Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!
... 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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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"
Nobody watched much TV before 1950 or so. The NTSC format used by U.S. broadcasters wasn't standardized until 1941, and then the war ended production of TV sets, so there were about 5,000 sets in the whole country. Add a few years for the price of the technology to drop (and for Great Depression era nervousness about buying stuff to wear off) and you really don't have any TV viewers to speak of until the mid 50s.
I grew up in the 50s and 60s, and I recall TV addiction being an issue for me and my friends even then. But I don't think it got to be really bad until the 80s, when cable became widely available, latchkey kids became the norm, and TV was the easiest way for most kids to distract themselves.
Another factor: more and more people living in "edge cities" as mass transit withered and car ownership became common. That really limits the social life of children too young to drive, especially once parents started getting nervous about letting their kids do stuff without supervision.
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.
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)
"....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
You *are* old if you worked during college. These days, college is an expensive, full-time responsibility. Student loans come with high interest rates. The job market is treacherous, to say the least. Failure to obtain a degree, let alone get a job quickly after college, is financially crippling. Working a minimum wage job comes nowhere close to making up for the lost opportunity cost of time that could be spent studying, and making better grades. And college students aren't usually considered for jobs that make more than minimum wage.
I will agree that there is a huge disconnect between academia and the workplace. But it sounds like you aren't aware of the realities of college.
Additionally, speaking as someone who didn't graduate but who has lots of "front-line experience" that you claim to value, somehow I doubt you would even consider me for a job I have been doing quite successfully for over six years.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
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.
This is being reported all over the place. In fact, my wife read an article in Macleans (I think) years ago about this very thing. Overall, the false self-esteem forced upon these kids by our so called "education system" in North America has brought about a new horror in education. As in, most students today are what is commonly referred to as "mark mercenaries." They also have a gross tendency to lie or twist words or ... to get what they want. I've seen it used time and time again in attempts to screw over profs, TAs, etc because of a perceived wrong. That perceived wrong typically being not paying enough attention to the student or giving them a bad grade (that they earned). In fact, a recent example is a TA got questioned for not giving help to a student. What actually happened is that this student didn't even as for help. Likely in some twisted reality in this students head, the TA should have constantly come up to this student asking him/her if (s)he needed help. Because, that's what happens in highschool right?
And what makes it worse? TV programs that, including reality TV, that glorify people getting a free ride. So, now with the delusional aspect to the general mentality of todays youth added to there false self-esteem, they actually honestly believe that they deserve what they think they deserve. Regardless of the reality of the situation.
And what makes that worse? Universities/Colleges/etc are indirectly encouraging that. Because, if they did anything to stop that, then the students wouldn't take there (service) courses and the departments would be in big trouble. Both through the lower grades and the complaints that admin would surely get and the lower enrolment rates.
Right now, what we should expect is for this to get worse for a long time to come. Because, the Universities/etc (because they are now run like businesses and NOT educational institutions) have a vested interest in caving to these power drunk students. And those students are the *vast* majority of the student population.
I quake for our future...
I've had to deal with interns coming into the technology field after being coddled at college for a few years. I've tried to be friendly, polite and honest. Mostly that's been appreciated after a few months in 'the real workplace'.
I also took the time to talk to these interns at the end of their internship to go over how they would represent their work on their resumes. Invariably they didn't see what they really did. What they saw as a series of menial tasks was really "Performed X with minimal supervision" and "Completed project Y using blah blah blah". They weren't prepared to comprehend what a real project was.
One of the truly sad things was their lack of ability to troubleshoot. I know I've said this in the past but I feel it bears repeating. Everything these kids have done has been multiple choice. Their tests, their games, everything has presented them with a list of choices. Our games gave us a problem and then we were on our own to come up with what might work as a solution. Does anyone remember "You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." and a command prompt? Not a lot of pre-chosen answers there. I spent quite a bit of time helping them learn how to solve problems.
Lastly, here's the advice I have yet to see an intern use. "Find the job that no one wants to do, do it well, and you'll be employed for life." Seriously, everyone wants the fun and happy jobs. But someone has to clean the crap out of the corners and keep the place running. Fun and happy candidates are lined up out the door and around the corner. The one who is willing to do the jobs that require doing is going to stand out.
Now get off my intarwebz.
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.
Stick one of these up on the wall, and just go with it.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
I too want to do cool stuff, but the reality is that there is cool stuff and stuff that will make the company money. You may be lucky and be able to land a job at a company that does both, but don't expect it. The companies I worked for, that did cool stuff didn't last long because it was too cutting and the market wasn't ready for it.
Often you aren't in management because you were forced there, but because you wanted more pay (pay usually corresponds to responsibility) or you were fed up of being a lab rat or equivalent.
I am still hoping I will get my dream job, but I realise that it is all down to luck and hard work.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
The reason schools are making their engineering programs do more interesting-sounding things are because engineering and CS enrollments, especially among US citizens, are dropping rapidly. So schools are trying to find creative ways to interest people in majoring in those areas; "training for boring cubicle job", funnily enough, doesn't entice people.
The only other solution, really, is the capitalist one: offer so much money that people will go into the field even if it does sound boring. But you need to offer a lot more than current going rates for that.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...?
Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
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.