
It's really a major shift in our culture, and kids now expect to be rewarded for merely appropriate behavior, and have no idea what responsibility even means. I realize I start to sound like a cranky old man, but I don't think this is an age issue - I mean, up until the modern generation, punishment (often physical) was how parents kept kids in line, but we've shifted to a different paradigm, and well, now we have the problems this post is talking about.
The really interesting question is what will happen over the next 30 years, as this same Gen-MEMEME group actually has to suffer through real life, and becomes the leaders and bosses of tomorrow, and whether they'll be psychologically equipped to handle it.
I suppose it's a perfect irony - we trash the planet, then guarantee the generation left to inherit it can't possibly cope.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
$.02
So, first of all, you have already put yourself into a group that most likely does NOT fall into the students described in the original post because you have interest in proving yourself, rather than just getting rewards. In that respect, if you keep in mind that it takes hard work to get bonuses and perks, etc in the real world, you are way ahead. .NET, etc) and get familiar with it. .NET, Linux, etc, they are all just TOOLS. If you learn the basics of why things work the way they do, you can pick up any and all of this later. Tech changes in the marketplace, you cannot pick "the one perfect tech". When I started there was pretty much just C/C++. Along the way I learned all the other languages and went back to school for a masters degree in Software Engineering. Almost all companies do not expect college grads to know everything under the sun, they are like pro football scouts - they look for raw talent. Just keep an attitude that is helpful and inquisitive, always work to improve yourself, and actually enjoy your work, bust your ass and you will do better than the majority.
In terms of skills - really nail your classwork. Think of a BS as the foundation of a house. It is not glamorous, but if laid well, you will have no problem building the rest of the house which can be as fancy as you want it.
If you are looking to add to areas you don't cover in school (say over the summer), try to get internships that have you actually work with development groups (or whatever area you are interested in, like sys admin stuff). If you can't get an internship, then decide on some area you find interesting (distributed computing, OS, web, etc) and just learn as much as you can. Or pick up some framework you don't see in school (Spring, EJB,
Be aware though - there is NO ONE MAGIC TECHNOLOGY. JAVA,
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.
Whew, good thing we can pin all this on the young and ignorant consumer. For a minute there I was thinking those old cranky bastards that ran the banks that approved all these bad loans might had something to do with it...
Sure glad to know my tax dollars are going to the wise and honest ones.
Yes, I do know that the consumer is mostly at fault here, but the guy pushing credit card apps like crack cocaine at every campus sure as hell isn't helping the situation. Never has.
These type of rants are ALWAYS from whiny insecure non-degreed programmers who have maxed out their career potential. It's obvious that programmers without degrees would desire to mitigate the value of their competitors CS degrees. If put into a hiring position, they will be reluctant to hire someone more qualified than themselves. Non-degreed programmers effectively try to "unionize" against degreed programmers through hiring practices and propaganda such as this topic.
How did this get modded troll?
The points made are perfectly valid, although the conclusions are somewhat misguided.
The reasons schools are not keeping up with the industry complexity is because the complexity is out of control.
We are losing the ability to build these things (complex buildings, software projects, networks,etc) with the entry level help that was usable in the past.
Its not a fault of the schools. Its a fault of the constant piling on of complexity while continuing to write/build everything from the ground up.
This is why projects like Linux and Android are so important.
Its going to be necessary to either standardize building blocks and automate large subprocesses, or stretch college to age 30.
I've hired CS grads. It takes a year to un-teach them so that the can be come useful enough to find and fix a simple bug.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Seems like the narcissists don't agree with your ideas. They seem to have all the mod points.
This reminds me of this entry from a short while back. The whiny marketing major makes you feel a bit better about the narcissistic entitlement you encounter with developers, huh?
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?
So, I have a pretty sweet job, working with very, very talented people to solve meaningful/challenging software problems.
Sometimes I get to go recruiting for interns on college campuses. Every kid hands me the same resume. They've taken the same classes and maybe have a tiny bit of "professional experience" (eg nothing akin to a substantial contribution to a large scale, commercial software project). That's not surprising; they're in the same school, following the same curriculum.
The first thing I ask a potential recruit? "What types of programming or techy/geeky things do you do in your free time?" It doesn't matter if what you do is even remotely related to our sub-field (although, of course, it helps). The fact that you're one of the 5% or less that are genuinely interested enough to experiment on your own sets you apart.
And that's not just some random question to separate out a random group of people. When it comes time to work on some serious coding/software architecture tasks full time, you'd better really enjoy it or your life and the work you produce is going to suck.
(Sympathy vote!)
A post a day keeps productivity at bay.
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.
The expectation of travel is stupid, why would an engineer care about being sent here and there? If you want to travel to exotic places, just figure out how to make the most money using the smallest amount of time possible, make your own business on the side and send yourself on a nice vacation. Otherwise, you could do what I did and just move somewhere nice like San Diego and work there.
As for expecting constant rewards, what is wrong with thinking that learning a new skill gives you a leg up on the competition? You say "you are expected to learn new technology" as if everyone puts forth effort to learn new technology. Based on my experience, the older the person is, the less likely they are to give two shits about learning new technology. They are perfectly happy in their ways, even if that means refusing to write object oriented code and instead writing C++ using giant functions that resembles a goto-filled BASIC program, and the manager is happy as long as it works and doesn't take forever to do. So if this new grad learns technology A, and the senior programmer who's still writing using Delphi doesn't bother to learn that new technology A, and the company finds a use for technology A, guess who's more likely to get a reward?
Of course, instead of encouraging him, you simply kill his motivation, and for what? I don't think it has to do with being an old grad or a new grad, certain people are just inherently narcissistic.
Children today are tyrants. They contradict their parents, gobble their food, and tyrannize their teachers.
A bit too much being said - not enough details. I think another commentator felt your post was narcissistic in itself. I would agree.
1) Is there a personality clash between yourself and your (younger) co-workers?
2) Are you narcissistic and afraid other narcissists will get ahead of you?
3) Are you jealous that a younger person might actually be getting ahead?
I'm one of the newer graduates going into the work force. I don't think it is necessarily bad to try and get ahead.
All I know is:
1) The current grads are going to have the burden of taking over all the retiring boomers' jobs. In some way we'll have to get ahead fast.
2) The whole posts smells of the attitude: When I was in college, the arrogant rich kids with the bad grades always thought only they would get the best jobs.
While its easy to generalize, maybe talking to other young new grads working for your company might give a different perspective. The company I work for is very well off and probably 50% of the workforce is under 35 - unusual for the type of industry we are in. I haven't met any of the arrogant know-it-all types.
Seriously, I am an American, but I really think in general, as a society, we have become so completely "entitled" in the last 20-30 years it is insane.
Back in the day (IE 70s early 80s) it was EXPECTED that you work 70-80 hours a week for at least 5-10 years if you wanted to be a millionaire.
If you wanted to be able to send your kids to college that MEANT BY DEFINITION that you worked 80 hour weeks to try to make the money it took. I remember growing up the 8 years my dad spent building his business up from nothing, he never took a single day off family vacations were at most 2 days long (aka a weekend non of this pansy 3 or 4 day work week crap), he worked mon-sat and most sundays for 8 STRAIGHT YEARS. This was 100% NORMAL back then. Everyone I meet these days thinks that they are going to start the next google and just have a billion dollars dropped in their laps.
And even people who aren't "starting" something think they automatically DESERVE a college education, a 6 figure income, and a couple vacation homes. That is absolutely bizarre! Used to be that you had to have good grades, a proven track record of work, and at least a minimal ability to reason to get accepted to college... My college experience in the late 90's was so seriously lacking in any sort of actual intellectual stimulation that it was a complete waste of time and money. Being relatively ambitious, a quick learner, and motivated I was extremely disappointed to start 4 more years of high school. It was just as bad, stupid kids making lame excuses for why they couldn't spend 20 minutes doing some lame assignment.
Worse still are the welfare jerk offs like the octomom that just expect society to take care of them regardless of their complete lack of contribution. America in general is suffering because as a society we have become entirely too "entitled". If we don't wake up soon, the chinese and indians who are willing to work 80-100 hour weeks to make their lives better will steal the world out of our lazy hands. Everyone just better step up and start working your butts off and quit whining about not getting paid enough, if you make enough for a) housing b) food c) clothes (and not a penthouse in manhattan, filet mignon, and gucci, but a 2 bedroom apt, top ramen, and levis) then you make enough to live and work. So get to FREAKING WORK! LAZY PUNKS!
When I interview people, I look for the things they've done BESIDES their education.
What I look for is the ability to solve a problem they've never seen before. I ask them for examples of such situations, and how they addressed them.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
As a young (not yet grad) student that has worked on and off in between school the biggest problem for me is the reality of the 9-5 work week. It sucks. I first went through a 2 year computer technology program that taught mostly in Java. It was challenging, and fun. Learning data structures, operating systems and having interesting assignments based around that kind of thing, or hacking away at assembly code. That kind of thing was always interesting. But when I went off to my first Co-op job for a semester the reality quickly switches and all I get to do is be bossed around by some guy with less education than myself to do all the crap jobs. No big deal though, its a co-op job and my first in the industry. After that I landed a pretty good job doing Java, PHP, SQL kinda stuff with a lot of responsibility and great bosses at a small software firm. Still though, wasn't nearly as interesting as school so I decided to go back, this time transferring into university. Now, every time I go and apply at a position the majority of the jobs are the same sort of thing. The actual work might be ok, but I hate, HATE being stuffed into office buildings. It seems like every single time I get a new job they are almost never prepared for me and being a young worker I get put wherever they can "fit" me. The real problem though, is that through school we learn to work at oddball hours, on our own time and we get the job done. But as soon as we migrate over to the workplace we are forced to work 9-5, 40 hours a week, sometimes have to wear ties and dress up even if we never speak to clients anyway. I suppose I just find it incredibly frustrating knowing that we've got the technology to be able to work from home, or wherever and still i'm forced to go through the monotony of this factory-like existence on a weekly basis. So, I wouldn't consider myself someone expecting more than I'm worth. I just wish more companies in the IT sector would make the move towards work flexibility. Working on my own schedule is my biggest want in a job, but it is often hard to find as a young programming, in my experience so far. Plus, it should also be considered that all of us young guys are often without a family, mortgage, car payments and all of the other "freedom" traps that the older generation have to deal with. As a result its harder to keep me simply because if I get bored, I leave and go elsewhere and unfortunately it doesn't take me long to get bored of office life.
It will get worse for about the next 10-15 years. At which point this current crisis will peak -- with a peak like WWII or the Revolutionary War. At that point, it will turn out that what we'll need is a bunch of young adults who think they are the most important people in the world. And who will do what they need to do to get what they want.
It happened before, it'll happen again.
TSG
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this the Agile programming philosophy? I mean, not the pretending to listen, but the actual listening part.
As a mid-thirty year old, desperately trying to avoid management of any type (particularly the paper trail type) so I can keep programming, this has been the crux of my job to date. And I absolutely love it. I love rocking up to some new professorial chamber when they've heard of the HPC group I work for and the services we provide, sitting down and letting them rattle on about something they want simulated that they've never had, nor fully understood, the resources for. Essentially you repeat everything back to them, trying carefully to use *their* language and introducing some basic language of my own (as it generally will become a long lasting relationship and a common language is essential). The goal is not to try and impress them with your knowledge (as I suspect it would be pretty easy for them to turn the tables) but to develop the trust and understanding.
It's my job to then go back to my newbs/grunts/minions (who I hand pick from a class I teach in Mathematical Sciences - only reason for continuing this one semester per two year position is for recruitment purposes) and get them to code up the basic crap I don't want to do ... keeping the fun, typically large scale algorithmic, stuff for myself (occasionally dangling the carrot and getting one of them to do it).
.
I'm not sure what alternate reality you came from, but in the actual United States of the 1970s and 80s, the majority of people who did well for themselves (well enough to send their kids to college, anyway) did not work 70-80-hour weeks. If you want to run you own business, sure, but the salaried office job was not invented yesterday. I know plenty of people who pulled in excellent salaries working 40-hour weeks at companies like Boeing, IBM, and Amoco in the 1970s.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I fully expected that there would be a nuclear holocaust before I graduated college, and if I was *lucky* enough to survive, I'd be scavenging for gasoline and medicine across a bombed out radioactive wasteland. Wasn't that how we were taught the 80's were going to end?
I find myself supremely disappointed, and ill-prepared for the continuation of modern society.
The 'me' decade (the 1980s) saw a similar set of expectations (maybe couched differently and with more pastel fashion, but essentially an entitlement gap emerged). I suspect what is being observed now is the same type of pop culture fallout to some degree.
I am one of those young developers, I've got about three years of full time experience after university.
I didn't expect the things you mention, but I expected something else.
I expected a focus on quality and a need for the knowledge and experience I had gained before and during my formal education. I expected software companies to take software as serious as bridge building engineering companies take bridge building.
What I have found in the companies that I have been in and that I know of otherwise, is that the even the most basic of quality requirements and technical decency are rejected.
Just make the quickest and dirtiest fix and ship something that is at best a broken prototype. That WILL come back to bite our proverbial ass later.
Whenever I question this or try to go for the long term quality solution and do things the right way, I get a response from seniors that feels a little bit like they think I am just being narcissistic. Just make it work. Quickly. No time for the fancy stuff (meaning the most basic stuff). Just keep pushing a growing mountain of technical debt in front of you.
Oops. 10 is pretty clearly in the 8-bit range. Guess I shouldn't post before having my first cup of coffee in the morning.
They tyrannize their parents, contradict their food, and gobble their teachers.
There, fixed that for you.
Oh yeah? You haven't seen the carnage that rookies or wannabes can cause if they get their hands on power tools.
We have had a generation, maybe two, that have been pushed through school with self-esteem pushed above academics, creating a situation where (as summed up by a friend of mine,) "we have a nation full of kids who are dumber than a box of rocks but feel great about themselves."
After 32 years in this business, ouch, I have come to the conclusion that the graduate problem is as follows: At college they are the customer, and the college the supplier, they are presented with a computer and 'patted on the head' when they make it do something complicated. They arrive in the workplace and think it the same, the difference actually is that they are now the supplier (of skill) and the establishment is the customer. The computer is there to help the establishment, and they are there to help the computer help the establishment. They still expect to be patted on the head for making it do something complicated, and don't recognise that they are there to help the business. This is very curable, I usually take them to meet users and introduce them to the concept of empathy, a trait often lacking in IT graduates ;-).
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
i imagine the above poster is in the same boat. maybe working 50 or 60 hours a week at a job... it is kind of hard to justify to yourself putting in another 20 hacking the kernel.
now, someone posted 'well if you did that, maybe you would get a job hacking the kernel'. yeah, well, maybe you wouldnt.
Very true. Definitely do not get into kernel hacking because you think it pays well. Only do it because you find it fascinating and a reward in itself. Otherwise, there are much easier ways to make money, think about being an actuary or a dentist for example. That said, good kernel hackers tend to land in well paying kernel jobs if they want them. Not all do, some prefer that work not intrude on their real life.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
In my day, we all had crappy jobs, with low pay and long hours and soul-crushing tedium- and we were grateful!
My 20 year old daughter just boomeranged from college, mid-sophomore year. I could see this train wreck coming because of what I called her "MTV Spring Break" view of college: she had been provided with a fable of how college is "supposed" to be (i.e. throwing up naked on cheezy motel room beds in Daytona). She got to experience this "authentic" college life but unfortunately couldn't hold up the academic end of things.
The relevance to the original story is how media-fed these young adults have become. All their expectations about life after school are formed by TV and the internet. I'm 50 and so glad I'm not coming of age today. It was hard enough in the 70's and 80's but today there is a lot more baggage to overcome.
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
- Plato, attributed to Socrates
("cross their legs"?)
Sure, $50-60k out of college isn't bad, but there are plenty of liberal-artsy jobs that start at $40-50k, so it's not an amazing differential. If you want to actually attract people into the field who wouldn't have otherwise come, as tech companies claim they're interested in doing, you have to offer a bigger differential than that. Basically, people have other options, and are taking them. Tech companies don't want to do the capitalist thing to entice new employees into the field (if supply is low at a given price, the price is too low), so instead they whine to Congress about H-1Bs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I think you have a great point here; most workplaces don't have much idea how to effectively use highly-academically-trained individuals. Most workplaces expect a high-school educated person; they know their 'letters and numbers', and the jobs are geared towards that entry level as a result. However, when you have people who are capable of higher-level thinking, most jobs simply don't know how to integrate them effectively.
That doesn't mean buy them a plane ticket for Rome, of course, but it does mean treating them as something more than one more drone.
[Ego]out
Just what are you implying is wrong with Cedar Rapids, IA? This smells like Jihad to me!!
your right, I had considered them, but in a pressurized vessel the corners would be a stress riser
True,but why would a sewer be pressurized?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Every generation hits the workforce and has some illusions that need shattering. Welcome to middle age - that time in life when you meet youthful inexperience in others and instead of seeing a variation of yourself through the lens of current culture, the 'new youth' are just SO much more pathetic, immature, etc. than you EVER were. I'm 40 and work with mostly 22-26 year olds at a consulting firm. These kids are just like me and my peers were at their age temperment-wise. Yah, they can be immature - they are also fresh, enthusiastic and imaginative. They ask awkward questions that can lead to better answers. Don't beat that out of them, or they'll become old and bitter - and there's enough of that out in the world already. Try patience - you would have appreciated it when you were young and immature.
My money is on the new age "You're special, everyone is a winner, here have a ribbon JUST for showing up and participating" and "we cant have valedictorians because it might make the average students feel bad" mentalities.
We have coddled the youth of today into unrealistic expectations of the world.
Instead of preparing them for the world by saying, "You played really well today, too bad you didnt win. Work hard and maybe you can win the next time." We are saying "winning doesnt matter! You are special and great JUST because you tried."
Sorry sparky. No matter what your public school indoctrination told you, "try" is NOT on par with "succeed".
Now these kids are learning the hard way as they are receiving the equivalent of being thrown off a dock into 20' of freezing water so they can learn to swim.
Well, daem0n1x, I doubt very seriously that human nature is unique to "Capitalism," as evidenced by behaviors exhibited in the Apparatchik class in the former Soviet Union. Arrogance, spite, greed, ambition, etc., are human conditions, and no amount of inculcated Utopian ideals will likely eliminate them. Environments may suppress overt manifestations, however, which just makes jerks more wily and passive-aggressive...
They're not narcissistic but they know they can get a job elsewhere so aren't afraid to game you to get more money or perks.
If you don't ask for it and act like you deserve it, the likelihood is you'll never get it... even if you shoot for more than what you know you deserve or expect, likelihood is you'll end up getting more than if you're complacent.
At least, this has been my experience.
Don't act like companies don't do the same thing. I have never yet met a company that didn't lowball a college grad or younger developer at the start.
Sorry for double post.
A large part of this narcissistic group of individuals are a result of the unrealistic musings of college professors telling kids what they want to hear. I heard, throughout all of college, about how I would be making an excess of 40-60k a year when I got out into the job market. The reality of it, is that NO ONE, in their right mind is going to pay a 21 year old that type of money who has little to no experience besides what he or she has learned from a text book. I worked all throughout college, and I had been in the IT field since I was 17 going from a phone jockey to a Network/Systems Engineer. I knew the realities of what the industry was like and I chose to keep my mouth shut when professors were advertising their competency. The professors have their livelihoods to watch out for and their jobs are directly related to the interest in their field of study. They are pressured/obligated/motivated to do anything they can to generate interest. The resultant is that A students, which lets be honest, if you don't have a job in college and you are not an A student you're doing something wrong, come out of universities with a HUGE unchecked sense of entitlement. Just my 2 cents.
It was back in the early 90s. I wasn't so long in the tooth myself, but I'd had over a decade of solid accomplishment behind me, and I was working with this kid fresh out of college (and prep school before that) who was certain he knew everything, and pretty much did and said whatever he pleased without any regard to how it affected my responsibilities.
The problem with narcissism isn't self-confidence; I like self-confidence. The problem isn't challenging the beliefs of senior colleagues. I like to have my beliefs challenged. The problem was that this kid acted as if his were the only experiences and ideas that mattered. What was galling to me was that I found myself having to justify to him why a decade of professional experience was worth taking into consideration, because that's the very justification that old-timers use to squelch new ideas. I know better, so STFU. But sometimes, you do know better, so it's nice to have the opportunity to offer your experience graciously.
There's a symmetry between young narcissism and mature narcissism. The common theme is treating the workplace as a stage on which coworkers are bit players in the wonderful story of you.
Narcissism sometimes is cured by life experience, but not always. The senior version of newbie narcissism is dismissing anything the newbie has to contribute. The fresh perspective newcomers bring is valuable -- it's just not proven. Nobody can be at their best professionally by sticking to what has worked for them in the past, nor can they by ignoring the experiences of others.
The bottom line is that very, very few people are any damn good at what they do. It pays to listen and learn, at every stage of your career.
Now the phenomenon of catering to newbie narcissism, that's driven by economics. Experience is more expensive to hire than talent, so hiring inexperienced talent has a certain appeal. I won't say whether it's smart or not; it depends on how good you are at spotting talent. There's a lot less of it out there than people who think they're talented.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I've seen a little of that in the post I just read.
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
Ha.
The problem with this kind of "in my day" topic is that it was your day. When I started my "professional" career in 1986, I was one of those dewy-eyed, easily disillusioned, "nothing in use is any good" developers.
It took me about 8 months at my gig before I was totally disabused of this notion. I had loads to learn. True, I could code and debug.
But I couldn't design worth a shit because I didn't understand the business, and I didn't understand user behavour. I didn't understand why my boss would get upset when I'd spend a weekend re-writing something that was working pretty well to begin with (I just didn't like the style), and I didn't quite get office politics.
And I suspect those kinds of things that people don't want to admit to when they're in the middle of saying "This job isn't what I thought it would be."
NO job is ever what you thought it would be, especially your first one. I thought I'd be coding and writing all kinds of neat stuff in my first year. Instead, I learned how to run cables from office to warehouse (not complying with building codes), debugging arcane tax calculations, distributing reports, re-writing MRP and MPS calculations, etc. None of this stuff I'd ever learned in college.
In the end, I accepted the situation, and made the best of it. I learned a ton of useful stuff, and then got out of there as soon as I could line up a better opportunity in what I wanted which was working in commercial software development. But there is no way I could have ever gotten that gig without going through my first job.
Older assholes who think that because they learned Basic back in the 80's
I learned Basic in the 80's and I'm 28 years old, you insensitive clod!
I agree with kdawson on the issue. Let me explain.
While one might deem it ignorant to throw myself under the bus with my reply-header, it's the truth. I've no problem admitting that I'm inexperienced. I'm twenty-four years old working in the IT field as an intern-programmer. My, "title" is Intern Developer.
I've been working on various different software development projects for just about a year now. But, I feel that my inexperience allows me to answer this in a different light. "Kids these days", are different. To be honest, they're more spoiled, have less-solid upbringing from their parents (where are your manners, young man/woman?), and it really influences them in the long run.
Couple that with the way my generation and younger portray themselves in the world of IT. Everyone in generation-y or younger couples video games (which bears the fruit of an unrivaled competitive edge) meshed with hiding behind the mask of internet anonymity. It becomes habitual. Pride, prejudice, and egotistical behaviors floods through younger society. It's a defense mechanism. They're not used to being told, "you're don't know what you're doing".
In my opinion, at my age, if I were in the hiring position and saw anyone acting the way kdawson described, they'd be out the door faster than I had let them in. Behavior like that shows lack of compromise and cooperation. It shows the inability to learn new things (or the desire for that matter), lack of adaptability, and an overall poor sense of manners and business ethics; There's no sense of humility.
While some have thousands of excuses for it, I call it a lack of maturity. It's time to grow up. You're working in a field that is a profession. You don't become a professional over night. I personally believe these things are common sense. A college degree gets you the first job and education you need/desire, but it's only the tip of the iceberg.
Send similar prospects home kdawson, they deserve to learn a lesson or two.
End transmission.
Welcome to the world of universal college education.
Amazingly enough, many of the college grads I interview who have sparkling qualifications are terribly uneducated. They appear well, speak well, and for all purposes talk the talk, but it is very superficial.
College grads, regardless of discipline, should just be happy to have jobs. Work hard, do good work, be humble, accept (not demand) positions of greater responsibility. Soon enough you'll be getting what you "deserve", but as a recent college graduate, the only thing you "deserve" is the chance not to screw up your really good job.
Don't worry, the crushing grind of working for the man will quench their dreams in no time.
We've recently expanded our research program and have been trying to hire recent graduates to work as basic research assistants/project co-ordinators (they'd be doing basic tasks like helping to figure out what measures we want to use in projects, working with senior researchers to learn how to handle data management tasks, supervising interns, that kind of thing). The position is pretty good - 30k a year, 60 paid days off a year, good health and dental insurance for $10 a month, 401k/retirement matching and a pension, 100% tuition reimbursement, etc. There are massive professional development opportunities (credit on publications, presentations, opportunities to network) and it essentially guarantees that anyone who does it well will get into their graduate program of choice. Basically, if you're taking a year off between undergraduate and grad school, this is the place to do it.
The applicants are about 50/50. One half of them is comprised of people who are genuinely interested in the field, want to do this as a bridge between undergrad and grad because they feel maybe they didn't get enough internship time, maybe they didn't have perfect grades or 99th percentile GREs, or maybe they want a break from school and a chance to get some pratical research experience. The other half is comprised of little shits who have an epic sense of entitlement and think that just because they managed to sit still for 4 years (or, usually, 5 or 6) they're special in some way.
One recent applicant I interviewed came in and pretty much the first thing out of his mouth was, "What can you do for me?" Another told me she wouldn't take less than $40,000 for the job, despite the fact that it was only 10 minutes into the first interview and she wasn't even qualified for the position. Since I work at a university, I've taken the opportunity to educate these kids, and I let them know during the interviews (which were rather truncated) that we weren't interested.
But, then, when I was interviewing people for positions in the corporate world, about half the time I'd get great applicants, with the rest being clueless idiots who thought that since they knew how to turn a computer on they were entitled to 6-figure salaries. I don't think it's so much a "narcissistic graduates" problem as a "narcissistic people" problem. It's always been amazing to me how completely oblivious to how they come off these people are, but I guess that's why it's a personality disorder, eh?
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
...blind you to the fact that the article was referring to British college grads?
Or did you just not bother to read the article?
True the aritcle did mention that the ideas in question were imported from the US, but the focus was squarely on Britons.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
A narcissist society might very well be the product of modern marketing. From the point of view of a company that tries to sell something, the ideal consumer is one that commonly evaluates a purchase by thinking both:
- I deserve this
- I'm going to enjoy it and why should I not get something that I enjoy
This would also neatly help explain the increase in the number of overweight people around (food is a kind of product in which excessive self-indulgence has very visible effects).
New people with bachelors were being paid almost as much as people with decades of experience and graduate degrees. If you are at the other end just ask if you being paid enough to live on and not worry so much what the other guy is making.
What you're describing is naivete. So what if they have a misleading picture of the working world? That's a property of youth in general, and will be corrected soon enough. The question is how they deal with the resulting disappointment: do they chalk it up to a learning experience, or do they whine and moan about how unfair it is? Only the latter is arguably narcissism.
Its not a fault of the schools. Its a fault of the constant piling on of complexity while continuing to write/build everything from the ground up.
I think this is the crux of the matter. Current IP law pretty much makes rebuilding from the ground up (often in less efficient ways) the only way to get anything new done.
I drive a fully paid for BMW, am looking out my window at an awesome view of the Capitol Building as I type this.
All this really proves is that even PhDs are idiots when equipped with a blackberry and a car.
I do tech support at a national research lab. This is one of the places that may crack practical fusion (ya'll have seen the iconic picture from here). Besides the main mission of the lab, in support of U.S. DOE stuff, there's a lot of really cool smaller energy/computer/robotic research going on here. I've been lucky enough to visit some really cool labs and engineering areas and you know what? Even head researchers, the ones getting their hands dirty, they all complain about all the rest of the stuff they have to do at work, that takes them away from the fun stuff. There's always meetings, budget reports, status reports, mandatory training (high security/safety stuff), and PR stuff. There's a few prima donna's who bitch and moan about every last little bump in their lives (I don't care if the email server's down, I want my Outlook working now!) but for the most part, my users are adults. Much easier to deal with than college profs (my last job).
As for younger folks in my workplace, we're in a situation where we can afford to hire experienced folk, usually age 30 on up. But every summer, when the college interns show up (grad students, not undergrads), there's usually a few special snow flakes that get their underwear in a wad, because, after calling in a ticket to get their computer/printer set up, it's been 20 minutes and they haven't heard from anyone yet and they need stuff working NOW! They have no idea they've gone from top of the heap (almost) at college to bottom rung, here's an old Pentium M with a desk in a trailer and now go organize these 20 year old filing cabinets. If you're lucky, we'll take you over to a real building before you head back to school and show you a Van de Graaff generator.
I drank what? -- Socrates
This is why projects like Linux and Android are so important.
Wait, what? How did we get from "college kids are narcissistic" to "Linux and Android are great"? Are you actually going to attempt to blame college kids' shitty attitudes on Microsoft?
Or are you saying Linux is simple?
Seriously...?
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i am 25 years old, male, have my BS in CS, and have switched jobs 4 times in the last 4 years. i now make twice as much as when i left college, and i am what you would consider a "senior" developer.
i think the narcissism is completely true for my generation, albeit it is the fault of the generation before mine. granted i don't consider myself in the group that is the target of this topic, because i'm not that way. i have my cubicle, i make decent money (less than $100k but more than $60k), and i am pretty content with it. i don't need to go overseas. i am using a 3 year old computer to program with. my job isn't glamorous by any means. i'm sure i will remain this way for a few years, and that's fine with me.
the problem is what the parents of my generation have done.
the generation before mine raised their kids to think that last place is just as much entitled to the benefits of first place. so is it so mind-blowing to think that a kid coming straight out of college is going to think he is entitled to something belonging to those who have worked harder and longer? his baby-boomer mommy and daddy did it to him/her.
i would also say, in my defense, that i think my generation is required to know much, much more than the generation in front of me. the depth and number of languages required by a recent college grad vs that of someone 10-20 years ago is night and day. truth be told, we have to know a ton now to be remotely marketable. that being said, college students should be researching this, and should be preparing themselves for such things.
as far as seniority goes, it is hit and miss. there are some senior guys at my job who are amazingly brilliant, and who i would not doubt for a second. but there are also a lot of stupid, older guys who don't do shit any more because they only know COBOL and maybe FORTRAN and can't comprehend object-oriented languages. they sit, earn $90k a year on their baseline gov't contracts, and ride it out 'til they retire.
This might be of interest to readers of the current thread: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/7943906.stm
"The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place."
maybe it's working smart?
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
There is no doubt in my mind from reading your post that you're one of the people this article is talking about.
Well, actually I'm X-Gen. --That would be the perpetually cynical generation which spent its school years being grilled on just how screwed we are in ten different colorful ways by the "I Deserve" generation which came before and the "I Deserve generation which came after. If anybody has the right to pen an article like the one above, it's me. In fact, I suspect that it was written exactly by an X-Gen guy, and so I understand his motivation. But that still doesn't mean he's right.
Personal power doesn't stem from delusions or from huge, unstoppable population trends. Zombies one-on-one are relatively useless, but as a force, they tend to stumble toward their goal and there is little you can do to prevent them, agonizing as it might seem. But seriously. . ? What would you rather be? The guy with the golf club or. . , well, the guy with the golf club *and* the golf shoes?
So yeah, I recognize that for some reason, people who come from large population trends tend to be less aware somehow. I think this has to do with going through school so utterly surrounded by so many people that you naturally take on herd identity traits. --When I was in Jr. high school, half the class rooms were empty, I had two lockers just cuz' and everybody in the school knew my name. And I knew most of theirs. We were ALL individuals without having to work terribly hard for that status. In overly dense populations, systems with too many people, different forms of individual expression become adopted, and it seems to result in people thinking like cows or zombies. Or zombie cows. And the delusion of the Zombie Cow is that they deserve something. And you're right; the way things are going in the world, those expectations will probably be dashed, but I also suspect that the programming may serve as useful. When an economy crashes and the young & strong work force refuses to believe it. . , what happens? I'm actually really curious about that.
Anyway, X-Gen people suffer from their own programming, and this article is a prime example of it; low self-esteem and bitterness. And there's no true reason for feeling like that other than the programming. X-Gen people have an enormous advantage, and when they choose to use it, they find happiness and gobs of personal power in life. --Though, this stems far less often from the accumulation of material wealth than it does from the "Zen" route. But how lucky is that? Everybody knows abundant material wealth is the siren call which leads to insanity, barbecues and lawn mowers. The only practical way to real success is to become self-aware. But rather than focus on this, the writer of the article is moaning about how he isn't a zombie cow as well. Whenever I hear this kind of thing, I tend to think, "You practically had your light saber handed to you and all you want to do is trade it in for a successful moisture farm."
-FL
I a kid beats you to a conference, then maybe he understands 'reality' better than you...
There is a danger in the new generation expecting great things, but there is also a danger in the old generation discounting new ideas.
Those can adapt to whichever law applies at the moment always come out ahead.
"I only speak the truth"
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I've seen this both in the work place, with fresh out of school kids thinking they know everything, as well as the kids still in school thinking they're going to get some fabulous job.
As an instructor at a university, I usually get at least once a semester, a student who will raise his (not being sexist, just not ususally any women in my CS classes) hand, and ask something like: "What kind of salary range can I expect when I graduate?", or "What kinds of jobs are there out there?".
I usually laugh first, then tell them the grim truth, that seems to have escaped them up til this point.
You should see their crushed looks when I tell them that if they stay here in NE Ohio, that they'll be lucky to get mid to uper 30's to start, and REALLY lucky if they get in the lower to mid 40's to start.
For some reason, they're expecting 50's to 60's, fresh out of school or something. I just don't get it.
So I tell them, move, or pick a field that doesn't have many people in it, if they want to make more...
Anyway, just thought I'd share.
Oh, and the funniest, are all the new kids, who think they're going to get jobs with big video game development studios right out of school! I laugh, and then when they look hurt because they weren't joking, I tell them they'll be lucky to get a testing job for my little ponies 4 paying $7/hour on the west coast...they don't seem to like that much...
The sad reality, is that 90% of them will be doing web development, and "playing" video games on their free time...
More like retarded. Did these applicants have ANY real development references? Did they code an app from scratch that is in common use, like BlueBeep or any of the stand-alone DOS programs?
Do they actually have the chops to start from the ground up and develop a helper application
for ANY platform or app? Are they living and breathing code? OR are they paper tigers with unrealistic expectations? I would bet they are A+ certified morons.
Great programmers program in any language, after all, logical thought can be expressed easily,
the implementation is only limited by the language they use and their understanding thereof.
Graduates, expecting to instantly gain GURU status, are wannabes and lame. Corporate travel??
Very funny. Real programmers can learn any language, with ALL it's quirks, and excel at using that, or any language. It is NOT only book learning and test taking. It is mostly doing and being able to DO that counts.
Besides the Vietnam debacle, let's take a look at some of the other accomplishments of the proud babyboomer generation:
- WTC attacks '93, '01
- War in Iraq, Afghanistan
- Dot com bubble
- Subprime housing crisis
- Unsustainable social security debt (enjoy that summer home in Florida financed by your children and their children)
This is just the top 5. There is much more that the babyboomer generation should be ashamed of (see also W. Clinton, G.W. Bush). Sure, other generations have left unenviable legacies, but none compares to the mess left by the self serving babyboomers.
Going through a Ph.D. program when you are in your 20s isn't working hard.
Hard work isn't just a matter of making yourself tired and then feeling that you deserve something as a result of being tired.
Hard work may mean staying up studying, not drinking too much, postponing child rearing, seeking out people that you can learn from, earning trust and reputation, working when nobody is telling you to work, and making other good decisions.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
I think you misunderstand... Your degree only demonstrates to an employer:
What it does not demonstrate to an employer:
I'm sure I missed loads, but those are just the things off the top of my head. Basically, your education is primarily there to teach you how to teach yourself in an area of expertise.
Decatur not Decater. Thanks!
I haven't really observed the attitudes described in Second Lieutenants. The summer internship (a.k.a. officer candidate school) that precedes an offer of full employment does a pretty good job of culling those who harbor such attitudes. Rigorous vetting in a high stress environment can be a great screening tool for character and commitment.
This is actually the exact topic I CONSTANTLY argue with friends over. Basically as someone who tried the whole college thing, and thought it was just an over paid day care, then taught myself. I have this argument because the schools, parents, books, learning materials basically have told them "once I have this piece of paper, the world falls at my feet". The BIGGEST one I have found for this is "graphic design" majors. I know probably 8-10 just graduating or graduated. The new businesses are opening, I get constant messages trying to drum up business. Then a few months later they are working at the local grocery store. Even friends with teaching degrees, engineers are working there. It's basically the college/university feeding the student the bull so they can justify the 10k tuition they are charging.
Yes the epidemic has infected our culture at large, not just students. People justify their entitlement mentality with loaded words like "fair".
And if they don't get their perceived entitlement they will blame you, attack you, tax you, steal from you. It's easier that way. Existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre called this behavior "leveling". In a purely relativist culture (as ours is becoming) it is sufficient to "get ahead" by pulling down or punishing those who excel. Ideally, some "watchdog" organizations will keep an eye out or anyone who is doing too well, and help you tear them down.
For more examples of leveling, look at the effect of labor unions on productivity, our current obsession with hating "the rich" (anyone who makes more than me), affirmative action hiring practices, maximum speeds enforced in quarter-mile drag racing, and of course... our public schools, where they "bring up the low and bring down the high"... and where our children get their first lessons in leveling.
These days, if a professor gives a kid a C on a paper, the dean of the college gets a call from the kid's parents demanding that the grade be changed to something better.
So just wait: one of these days, your new hire's mother is going to call you up and chew you out for not realizing how special her kid is. After all, he always got As on his college papers...
Actually the current form of radical individualism that's wrecking the global psyche has it's roots in Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud's ideas, and those descended from them, have been used by all those either in or hoping to gain power in the Western world in order to manipulate and appeal to our irrational, subconscious desires so that we might buy their product or vote for them.
This argument was presented by Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary series The Century of the Self .
TL;DR: If this looks too long I doubt you can be bothered with 4hrs of archive footage and voice-over :) . If you're still interested, I highly recommend you download this and watch it - All of Curtis' documentaries are easily available on torrent sites and they're put out by the BBC who don't mind people downloading.
Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, used his uncle's ideas in order to sell things. He was responsible for, amongst other things, convincing women to start smoking by selling them cigarettes as symbols of feminine empowerment. The cliché that cars are advertised as penis extensions for men is also due to Bernays' advertising techniques, this was what he had in mind when advertising cars.
This eventually lead to focus groups where people were encouraged to freely express their irrational thoughts about products and ideas - psychoanalytical discussion groups about products instead of neurosis! Product development then shifted wholly over to this model and the psychoanalysts involved in this process thought they were doing good because they thought that a safer, more stable society would result.
This use of psychoanalysis as a means of control was eventually rejected by analysts who believed that attempts to control the self were immoral and that the inner self should be encouraged to express itself at all times. These ideas fed into the counter-culture of the 60s and perverted the revolutionary message of the classic left, changing the personal into the political. The idea spread that if people changed themselves then it would inevitably lead to a new form of society - of course this isn't true.
The collapse of the counter-culture turned the hippies of the 60s into the selfish me generation of the 80s. They grew up in a society that conditioned them to believe that self-fulfilment should be the ultimate aim of everyone and so of course they conditioned their kids to behave in the same way. Ironically this made people easier to control than ever as now damn near everyone in the UK, USA and other western countries is told from birth that there should be no guilt associated with getting whatever you want.
It's quite a compelling thesis and again, I highly recommend you watch it if you're interested in this topic. It's not a conspiracy theory, it's a history of ideas.
Nick
... should be given a dictionary that includes city names and a fast slap on the ass by the door. It's "Decatur", after the famous Commodore Stephen Decatur, Jr. who served with distinction in the Barbary Wars and the War of 1812.
Perhaps they're only giddy with excitement over their glorious near-future assignments because they are being interviewed by a twit who throws around small, historically important names without even knowing how to spell them.
If you know your stuff, I'd love to work with you. But I've seen hotshots cut down to size and have been forced to bail Freshouts. I keep my skills sharp and take a holistic view of the workplace environment. I know when to ask, what to ask and how to ask. Basically what I'm saying is that there are some skills not developed untill you put in a couple of years and you still need to keep up with technology to stay relevant.
These snot-noses obviously still have a sense of self worth. Crush them quickly or better still farm their jobs out to India or China.
Wait...we already did that.
I teach freshman courses at the junior college level. One of the classes is a basic course designed to make sure that students can use a word processor and a spread sheet, and know enough so they won't fall for the Nigerian scam and will keep their antivirus software turned on and updated. About 35% of student fail that class.
Every time I teach the class at least one students comes to me and says "I don't see how I could have failed your class, I turned everything in." Yes, they are in college, they graduated from high school, and they do not understand that there is a difference between turning it in and doing it correctly.
I get blank documents turned in because students expect to get more credit for turning in a blank document than for not turning in anything at all.
I have had arguments with students who believed they should get credit for turning in the wrong answer to an arithmetic problem. They expect to get partial credit for turning in 3 when the questions was "What is 2 plus 2". I have had a student tell me that their opinion of the correct answer was a valid as mine and that I had no right to tell them otherwise. I am talking about the answer to a simple arithmetic problem.
Remember that I am talking about 35% of students. The other 65% actually got a pretty good, and in some cases exemplary education, from the same schools that graduated the first 35%.
But, still, it looks like a lot of them come out of high school with an unreasonably high opinion of themselves, and no education at all.
Stonewolf
Note: By you, I don't mean you, I mean them.
"One"
"You" is personal and "they" is also plural. It's a bug in the language.
Deleted
I'm saying that we need publicly available free systems upon which to build, so tat every project does not have to start from ground zero re-writing the world.
Nokia, Palm, Motorola, LG, all run out and develop a phone OS from scratch, then they do it all over again in two years.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The recession is caused by many factors - one of them being the recession is made worse by people expecting it to be worse.
Yes I'm looking at you parent article...
I agree it's a nice dose of painful reality arriving now.
But there is something to be said for optimistic belief translating into results, too. It works for some, not everyone.
Why? The difference between wishful la-la dreaming and constructive, creative wishfulness, it's an important difference. Both are useful skills in their respective domains :-)
What development company would hire a recent college grad in the US for anything related to actually producing code? Give me the kid that spent the last 4 years trying to hack his 360 over the dope that actually got into debt to learn programming. Unless you've got some decent project work to go with your CS, I'd say prepare to start coding me up a big mac on that mac terminal you'll be standing in front of.
It is Dr. Craig's thesis that "kids today" are overpraised-- too much focus on self-esteem-- and they are becoming narcissists. But the most important fact that seems to have eluded her is that it is the adults of today who are overpraising the kids.
The problem is actually the adults, who are themselves so profoundly narcissistic that they can't help but see their own progeny as extensions of themselves _and nothing more._ Time Magazine, in 2006, chose "You" as it's Person of The Year. Time Magazine's readership isn't teens.
Allan Bloom's Closing of The American Mind described how college kids, steeped in relativism, were unable to create a meaningful life outside of self-gratification and self-fulfillment. Was he right? Before you answer, note that he wrote that book in 1987. Those college kids are 40 now.