* Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.
Those that are suited to it, yes. But I learned to program because I couldn't help it. It fit so well with my mind that every second was pleasure. And it got me a great job. But that's just good luck for me. That's the world happening to be aligned with my obsession and aptitude.
If the only demand right now was for people that could play a mean game of pick-up basketball, I'd be the one serving latte's.
Edit: You are right though. My little cousins that are coming up, even the ones that might not love programming, I am encouraging to learn what they can. Just be able to do the basics and it probably increases your worth as an employee by a large factor.
While programmers in general are in short supply, Rails people are extremely scarce. This is surprising considering the learning curve for this platform is basically a few weeks of intensive training, perhaps even less for those familiar with some other MVC development model.
Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out back-end APIs to support these applications. Rails is great because it can get your product out the door and expose what kinds of difficulties you'll have scaling it by providing real-world data on how it's used. It's fast to ship and an essential first step.
Maybe it varies from market to market, but here (Toronto), there's almost zero in the way of surplus labor. Rails is fairly well established here in the web arena because of the efforts of companies like Unspace that have been active promoters.
They should. They'll also find it helpful to learn what a command line is and how to operate it. Oh, and HTML -- got to know HTML. And Javascript seems to be pretty popular these days... at least enough to operate jQuery. Then there's SQL, because even Rails developers will get their hands dirty at some point. Of course, we wouldn't want to start them with data programming because they've got imperative programming, object oriented programming, and MVC architecture to get on top of first. We'll start with simple syntax that as many as 1/4 of you will understand after a week of classes: "a = 10; b = 5; c = a + b; #What is the value of a now?"
After they get through that a quick course in Linux system administration with a refresher on the file system metaphor ("Its like Facebook... actually, no, it is wholly unique to your experience and every person you'll be working with has forgotten that twenty years ago it confused them, too, so expect not-so-good natured ribbing when you ask questions."), and how to use Google, StackOverflow, Github, and a version control system designed by a supergenius who doesn't care what your fingers think about getting bitten.
Sweet, that gets us to Hello World.
OK, now let's start doing useful work: meet your new friends, the letters A, P, I and the number "countless." Here's the Stripe API, go charge credit cards. Ugh, wait, you set the name value of the credit card text field in your HTML, which results in the credit card number getting written to production.log, thus causing us to fail PCI compliance. Don't you know anything?
Seriously: I think young college graduates would be very, very well served by skilling up on things that are commercially valuable rather than the blather that comprises a lot of what passes for education. That said, "just learn Ruby on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of commercially valuable work.
> That said, "just learn Ruby on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of commercially valuable work.
I agree. On the other hand, that's a relatively easy gap to fill.
That article is exactly patio11's point--the state trooper in the article spent a year and a half pulling up to 80 hour workweeks to learn iOS. His husband is also technical.
I just taught 20 people ror. It took 8 weeks. They worked their butts off, and now two thirds of them have entry level dev jobs.
The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.
Too many people confuse a college degree with functional skills. College is a good place to gain functional skills, but in the age of grade inflation, a degree does not imply you've gained any.
I'm not sure why college students aren't told that a degree in anthropology/english/women's studies is not going to give you marketable skills, while a degree in nursing/engineering/computer science will. Perhaps incoming freshmen should be given better guidance?
Totally. In fact, colleges should publish outcome stats -- what percent graduating in degree X got a job in their field within 9 months? And at what median starting salary? Dismal numbers would cause many students to reconsider that Psych degree, or at least realize they are really undertaking a 4 year vacation.
"Do what interests you" is very common and very bad advice. I studied social anthropology for a semester because it "interested" me — but only in theory, not in practice. The computer science degree I eventually received has yielded a far more interesting career than what my friends in psychology/philosophy/sociology have experienced, on average.
I declared a double major of dance and creative writing when I entered college. Nobody discouraged me. It was sheer luck that I stumbled across computer science, fell in love, and never looked back. I shudder to think how my life would have turned out if I had stuck with what had originally interested me.
Is it really bad advice? I can't think of a single good software developer I know who chose the field simply out of pragmatics. Any time I've met someone in a field because they felt it was necessary they typically hate what they do are are likewise not very good at it (with some exceptions).
It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests.
If anything I think people get stuck because they don't follow their interests strongly enough.
> It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests.
Amen.
Almost all the programmers I know (myself included) chose it as a career choice primarily because they found it interesting, not because the money was good. It just so turned out that what I (and probably a lot of other people here) wanted to do because they liked it also turns out to be a great career choice. We of all trades are the ones who should definitely not be telling people they need to make the tradeoff between doing something they love and something that will get them a job just because we happen to work in the intersection of both. That I get paid well to do something I love is truly amazing luck, and I (and, it seems, a good portion of the industry) tend to forget that all too often.
I suppose I should clarify: people generally interpret "do what interests you" as "study what you think you will enjoy studying" when they should really be asking themselves what they will enjoy doing as a career.
Social anthropology was interesting to study, but at some point I realized that actually embarking on a career as a social anthropologist would have been terrible for me. I like learning about different cultures, not studying a few scientifically. I can do that as an amateur.
When I sat down to decide what to do instead, I thought, a) I like making ASP pages for our newspaper, b) you can go into a lot of fields with a CS degree, and c) there is a clear path for making a tangible impact on society. It turns out, that was pretty sound reasoning (despite ASP pages being entirely different from CS): I've worked at Microsoft, in computational biology, and now at a publishing startup. I've never lacked for engagement (except toward the end of my time at MSFT), and the problems I'm able to solve in our economy are a larger part of that than the practice of the discipline itself.
"Any time I've met someone in a field because they felt it was necessary they typically hate what they do are are likewise not very good at it (with some exceptions)."
Do they like it more than they'd like waiting tables or serving coffee?
"It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests."
I don't think anybody is telling them not to follow their interests. But if they're going to do that they should realize and accept that doing what they love may not pay well.
Did studying social anthropology for a semester hurt you in any way? And when you figured out you weren't really interested in it, how did you decide to pursue CS if it didn't interest you?
a) No, in fact, I benefitted from the semester. I learned interesting things about, for example, the role of gift giving in society and what it means to be a social anthropologist. I don't regret the semester, but I do think I would have regretted a degree.
b) I never said CS didn't interest me — that "study what interests you" is bad advice doesn't mean to do the opposite. See my reply above for more explanation and a short description of my thought process.
I'd imagine it's a combination of:
1.) Hangover of attitudes from better economic times.
2.) Cultural pressure to be seen to "follow your dreams" rather than directly focus on money.
I agree on the better guidance, but I don't think steering people away from these degrees is completely correct either. Anthropology, English, and Women's Studies can lead to tremendously rewarding careers (if not monetarily, at least professionally)...but! BUT! YOU WILL NEED AN ADVANCED DEGREE!
Honestly, I think a lot of good would be accomplished by simply abolishing Bachelors degrees in subjects like these. You want to enter school to study anthropology? Great. Get ready to work your ass off for the next 8-12 years (and then struggle through the world of post-doc appointments and tenure track for the next 9-15 years after that). Oh, suddenly that doesn't sound so appealing? Well then, lets see what other major you might pick that will give you marketable skills after 4-5 years.
Look at all the 'follow your passion' articles that appear on HN.
Young folks also take bigger risks, like doing music or art in the hope that they can make it. Add in an education system that rarely considers humility a value and realistic assessment of your skills and that's why people don't have marketable skills.
Mind you, there are places like the School of Music near me where for every incoming class they tell them that they won't get a job and most of them will not make it. It's really honest, but on wildly optimistic 18 year olds it doesn't have much impact.
I personally reject the notion that a degree in Anthropology, English or some other nonmarketable major is a bad idea. Doing something that makes a significant impact in any given field, especially considering the sizable advantages of web distribution, is easier now than ever.
If you feel the deep passion and need for bringing your ideas into the world, you will be successful.
The issue is motivation, you're either working towards doing great work or you aren't.
There's nothing that guarantees success for the passionate.
If you are passionate about being a screenplay writer, your talent will be drowned out in the deluge of other passionate and hardworking people also trying to be screenplay writers. For the vast majority of people, that kind of pursuit is better left as a hobby.
I think you (and I, and most of us here in HN) should count ourselves lucky that we happen to be passionate about programming. It's a tool that allows us to bring out ideas to life - anything from games to Mars rovers to businesses. People passionate about 19th century Russian literature don't have the luxury that we do because that's not going to earn them a living, no matter how great their passion may be.
This "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" notion is a little misguided, IMO. Instead, I'd say the screenplay writer should see if she can get herself to be at least passably comfortable in a marketable field, while leaving the writing for the weekends.
I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more than enough to not be considered underemployed.
I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
I'm afraid young people of today are losing the real virtues of life like living with passion and taking responsibility for who you are. The ability to make something out of yourself and feeling joy in life is more alive today than in any other point in human history.
I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games (which, incidentally, I think could be argued as more detrimental to human wellness than even the most societally hated and destructive addictive stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine)
This is really a shame, as one thing that comes out of hacker culture is a feeling of a real kind of exuberance about your work. Your work is yours to create. I've read the college labor statistics with some interest, even fear. But when I read them, I can't help but think that something essential about our generation and present technological zeitgeist is being left out. As if somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control, framing college graduates as fragmented or marginalized which opens up a world of excuses.
From Chaitin to Stallman, when hackers talk about the meaning of work, they're not talking about abstract decisions, they're talking about doing something that has concrete consequences. It may be true that there are seven billion people on the planet, never the less, your work matters in material terms.
In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we do with our lives.
> As if somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control... In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we do with our lives.
You are wise. Please write a book for our generation.
Not everybody is a creator at heart though. And even among creators, programmers are the ones with the best opportunity to create something out of nothing.
The non-creators, or the creators-in-high-entry-fields, are the ones losing jobs and opportunities. So yeah, if you have a CS-related degree and a passion for programming, you have amazing opportunities that should not be wasted.
I think you're absolutely correct, I also think there's a lot more people making decisions that optimize for short-term satisfaction rather than long-term happiness. It's true that my deepest happiness comes from creation but I believe I'm far from alone (especially amongst college attendees, who are supposed to be the endlessly curious!).
Even still, maybe not everyone is a creator, but we are the result of 6 billion years of evolution -- act like it.
Many video games these days are designed as Skinner Boxes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skinner_box). Drugs have some of the same effects, but their addictive powers are often limited by adverse side effects (e.g. get too drunk, you vomit) and the build up of tolerance (e.g. a heroin addict continually needs bigger doses for the same effect). Since video games play directly on psychological reward centers, they can push a person much farther into a response/reward cycle than drugs can.
What a weird and incredibly false dichotomy. I smoke a bunch of pot, play a bunch of Halo, have had internships with 3 major corporations, worked as an independent contractor last summer and have a 6-figure job lined up when I graduate. On top of working 12 hours a week with 15-18 credit hours during my Junior and Senior year, I also have 5 side projects that will either make nice additions to my open source portfolio or could potentially become products if I gave them the attention they need.
I think ZephyrP is blinded by his good fortune to not understand that: one, software developers are in crazy demand compared to, for example, "creative writers"; and two, that the economy IS quite bad right now and that this is a generalized extension of the unemployment problems across the country.
That having been said, when it comes to things like video games and drugs, I think Zephyr's point about "you have to make your own luck" logic is right (granted I have no idea why there is a pot-shot in there about video games). A person's work ethic is the root cause and "video games" and "drugs" are silly remarks for people that don't understand or see that there are plenty of us who can indulge and still live perfectly productive lives.
Further, I don't know of any indication that "video game" playing is trading off with employment. At all. On the other hand, there are probably thousands of statisticians and economists who could give you very specific reasons for the downturn in employment and show a trend that will probably make it's way across all segments of society including college grads.
Also, people need to understand that they need marketable degrees and they need to understand that employers are learning that all degrees are not equal and you ABSOLUTELY MUST have the skills that your degree assert and you must be able to communicate well and articulate why you deserve a job.
You're right, it's somewhat unfair of me to demonize video games. I most certainly did not mean to demonize drugs, our society places an unfair stigma on them that is entirely a result of some rather ancient belief systems.
To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers, filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything they can give the world and themselves by spending their lives in front of video games. Video games are not bad, they are an interesting artform and provide unique cultural dialog. They are however something that people have moved beyond using to relax, contemplate or fill the boring spaces in their life, it becomes them.
As the other poster stated, because of their reward systems they can suck very intelligent people incredibly deep into what amounts to a terrible vice.
I think I agree with you about human behavior and things being drains on peoples' productivity, but frankly I'm sure not if it's anywhere near "big enough" to be relevant in this particular conversation.
I have some friends that are extremely intelligent that fall into "addictive ruts" that I think cater to their ADD. In my opinion, it's embarrassing for them (the ones I have in mind) because they run their mouths about these big ideas and then play "Tiny Tower" on their iPad (which I suppose qualifies as a video game) and don't really excel as much as they could. I mean, they're doing fine for themselves but I'm floored at how I can write 500 lines of code for something and they've not moved from their chair/iPad.
At the end of it all though, I still don't see anything to make me believe that this is unique to our generation. Anything can and often is a distraction, whether it's video games, drinking, being out doors. I know people that fail classes they were more interested in their rec football game than studying. I don't think these things account for this enormous gap in employment.
I'm just imagining the line-graph of "overall unemployment in the US", on top of the linge-graph of "job availability in the US". I'm sure if you placed the graph of "college grads with jobs exiting college" you would find a very large correlation between these three graphs.
>I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games (which, incidentally, I think could be argued as more detrimental to human wellness than even the most societally hated and destructive addictive stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine)
oh come on with this bs, while you feel so smug about achieving success through hard work, super obvious you got lucky with an early start. your profile shows you learned assembly before you could vote and started writing a nosql database when you were 19. you're a "normal guy" and im the second coming.
if you're an autistic supergenius there will always be code work, but some of us have to live in the real world you clearly do not inhabit.
> I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without college (or high school) degrees, meanwhile in many places there was barely a recession in the tech sector, and if there was, it was over very quickly.
I feel like every HN thread about a successful startup, or a reminder of the excellent salaries we get for doing things that we love, should include someone behind us, whispering in our ear that the majority of bankruptcies are from people with unexpected medical problems, 75% of whom had insurance, and that last year 20% of children in the US grew up in households making less than $22,000 for a family of four.
This is overly personal and about to be a little Horatio Alger, but it's a relevant anecdote to the bubble comment so I'll throw it out there -- I personally don't come from a household making more than 25,000 a year, I lived in the esteemed estate of 'Mountain View Trailer Park' just a few years ago and have always attended public school, My stepfather was a construction worker and my mother taught ESL.
My insistence on refusing to believe that you are the result of forces beyond your control perhaps comes directly from this experience. Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible because of the various capitalist systems of control, yet here I am today, hobnobbing with high HN society (kidding).
I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
Come, come. I'm just saying that even if you come from a low-income household, you're more than just a gear in some deterministic machine. I'm not saying these statistics are invalid whatsoever.
Statistics is dangerous in the sense that some use it to frame their potential for success, adopting “Well I guess statistics says I won't get a nice job in the current state of economy considering my social position, so why bother doing things”-like attitude.
Leaving aside the fact that an ESL teacher even working part time somewhere near mountain view should probably net 25k pretty easily (there's always unemployment to factor in, and I have no interest in going too personal either), do you really see no advantages of attending public school in Mountain View vs a town in, say, Mississippi? Or having a teacher for a mother vs, say, a migrant worker?
It's a pretty fundamental error to assume that you are a good sample for that kind of conclusion. My examples were deliberate. It's nice to think that exercise and eating right can avoid medical issues, and you certainly can influence your chances of needing 20 years of kidney treatments or needing early joint replacement. But the leading causes of death in the US are heart disease and cancer, even amongst the physically fit, and that still doesn't preclude that latent heart condition, or getting hit by a car while on your bike, and suddenly facing hospital bills of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Your life is yours to create in many of the same ways that your startup's success is yours to create. You just have to make sure you define success as including adapting to and (most importantly) living with failure. Meanwhile, don't assume those that are hurting right now didn't dream or work hard enough; far better to start from the assumption that in addition to those qualities you also had good timing and incredible luck.
Whew, quick assumptions -- That would be Mountain View Trailer Park in lovely, rural, Durango Colorado [ http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&ll=37.229004,-107.8021... ] (Although in that shot you can't see the sign, I assure you it's called Mountain View Trailer Park, because of the view of the Mountains )
However, I spent the majority of my youth in New Mexico, with close to the lowest public education ratings in the country.
Outside of that, I guess we're simply in fundamental disagreement about the nature of success. Sure, doing groundbreaking work might be impossible or at least very unlikely for the average person, but I believe that anyone can be successful (in a pragmatic sense) for the same reason I believe in the central limit theorem. The most successful scientists are not necessarily the smartest, but the ones who publish the most -- the same can be said of any discipline. In short, unrelenting persistence is key, and depth always beats breadth.
I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm young and dumb and haven't been jaded by the world yet. Maybe I'm Malcom Gladwelling myself into thinking that there's some rhyme or reason behind the (personally qualified) success I feel I've achieved. Still, I am of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, it will spread from your life into your work. There are no real limitations to what you can do. There may be temporary periods of plateaus or even deep valleys, but you can transcend them. I have seen this too many times to declare our ultimate fate and legacy of our work entirely accidental.
> Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible
Then those people are idiots. However, the statistics don't lie. It is very, very difficult. It's called a cycle of poverty for a reason. Having said that, I commend your passion and attitude as someone who came from a family of four well below the poverty line. It really is key to getting anywhere.
> I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
This is true, but it's only in the US where medical crises lead to financial ruin, increasingly so with the revised (personal) Bankruptcy laws of the last few years. Personal responsibility is something I think everyone can get behind, but the system is plain broken, and that is the far bigger problem.
> I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.
I fundamentally agree with this, but it dangerously ignores certain realities and systemic problems in our society. Be very careful of adopting the attitude "well I made it, so therefore everyone should be able to." Everyone's individual circumstances are different and there's more random luck involved then anyone cares to admit.
The value of college when you enter the job market depends on what you make of it while you are there. Most people can probably finish one way or another, but that doesn't guarantee passion or valuable real world skills. I also believe that the 'name' of your school matters a lot too.
I don't like headlines like this that conflate two quite different situations (ie, "jobless" and "underemployed").
Ebay used to do the same thing when it would report that x00,000 people sold on Ebay "full time or part time". Kind of a big difference so not that meaningful a stat.
I wonder if this has anything to do with how it seems that every time someone talks about colleges better preparing young people for a career, there is always someone here that responds saying that college is not all about getting a job, but about a "cultural experience". I guess you need something to justify the expense now.
Absolutely. This phrase is a distortion of the "liberal education" (that included calculus, biology, chemistry, and physics) provided by universities of the past. From what I can tell, universities used to have a much smaller student/professor ratio, and had a bit more "disciple" in the study of a particular discipline.
Presumably that ended with the G.I. bill, but no one particularly minded because factory jobs were plentiful.
So when baby boomers of yesteryear look back at their college experience, and try and figure out what they got out of it, can they point to stellar education that they use every day? If they majored in Communications, probably not. Do their jobs require collegiate-level knowledge or skills? If they're in marketing or sales, probably not.
So they remember that they smoked their first joint there, and met that one foreign kid from Uzbekistan, and throw in the first awakenings of independent thought that come from living on one's lonesome for the first time, and call it a "cultural experience of self-discovery."
I malign communications and the so-called liberal arts a bit, but that's not completely deserved. If done right, they actually seem about on par with mathematics in terms of usefulness---abstract and useless at first, but a fantastic base for further study, providing that that further study occurs.
This seems like the most important line in the story:
"About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields."
Headline in 2000: "Even with incredible economic performance, nearly 1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed"
Not to get in the way of the AP's narrative and everyone's self-congratulations for picking a profitable major.
"Learn to program" is probably going to be a repeated answer here but I'm not so sure this attitude is going to be doing any good. Enticing people into technical professions that do not have the inclination is not going to make things much better - instead your going to end up with a significant band of people disinterested in their work. We all know how much "negative" work can be done by bad apples in software.
The problem is that everyone has natural competencies, personalities and cognitive methods and only a relatively small sliver have the type that will fit software development. If you think I'm saying were special, I am not. Every discipline has a relatively small sliver of people who will be naturally inclined to do it and enjoy it.
The real problem is us... meaning society. We currently aren't culturally organized in a manner to take advantage of everyone's abilities and part of the main reasoning I'd say is a lack of diversity in terms of what is appreciated and rewarded. From my limited perspective our culture seems to have a maniacal focus on money and a growing monoculture that is focused on how to become a millionaire at whatever cost. Right now software development seems to be a good way to get rich partly due to our monoculture's love of video games, apps, business processes etc. so our industry gets green lit for now so to say.
The problem is that there is a lot of important stuff to us humans all living a better life that the majority falsely considers unimportant and lowly for the most part because of its current low correlation to the almighty profit ... things like culture, art, anthropology, farming, geology, architecture, care-taking, etc etc The sad thing is that we have swaths of people with great skills and inclinations that should be going into these different segments but essentially can't because we collectively don't appreciate people doing these things.
In other words if you ask me our real jobs problem is that we don't have diverse enough "consumers" who appreciate the interesting niches different humans fill.
A bachelors degree is NOT (and should not be) a guarantee you will get a job. Yes, 30 years ago, a bachelors almost guaranteed you a job. That's because nobody else had one.
That's not really the case any more. More and more people are going to college.
Students know their psych degree is worthless when they graduate. They know it 2 years before they actually do graduate. They didn't go to college to become something, they went to college just because that's what people do now.
The people I know from high school that are successful now went to school to become something (doctors, lawyers, software developers, photographers). The ones that are waiters and waitresses just went to college and took classes.
I love this. The U.S. is a leader at everything. I live in the Philippines and everyone is crazy about getting cars. People in the U.S. now hate their cars. Countries such as China and India are churning out gobs of college graduates while people in the U.S. are beginning to question the value of a college education.
Anyone who sends out 4 resumes a day is obviously doing something wrong. As a web developer, I probably couldn't expect to land anything if I were to apply for 4 gigs every day. The problem with learning marketable skills in college is that apparently college students aren't learning how to market.
Get yourself out there, talk to people, network, make friends, build things! All these activities increase your surface luck area. Sending out resumes is doesn't really help with any of the above, though it probably doesn't hurt to send one out every once in a while if you are more targeted with it than sending out 4 a day.
I'd like to throw in the practicalities of survival income that many college applicants fail to appreciate because they are so used to living off their parents' dole. The following are steps that young people ignore until it's too late:
1. Before living your dream or doing "something you love", you have to make your survival income: the first $1500 for food, shelter, transportation. So where does this steady $1500 come from, and is working the necessary hours to make $1500 going to leave you with enough time to invest in that "dream"?
2. So before graduation, have you established your fall back $1500 contingency plan? Do you have a skill (vocational or otherwise) that you KNOW will bring you that monthly $1500? Step TWO is where I believe high school counseling has failed America's youth. Everybody should leave high school with a $1500 skill, whether that be bookeeping, welding, sales, waiting tables, cashier, etc. It is imperative that upon graduating high school, you are able to count on having survival wage skills.
3. Does your college major allow you to skip step two because it is in such demand that the employment rate for your industry is healthy? Back in the early 90's, CS graduates were not having an easy time and were considered the bottom of the totem pole among engineering majors (in my school they weren't even considered engineers, but rather a soft science more akin to biology, insultingly enough). Again, this is the fault of high school counselors who fail to make foresight an essential part of the planning process - this whole "major in what you love" crap just leaves graduates with a sense of disappointment when they are unemployable. Always temper "major in what you love" with the caveat "as long as you already have a skill to pay for food/shelter/travel".
4. What's your exit strategy from your survival job? Plan this every day as you're waiting tables (bartending, welding, dancing,...).
4. Knowing that high schools (both public and private) are too highbrow to ever consider vocational training for their top students, it's up to parents to fully prepare their children. When my son is old enough, his summers will be spent honing a vocational skill so that he will have an employable skill that any society will find useful such that if he wishes to travel the world, he can always pick up a local job should the circumstances demand it. Two come to mind: welding (easier and ubiquitously needed) or electrician (harder, but more lucrative).
This long rant is a part of my disatisfaction with the high school paradigm as currently constituted. The current paradigm is a crapshoot that ill prepares students for the rigors and realities of survival in a world that could care less if they were once a valedictorian or All-State track star. I have known many former high school heroes turned zeroes after college, and it's a fall from grace that their parents have never ever prepared them for because in their world, their kids will always be special.
67 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 65.1 ms ] thread"After grad job slump, big hiring is back at U.S. colleges"
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/04/01/us-economy-hiring-...
* Yea, this sounds like I am being an asshole, but really - the gap between how many developers are needed and how many are available is probably hundreds of thousands.
If the only demand right now was for people that could play a mean game of pick-up basketball, I'd be the one serving latte's.
Edit: You are right though. My little cousins that are coming up, even the ones that might not love programming, I am encouraging to learn what they can. Just be able to do the basics and it probably increases your worth as an employee by a large factor.
Mobile applications are putting a tremendous strain on the labor pool by demanding not just native developers, but people who can build out back-end APIs to support these applications. Rails is great because it can get your product out the door and expose what kinds of difficulties you'll have scaling it by providing real-world data on how it's used. It's fast to ship and an essential first step.
Most people without this background are starting from scratch, and if they have no determination, are soon lost.
After they get through that a quick course in Linux system administration with a refresher on the file system metaphor ("Its like Facebook... actually, no, it is wholly unique to your experience and every person you'll be working with has forgotten that twenty years ago it confused them, too, so expect not-so-good natured ribbing when you ask questions."), and how to use Google, StackOverflow, Github, and a version control system designed by a supergenius who doesn't care what your fingers think about getting bitten.
Sweet, that gets us to Hello World.
OK, now let's start doing useful work: meet your new friends, the letters A, P, I and the number "countless." Here's the Stripe API, go charge credit cards. Ugh, wait, you set the name value of the credit card text field in your HTML, which results in the credit card number getting written to production.log, thus causing us to fail PCI compliance. Don't you know anything?
Seriously: I think young college graduates would be very, very well served by skilling up on things that are commercially valuable rather than the blather that comprises a lot of what passes for education. That said, "just learn Ruby on Rails" perhaps does not appreciate how much of a gap there is between the bottom half of the US college-bound population and an engineer capable of commercially valuable work.
I agree. On the other hand, that's a relatively easy gap to fill.
A recent example: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/20/smoopa-state-trooper-ios-de...
The talent gap is big enough now that it doesn't take much for someone who is talented and motivated to get to a point where they are getting paid to continue to learn.
It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests.
If anything I think people get stuck because they don't follow their interests strongly enough.
Amen. Almost all the programmers I know (myself included) chose it as a career choice primarily because they found it interesting, not because the money was good. It just so turned out that what I (and probably a lot of other people here) wanted to do because they liked it also turns out to be a great career choice. We of all trades are the ones who should definitely not be telling people they need to make the tradeoff between doing something they love and something that will get them a job just because we happen to work in the intersection of both. That I get paid well to do something I love is truly amazing luck, and I (and, it seems, a good portion of the industry) tend to forget that all too often.
Social anthropology was interesting to study, but at some point I realized that actually embarking on a career as a social anthropologist would have been terrible for me. I like learning about different cultures, not studying a few scientifically. I can do that as an amateur.
When I sat down to decide what to do instead, I thought, a) I like making ASP pages for our newspaper, b) you can go into a lot of fields with a CS degree, and c) there is a clear path for making a tangible impact on society. It turns out, that was pretty sound reasoning (despite ASP pages being entirely different from CS): I've worked at Microsoft, in computational biology, and now at a publishing startup. I've never lacked for engagement (except toward the end of my time at MSFT), and the problems I'm able to solve in our economy are a larger part of that than the practice of the discipline itself.
Do they like it more than they'd like waiting tables or serving coffee?
"It's incredibly myopic for a people who are passionate about something that also happens be a reasonably well paying profession to tell other people that they shouldn't follow their interests."
I don't think anybody is telling them not to follow their interests. But if they're going to do that they should realize and accept that doing what they love may not pay well.
b) I never said CS didn't interest me — that "study what interests you" is bad advice doesn't mean to do the opposite. See my reply above for more explanation and a short description of my thought process.
Honestly, I think a lot of good would be accomplished by simply abolishing Bachelors degrees in subjects like these. You want to enter school to study anthropology? Great. Get ready to work your ass off for the next 8-12 years (and then struggle through the world of post-doc appointments and tenure track for the next 9-15 years after that). Oh, suddenly that doesn't sound so appealing? Well then, lets see what other major you might pick that will give you marketable skills after 4-5 years.
Young folks also take bigger risks, like doing music or art in the hope that they can make it. Add in an education system that rarely considers humility a value and realistic assessment of your skills and that's why people don't have marketable skills.
Mind you, there are places like the School of Music near me where for every incoming class they tell them that they won't get a job and most of them will not make it. It's really honest, but on wildly optimistic 18 year olds it doesn't have much impact.
If you feel the deep passion and need for bringing your ideas into the world, you will be successful.
The issue is motivation, you're either working towards doing great work or you aren't.
Most people aren't.
If you are passionate about being a screenplay writer, your talent will be drowned out in the deluge of other passionate and hardworking people also trying to be screenplay writers. For the vast majority of people, that kind of pursuit is better left as a hobby.
I think you (and I, and most of us here in HN) should count ourselves lucky that we happen to be passionate about programming. It's a tool that allows us to bring out ideas to life - anything from games to Mars rovers to businesses. People passionate about 19th century Russian literature don't have the luxury that we do because that's not going to earn them a living, no matter how great their passion may be.
This "they should pull themselves up by their bootstraps" notion is a little misguided, IMO. Instead, I'd say the screenplay writer should see if she can get herself to be at least passably comfortable in a marketable field, while leaving the writing for the weekends.
I'm 20 years old and I'm not in college nor do I plan to finish a degree (and if it wasn't for technology greats like Peter Thiel and PG advice, I might still be making a $100,000 mistake). I'm a fairly normal guy, I've been out of high school for 3 years now and I'm making slightly less than Bureau of Labor Statistic's 2010 Median Income for 'Software Developers', which I believe is more than enough to not be considered underemployed.
I see a lot of psychic pain in my peers about how hard work is or the labor market is so difficult, but to be frank the failures I see are directly attributable to plain laziness in a generation addicted to easy and inane pleasure.
I'm afraid young people of today are losing the real virtues of life like living with passion and taking responsibility for who you are. The ability to make something out of yourself and feeling joy in life is more alive today than in any other point in human history.
I see a lot of active rejection of the ideals of hacker culture, perhaps epitomized by my generation's obsession with video games (which, incidentally, I think could be argued as more detrimental to human wellness than even the most societally hated and destructive addictive stimulants like methamphetamine or cocaine)
This is really a shame, as one thing that comes out of hacker culture is a feeling of a real kind of exuberance about your work. Your work is yours to create. I've read the college labor statistics with some interest, even fear. But when I read them, I can't help but think that something essential about our generation and present technological zeitgeist is being left out. As if somehow our work is simply just a confluence of forces far beyond our control, framing college graduates as fragmented or marginalized which opens up a world of excuses.
From Chaitin to Stallman, when hackers talk about the meaning of work, they're not talking about abstract decisions, they're talking about doing something that has concrete consequences. It may be true that there are seven billion people on the planet, never the less, your work matters in material terms.
In short, I'd encourage any young person my age to not write themselves off as a victim of societal forces. It's always our decision who we are and what we do with our lives.
You are wise. Please write a book for our generation.
The non-creators, or the creators-in-high-entry-fields, are the ones losing jobs and opportunities. So yeah, if you have a CS-related degree and a passion for programming, you have amazing opportunities that should not be wasted.
Even still, maybe not everyone is a creator, but we are the result of 6 billion years of evolution -- act like it.
I think ZephyrP is blinded by his good fortune to not understand that: one, software developers are in crazy demand compared to, for example, "creative writers"; and two, that the economy IS quite bad right now and that this is a generalized extension of the unemployment problems across the country.
That having been said, when it comes to things like video games and drugs, I think Zephyr's point about "you have to make your own luck" logic is right (granted I have no idea why there is a pot-shot in there about video games). A person's work ethic is the root cause and "video games" and "drugs" are silly remarks for people that don't understand or see that there are plenty of us who can indulge and still live perfectly productive lives.
Further, I don't know of any indication that "video game" playing is trading off with employment. At all. On the other hand, there are probably thousands of statisticians and economists who could give you very specific reasons for the downturn in employment and show a trend that will probably make it's way across all segments of society including college grads.
Also, people need to understand that they need marketable degrees and they need to understand that employers are learning that all degrees are not equal and you ABSOLUTELY MUST have the skills that your degree assert and you must be able to communicate well and articulate why you deserve a job.
To be direct, I take this pot shot at video games because I see so many peers, filled with unbelievable intelligence, ambition and ideas waste everything they can give the world and themselves by spending their lives in front of video games. Video games are not bad, they are an interesting artform and provide unique cultural dialog. They are however something that people have moved beyond using to relax, contemplate or fill the boring spaces in their life, it becomes them.
As the other poster stated, because of their reward systems they can suck very intelligent people incredibly deep into what amounts to a terrible vice.
I have some friends that are extremely intelligent that fall into "addictive ruts" that I think cater to their ADD. In my opinion, it's embarrassing for them (the ones I have in mind) because they run their mouths about these big ideas and then play "Tiny Tower" on their iPad (which I suppose qualifies as a video game) and don't really excel as much as they could. I mean, they're doing fine for themselves but I'm floored at how I can write 500 lines of code for something and they've not moved from their chair/iPad.
At the end of it all though, I still don't see anything to make me believe that this is unique to our generation. Anything can and often is a distraction, whether it's video games, drinking, being out doors. I know people that fail classes they were more interested in their rec football game than studying. I don't think these things account for this enormous gap in employment.
I'm just imagining the line-graph of "overall unemployment in the US", on top of the linge-graph of "job availability in the US". I'm sure if you placed the graph of "college grads with jobs exiting college" you would find a very large correlation between these three graphs.
I'd be interested in reading this argument.
if you're an autistic supergenius there will always be code work, but some of us have to live in the real world you clearly do not inhabit.
You probably live in a bubble then. Yes, we all know these people, but they are the minority of those affected by the current economy. Unemployment is vastly higher in groups without college (or high school) degrees, meanwhile in many places there was barely a recession in the tech sector, and if there was, it was over very quickly.
I feel like every HN thread about a successful startup, or a reminder of the excellent salaries we get for doing things that we love, should include someone behind us, whispering in our ear that the majority of bankruptcies are from people with unexpected medical problems, 75% of whom had insurance, and that last year 20% of children in the US grew up in households making less than $22,000 for a family of four.
My insistence on refusing to believe that you are the result of forces beyond your control perhaps comes directly from this experience. Plenty of people told me that escaping my class was impossible because of the various capitalist systems of control, yet here I am today, hobnobbing with high HN society (kidding).
I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.
It's a pretty fundamental error to assume that you are a good sample for that kind of conclusion. My examples were deliberate. It's nice to think that exercise and eating right can avoid medical issues, and you certainly can influence your chances of needing 20 years of kidney treatments or needing early joint replacement. But the leading causes of death in the US are heart disease and cancer, even amongst the physically fit, and that still doesn't preclude that latent heart condition, or getting hit by a car while on your bike, and suddenly facing hospital bills of tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Your life is yours to create in many of the same ways that your startup's success is yours to create. You just have to make sure you define success as including adapting to and (most importantly) living with failure. Meanwhile, don't assume those that are hurting right now didn't dream or work hard enough; far better to start from the assumption that in addition to those qualities you also had good timing and incredible luck.
However, I spent the majority of my youth in New Mexico, with close to the lowest public education ratings in the country.
Outside of that, I guess we're simply in fundamental disagreement about the nature of success. Sure, doing groundbreaking work might be impossible or at least very unlikely for the average person, but I believe that anyone can be successful (in a pragmatic sense) for the same reason I believe in the central limit theorem. The most successful scientists are not necessarily the smartest, but the ones who publish the most -- the same can be said of any discipline. In short, unrelenting persistence is key, and depth always beats breadth.
I'm willing to concede that maybe I'm young and dumb and haven't been jaded by the world yet. Maybe I'm Malcom Gladwelling myself into thinking that there's some rhyme or reason behind the (personally qualified) success I feel I've achieved. Still, I am of the firm conviction that if you put limits on yourself, it will spread from your life into your work. There are no real limitations to what you can do. There may be temporary periods of plateaus or even deep valleys, but you can transcend them. I have seen this too many times to declare our ultimate fate and legacy of our work entirely accidental.
Then those people are idiots. However, the statistics don't lie. It is very, very difficult. It's called a cycle of poverty for a reason. Having said that, I commend your passion and attitude as someone who came from a family of four well below the poverty line. It really is key to getting anywhere.
> I'll accept that our medical system imposes undue stress upon those within it, but equally so, it's tough to not concede that many medical problems are ultimately self-induced through poor diet and exercise habits spanning over many years.
This is true, but it's only in the US where medical crises lead to financial ruin, increasingly so with the revised (personal) Bankruptcy laws of the last few years. Personal responsibility is something I think everyone can get behind, but the system is plain broken, and that is the far bigger problem.
> I'll reiterate -- your life is yours to create.
I fundamentally agree with this, but it dangerously ignores certain realities and systemic problems in our society. Be very careful of adopting the attitude "well I made it, so therefore everyone should be able to." Everyone's individual circumstances are different and there's more random luck involved then anyone cares to admit.
Ebay used to do the same thing when it would report that x00,000 people sold on Ebay "full time or part time". Kind of a big difference so not that meaningful a stat.
Presumably that ended with the G.I. bill, but no one particularly minded because factory jobs were plentiful.
So when baby boomers of yesteryear look back at their college experience, and try and figure out what they got out of it, can they point to stellar education that they use every day? If they majored in Communications, probably not. Do their jobs require collegiate-level knowledge or skills? If they're in marketing or sales, probably not.
So they remember that they smoked their first joint there, and met that one foreign kid from Uzbekistan, and throw in the first awakenings of independent thought that come from living on one's lonesome for the first time, and call it a "cultural experience of self-discovery."
I malign communications and the so-called liberal arts a bit, but that's not completely deserved. If done right, they actually seem about on par with mathematics in terms of usefulness---abstract and useless at first, but a fantastic base for further study, providing that that further study occurs.
How many dev jobs do you think require, say, integrals or compiler design?
"About 1.5 million, or 53.6 percent, of bachelor's degree-holders under the age of 25 last year were jobless or underemployed, the highest share in at least 11 years. In 2000, the share was at a low of 41 percent, before the dot-com bust erased job gains for college graduates in the telecommunications and IT fields."
Headline in 2000: "Even with incredible economic performance, nearly 1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed"
Not to get in the way of the AP's narrative and everyone's self-congratulations for picking a profitable major.
The problem is that everyone has natural competencies, personalities and cognitive methods and only a relatively small sliver have the type that will fit software development. If you think I'm saying were special, I am not. Every discipline has a relatively small sliver of people who will be naturally inclined to do it and enjoy it.
The real problem is us... meaning society. We currently aren't culturally organized in a manner to take advantage of everyone's abilities and part of the main reasoning I'd say is a lack of diversity in terms of what is appreciated and rewarded. From my limited perspective our culture seems to have a maniacal focus on money and a growing monoculture that is focused on how to become a millionaire at whatever cost. Right now software development seems to be a good way to get rich partly due to our monoculture's love of video games, apps, business processes etc. so our industry gets green lit for now so to say.
The problem is that there is a lot of important stuff to us humans all living a better life that the majority falsely considers unimportant and lowly for the most part because of its current low correlation to the almighty profit ... things like culture, art, anthropology, farming, geology, architecture, care-taking, etc etc The sad thing is that we have swaths of people with great skills and inclinations that should be going into these different segments but essentially can't because we collectively don't appreciate people doing these things.
In other words if you ask me our real jobs problem is that we don't have diverse enough "consumers" who appreciate the interesting niches different humans fill.
That's not really the case any more. More and more people are going to college.
Students know their psych degree is worthless when they graduate. They know it 2 years before they actually do graduate. They didn't go to college to become something, they went to college just because that's what people do now.
The people I know from high school that are successful now went to school to become something (doctors, lawyers, software developers, photographers). The ones that are waiters and waitresses just went to college and took classes.
Anyone who sends out 4 resumes a day is obviously doing something wrong. As a web developer, I probably couldn't expect to land anything if I were to apply for 4 gigs every day. The problem with learning marketable skills in college is that apparently college students aren't learning how to market.
Get yourself out there, talk to people, network, make friends, build things! All these activities increase your surface luck area. Sending out resumes is doesn't really help with any of the above, though it probably doesn't hurt to send one out every once in a while if you are more targeted with it than sending out 4 a day.
1. Before living your dream or doing "something you love", you have to make your survival income: the first $1500 for food, shelter, transportation. So where does this steady $1500 come from, and is working the necessary hours to make $1500 going to leave you with enough time to invest in that "dream"?
2. So before graduation, have you established your fall back $1500 contingency plan? Do you have a skill (vocational or otherwise) that you KNOW will bring you that monthly $1500? Step TWO is where I believe high school counseling has failed America's youth. Everybody should leave high school with a $1500 skill, whether that be bookeeping, welding, sales, waiting tables, cashier, etc. It is imperative that upon graduating high school, you are able to count on having survival wage skills.
3. Does your college major allow you to skip step two because it is in such demand that the employment rate for your industry is healthy? Back in the early 90's, CS graduates were not having an easy time and were considered the bottom of the totem pole among engineering majors (in my school they weren't even considered engineers, but rather a soft science more akin to biology, insultingly enough). Again, this is the fault of high school counselors who fail to make foresight an essential part of the planning process - this whole "major in what you love" crap just leaves graduates with a sense of disappointment when they are unemployable. Always temper "major in what you love" with the caveat "as long as you already have a skill to pay for food/shelter/travel".
4. What's your exit strategy from your survival job? Plan this every day as you're waiting tables (bartending, welding, dancing,...).
4. Knowing that high schools (both public and private) are too highbrow to ever consider vocational training for their top students, it's up to parents to fully prepare their children. When my son is old enough, his summers will be spent honing a vocational skill so that he will have an employable skill that any society will find useful such that if he wishes to travel the world, he can always pick up a local job should the circumstances demand it. Two come to mind: welding (easier and ubiquitously needed) or electrician (harder, but more lucrative).
This long rant is a part of my disatisfaction with the high school paradigm as currently constituted. The current paradigm is a crapshoot that ill prepares students for the rigors and realities of survival in a world that could care less if they were once a valedictorian or All-State track star. I have known many former high school heroes turned zeroes after college, and it's a fall from grace that their parents have never ever prepared them for because in their world, their kids will always be special.