One of the things people don't like to talk about is how the economy handles the oversupply of college graduates: use bright line rules to get people out of the job market. Two candidates, a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not. The former has a scarlet letter on his resume, and people with lesser credentials from the next class will be hired over him.
The practical effect of this is to normalize the hiring pipeline quickly after a recession. But it has the effect of just cutting huge numbers of people, who happened to be unlucky to graduate in a down year, out of the market entirely. If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.
> "a C/O 2012 and a C/O 2013 graduate should be fungible from the perspective of a recruiter, but they're not."
Assuming the 2012 grad doesn't have a year's experience, you don't think that the pool of those who have been passed over by hiring managers for the past year (as they presumably have) might be slightly less rich than the "fresh" pool of graduates from this year?
If you were a hiring manager, would you spend your time sorting through them, or would you work your way through the new class?
The 2013 pool as a whole would be richer, but if you're in a situation where hiring was down dramatically in 2012 but picked up for 2013, then there will be candidates in 2012 that are better than the ones you would have to hire if you only limited yourself to 2013.
You can see this very clearly in numbers-driving hiring pipelines in finance, consulting, and law. This year's 50th percentile candidates are getting hired by the big companies, while last year's 70th percentile candidates are pushed entirely out of the market. You see the same phenomenon across the job market, though, just in less easily quantifiable ways.
>If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.
This is not my perception at all.
I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough.
If you are willing to work for retail wages, the standards go way down, and there are more employers than you think who want to hire programmers for little more than retail wages.
The deal is that you work for shit wages for a while; if you are good, you can then take that experience (remember, your title was 'programmer' or something) and use it to get a real job, as now you have X years experience working as a programmer, even if you got paid absolute shit during that time.
> I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough.
Article took way too long to get to the crux of the problem:
1. Choose your majors carefully and plan your career early - A degree in communications doesn't really make you employable. . 2. These people aren't willing to relocate to a less than desirable area to get that first opportunity
So, let's say that you're getting poor grades in pre-med. You're already 30,000 in debt. Is it better to continue in a degree where you have no chance of further advancement (no medical school will take you), drop out and have absolutely no career leads and a pile of debt, or get a second rate degree?
This is the problem -- we've raised the bar for failure so high because of the cost of going to college. We've made it so that college degrees of any kind are a requirement to advance into white collar work. What's the solution when someone can't hack it in STEM?
Sunk costs are sunk costs. You quit and move on to something that doesn't incur more debt. One option is joining the military where you can get real-world experience and they'll pay a significant portion of future education. Another is taking base courses at a significantly cheaper community college until you understand what you want to do and whether you have the natural ability for it.
The core problem is taking on 30k of debt without the commitment and/or natural ability necessary to complete the degree.
I 100% agree you're paying for the signalling. But it's not an auction. Unless by auction you mean "the seller gets the government to pay upfront any price the seller chooses, and the government and buyer (student) get to work it out later as they see fit".
Am I the only one who thinks that we reached a point of nearly maximum efficiency? Think about it, that would explain everything.
The article clearly states that employers aren't interested in college graduates that finished two years ago if they didn't gather experience in the meantime. They'll happily hire the new kids straight out of college.
If they can afford to pass over to thousands of graduates then it means they're just not needed. Even the latest crop of graduates is having a hard time finding a job. As I see it, there's no shortage of graduates (STEM of otherwise), conversely, there's an oversupply of graduates.
A while ago I read an article that claimed that lost jobs aren't coming back and this only means, again, that many jobs and (thus workers) are not needed anymore. We can do more (or the same) with less. College graduates are taking jobs once reserved to high school graduates and dropouts, thus pushing these last groups into the ranks of unemployment. What if the global economic recession was just what was needed to cut useless jobs and turn companies into nimble and extremely efficient machines?
It's not really efficiency, it's a lack of growth. Efficiency (producing more with each worker) doesn't itself reduce the demand for workers, because the economy usually just produces more in the aggregate to compensate. What's reducing the demand for workers is that it's just not attractive to expand within the U.S. If you've got some capital, you're going to get a much bigger return on that money in a less developed place like China or Brazil than you will here. There is just less competition and consumer expectations are lower.
I would be with you if goods production somehow halted and we weren't able to get our hand on those very goods:
less workers->less production->scarcity->unsatisfied demand->soaring prices
that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.
I'm not saying that there aren't efficiency improvements happening. The economy is clearly producing as much as it did before with fewer workers. But efficiency improvements reduce production costs, which, in a competitive market, tends to be reflected as reduced prices. But when prices go down, quantity demanded goes up, so efficiency improvements tend to result in more overall production. I.e. the fact that companies need fewer workers per unit produced does not mean that they need fewer workers overall. We're not seeing that in the existing economy. Growth is non-existent, so companies are using efficiency improvements to cut workforces instead of using efficiency improvements to expand production while maintaining or growing the size of their workforces.
Part of this is because of wealth distribution, and part of it is because of a lack of imagination.
When businesses use productivity enhancements to cut labor requirements without increasing price or output, then all the money saved by this accumulates to the business. That results in large cash surpluses, which we're seeing right now (Apple has $40B in cash and short-term investments). In order to capture and redistribute that cash, the rest of the population needs to produce products that appeal to the firms who have the cash - but there's relatively little of value that an individual or small business owner can supply to a giant company like Apple.
In theory, cash is non-productive and so companies should have an incentive to re-invest this money into new products to make more cash. However, that requires that they see market opportunities that have a chance of succeeding. Since consumers have so little cash, that's a tough chore right now; the bar for a new consumer product that people will actually spend money on is quite high. And so companies never make the investments that generate employment that give people cash to spend on the products the companies are investing in. Catch-22.
I think that the current seed-funding boom is a symptom of this. Cash piles up in the financial markets, some of it ends up with venture capitalists, they spray it across many little proof-of-concept ventures to figure out what the next big thing is. And ultimately this is a very good thing, because it's typically fear of irrelevancy that makes big companies spend money on investments anyway. It takes a long time to work its way out, though, because you can't just wave a magic wand and have a hit product.
"In order to capture and redistribute that cash, the rest of the population needs to produce products that appeal to the firms who have the cash - but there's relatively little of value that an individual or small business owner can supply to a giant company like Apple."
If Apple has $40B in cash and no productive way to invest it at an above market return, the only sensible course of action is to distribute it all as a dividend.
We've reached a point where the limit of economic growth is no longer knowledge workers - it's entrepreneurs. After WW2, knowledge workers were the bottle neck, college degrees guaranteed jobs, and institutions, grants and MBA schools sprung up everywhere.
The key for new grads is understanding the supply and demand curve. Your career prospects are better if 1. your skills are in short supply or 2. if they're in great demand or both. When there's a glut of talent and it's cheap, form companies.
I think the key here is "without taking advantage of other opportunities". If you're unemployed for a couple years and you don't do anything, then you're signaling something very important to an employer: passivity. A fresh grad with no experience has no experience, but there's also no information to indicate that they won't be a good employee. A two-year unemployed worker has no experience and has two years worth of unsuccessful choices. Which would you hire?
The way to beat that cycle is to do something - other than looking for jobs - with that time. I've got gaps of 4 months and 6 months on my resume (actually more like a year and a half if you count a "startup" as unemployment, but I don't), and it's never been a problem - because I was finishing up the rewrite of a 100,000 user website with the first gap, and open-sourcing the remnants of my startup with the second. I've got friends with 2-3 years of funemployment on their resumes, but they did things like starting a non-profit in Vietnam or Peace Corps work in Peru, and ended up at the very tops of their fields. Unemployment by itself doesn't result in poor career prospects, but not going after what you want and seizing the opportunities that are available to you does.
I agree, I didn't sense a big revelation in this piece so I stopped reading after I got this was a sympathy piece about young kids who expect to have a gold-plated career handed to them because they showed up at a college recruiting session.
Don't you know that on Hacker News the answer to every social problem is either make everyone code up a massively-successful website or become an engineer in the bay area?
Just start a nonprofit in Vietnam! Surely this kind of opportunity is available to a construction worker who attended Kennesaw State. And if you do spend your years of unemployment working for free - assuming you're not done in by the many physical and psychological stresses of long-term unemployment - you too can snag a coveted $35,000/year call center job, just like the other kid in the article.
Look, this article is about basically unskilled workers with degrees from bottom-tier universities in useless subjects. That's their problem - they have little to no economic value to anyone. All the volunteering and hustle in the world is not going to turn them into anything other than exploitable labor to be had at bargain-basement wages.
>But the end result was disheartening: Mr. Wells was told, he said, that company policy required him to have at least two years of experience in the field before he could be hired.
The interesting bit here is that it's a transparent, obvious lie. If it were the truth, he wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place.
I mean, his lack of experience undoubtedly hurt him, but if you get the interview, (and if a 'high level recruiter' meets you in person, it's an interview.) nothing that is on your resume disqualifies you.
True, as someone who's done a bit of hiring, if you're meeting someone, you're still considering them as possible - you don't waste your time many times before getting pickier. Two years isn't a hard and fast rule - it never will be - you meet a brilliant candidate with 23 months and you won't hire them? Of course not. It's just a proxy. We want someone with about the skills that you should have acquired in two years.
We've all met people who have those skills with much less experience - and we'd hire them. Yes it's an excuse in a way to say then that this is why you weren't hired. Not a lie as such though - just the "reason".
I agree - but that's part of the problem with this article, as well as similar articles like it. The people they interview seem to genuinely believe that they were rejected because they didn't have a literal 24-months of experience, rather than simply lacking the skills (of which experience-time is just a proxy).
If we started communicating to people that they're not good enough for the job, maybe we would have fewer people running around complaining about how unfair everything is.
>If we started communicating to people that they're not good enough for the job, maybe we would have fewer people running around complaining about how unfair everything is.
I don't think you are good enough for this job
vs.
You are not good enough for this job.
The former is a decision that I (and anyone with hiring authority) is qualified to make; the latter is not.
Hiring is hard and most people aren't very good at it, so the opinion of one hiring manager (while being a valid reason for the hiring decision that manager makes) does not mean you are actually unqualified.
The other thing, here? Just like there is no incentive for a company to ever give a negative reference, there is no incentive for a company to ever tell you why you were rejected.
That's the thing, If I don't hire you, well, I can tell you the real reason, sure, and I feel a lot better because I'm being honest and transparent. Real reasons, for me, include the following
1. I planned poorly or business conditions changed, and it turns out there isn't actually enough money to hire someone.
2. I don't believe you are smart enough/ capable of learning what I will have to teach you to do the job.
3. I don't believe you are trustworthy enough. Most of the jobs I have, well, involve the ability to destroy me completely. (which is a problem, yes... but it's not an uncommon problem, for sysadmin jobs.)
Upon hearing either of those reasons, it's perfectly natural for the applicant to be angry and/or defensive. 1. is quite clearly my own fault; I'm wasting the applicants time through my incompetence, so obviously, that's going to be irritating. 2. is where my feedback could actually help the applicant, maybe? but even there, it's hard. It's hard to be told you aren't good enough, and many people react badly on that level... and sometimes their defensiveness is justified; evaluating people is hard and even really good hiring managers are quite often wrong. Hell, different hiring managers look for different things; One guy says to act more confident and take control of the situation; the other says the opposite. These decisions are often made on 'gut' (which is another issue... but it is what it is) and sometimes, well, the hiring manager does not understand him/herself what is going on.
Makes me feel bad, my SO has a communications degree, although jobs would be easy to acquire in Singapore, but we're planning to move live together in Europe..
Singapore has recently made work visas much harder to acquire. But I agree, it still is a decent place to live, and the economy is doing better than Europe. (I moved here from Britain last year.)
OH, I did work there, I've left :)
My point was missed I suspect. I said it's easy for Crap-degree holders to get job in Singapore, vs the rest of the world.
newsflash : University is not job training (except for professional programs like engineering, physical therapy, etc) ... University is _education_
I think what we are (re)discovering is that _education_ is a luxury, for the wealthy class. What the bottom 90% of the country needs is job training, not education. Or at least job training _first_ ... and education as a hobby.
Germany is getting it right: http://goo.gl/aRhvk (recent article from The Economist). They have a society where what we refer to pejoratively as "vocational training" is a valued segment of society, and many kids coming out of school gladly and enthusiastically choose that path instead of the academic track.
Somehow in north america we have adopted a culture where going and getting an honours degree in English Lit from Yale at $240,000 USD (4 x $60,000/yr) is valued more than going to college and becoming a licensed electrician or plumber, for example.
Like I said... education is for the (already) wealthy, privileged class. It's time that the middle class stop pretending otherwise. All we are doing is getting ourselves into debt. Instead we should train for jobs. Get educated in your spare time. University is not job training.
I think you're broadly right but your specific example is a bit off. An unexceptional English lit major at Yale will walk into any number of prestigious and potentially lucrative jobs in publishing, finance, consulting, nonprofit work, politics, etc, whereas an unexceptional English lit major - or even a business major - from Expensive Second-Tier Private U will have all those doors slammed in her face. It's the latter group whose expectations need adjusting.
Yeah my example is off because anyone who goes to Yale is already wealthy in the first place.
On a related rant ... obviously there is no real difference between a Yale education and a state school education ... academically speaking. What you get at Yale is the social network and the "badge" ... so (as you say) you can walk into any job on Wall St., Publishing, Consulting, etc, and have an immediate "in"... just because of the badge and the social connections.
The idea that there us upward mobility in today's society is a farce.
I understand this situation all too well. I quit my software development job in 2011 to finish my computer science degree. After a few months of enjoying my time off, a former boss of mine recruits me to do part-time development work for him. My current position pays extremely well, but it is unfulfilling maintenance work. So, while I'm grateful to have it, with graduation approaching I've started seriously looking for jobs.
So far, it has been very difficult to even get call backs from recruiters. My suspicion is that it looks bad to potential employers when somebody goes back to school in their late 20s (or later).
Going back to school does not automatically make you "look bad" at all. It shows your commitment to education and to finish what you started. There has to be some other reason you are not being called back. Maybe it's a bad resume, or your targeting is not good, heck, as we have seen in previous posts last week here, it may be that your name is "Kim"! (Look it up), or its your location or skill set presentation.
I find it hard to believe you cannot find a rewarding job in software these days! Assuming you are good, it has to be your presentation (in whichever format, paper, voice or email).
51 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 62.5 ms ] threadThe practical effect of this is to normalize the hiring pipeline quickly after a recession. But it has the effect of just cutting huge numbers of people, who happened to be unlucky to graduate in a down year, out of the market entirely. If you don't get a job a year or so after graduation in your major field, you probably never will.
Assuming the 2012 grad doesn't have a year's experience, you don't think that the pool of those who have been passed over by hiring managers for the past year (as they presumably have) might be slightly less rich than the "fresh" pool of graduates from this year?
If you were a hiring manager, would you spend your time sorting through them, or would you work your way through the new class?
You can see this very clearly in numbers-driving hiring pipelines in finance, consulting, and law. This year's 50th percentile candidates are getting hired by the big companies, while last year's 70th percentile candidates are pushed entirely out of the market. You see the same phenomenon across the job market, though, just in less easily quantifiable ways.
This is not my perception at all.
I got my job without a degree by being willing to work for pay I was qualified for while doing a job that I wasn't qualified for, but that I was able to 'figure out' well enough.
If you are willing to work for retail wages, the standards go way down, and there are more employers than you think who want to hire programmers for little more than retail wages.
The deal is that you work for shit wages for a while; if you are good, you can then take that experience (remember, your title was 'programmer' or something) and use it to get a real job, as now you have X years experience working as a programmer, even if you got paid absolute shit during that time.
This is precisely what I'm hoping to do now.
1. Choose your majors carefully and plan your career early - A degree in communications doesn't really make you employable. . 2. These people aren't willing to relocate to a less than desirable area to get that first opportunity
This is the problem -- we've raised the bar for failure so high because of the cost of going to college. We've made it so that college degrees of any kind are a requirement to advance into white collar work. What's the solution when someone can't hack it in STEM?
The core problem is taking on 30k of debt without the commitment and/or natural ability necessary to complete the degree.
The article clearly states that employers aren't interested in college graduates that finished two years ago if they didn't gather experience in the meantime. They'll happily hire the new kids straight out of college. If they can afford to pass over to thousands of graduates then it means they're just not needed. Even the latest crop of graduates is having a hard time finding a job. As I see it, there's no shortage of graduates (STEM of otherwise), conversely, there's an oversupply of graduates. A while ago I read an article that claimed that lost jobs aren't coming back and this only means, again, that many jobs and (thus workers) are not needed anymore. We can do more (or the same) with less. College graduates are taking jobs once reserved to high school graduates and dropouts, thus pushing these last groups into the ranks of unemployment. What if the global economic recession was just what was needed to cut useless jobs and turn companies into nimble and extremely efficient machines?
that simply isn't happening. It seems to me that organizations that previously employed tens thousands of workers are now doing just fine with way less than that.
When businesses use productivity enhancements to cut labor requirements without increasing price or output, then all the money saved by this accumulates to the business. That results in large cash surpluses, which we're seeing right now (Apple has $40B in cash and short-term investments). In order to capture and redistribute that cash, the rest of the population needs to produce products that appeal to the firms who have the cash - but there's relatively little of value that an individual or small business owner can supply to a giant company like Apple.
In theory, cash is non-productive and so companies should have an incentive to re-invest this money into new products to make more cash. However, that requires that they see market opportunities that have a chance of succeeding. Since consumers have so little cash, that's a tough chore right now; the bar for a new consumer product that people will actually spend money on is quite high. And so companies never make the investments that generate employment that give people cash to spend on the products the companies are investing in. Catch-22.
I think that the current seed-funding boom is a symptom of this. Cash piles up in the financial markets, some of it ends up with venture capitalists, they spray it across many little proof-of-concept ventures to figure out what the next big thing is. And ultimately this is a very good thing, because it's typically fear of irrelevancy that makes big companies spend money on investments anyway. It takes a long time to work its way out, though, because you can't just wave a magic wand and have a hit product.
If Apple has $40B in cash and no productive way to invest it at an above market return, the only sensible course of action is to distribute it all as a dividend.
Growth is the same as it was before the recession (about 2.5%).
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GDPC1
Efficiency improvements have resulted in more overall production.
The key for new grads is understanding the supply and demand curve. Your career prospects are better if 1. your skills are in short supply or 2. if they're in great demand or both. When there's a glut of talent and it's cheap, form companies.
The way to beat that cycle is to do something - other than looking for jobs - with that time. I've got gaps of 4 months and 6 months on my resume (actually more like a year and a half if you count a "startup" as unemployment, but I don't), and it's never been a problem - because I was finishing up the rewrite of a 100,000 user website with the first gap, and open-sourcing the remnants of my startup with the second. I've got friends with 2-3 years of funemployment on their resumes, but they did things like starting a non-profit in Vietnam or Peace Corps work in Peru, and ended up at the very tops of their fields. Unemployment by itself doesn't result in poor career prospects, but not going after what you want and seizing the opportunities that are available to you does.
Look, this article is about basically unskilled workers with degrees from bottom-tier universities in useless subjects. That's their problem - they have little to no economic value to anyone. All the volunteering and hustle in the world is not going to turn them into anything other than exploitable labor to be had at bargain-basement wages.
The interesting bit here is that it's a transparent, obvious lie. If it were the truth, he wouldn't have gotten the interview in the first place.
I mean, his lack of experience undoubtedly hurt him, but if you get the interview, (and if a 'high level recruiter' meets you in person, it's an interview.) nothing that is on your resume disqualifies you.
So if it was clear on his resume/communication that he had less than 2 years experience, the "we require 2 years" is an excuse, not the real reason.
If the recruiter knew he lacked the experience, and if the experience was a hard, unyielding barrier, then the recruiter would not even bother.
We've all met people who have those skills with much less experience - and we'd hire them. Yes it's an excuse in a way to say then that this is why you weren't hired. Not a lie as such though - just the "reason".
If we started communicating to people that they're not good enough for the job, maybe we would have fewer people running around complaining about how unfair everything is.
I don't think you are good enough for this job
vs.
You are not good enough for this job.
The former is a decision that I (and anyone with hiring authority) is qualified to make; the latter is not.
Hiring is hard and most people aren't very good at it, so the opinion of one hiring manager (while being a valid reason for the hiring decision that manager makes) does not mean you are actually unqualified.
That's the thing, If I don't hire you, well, I can tell you the real reason, sure, and I feel a lot better because I'm being honest and transparent. Real reasons, for me, include the following
1. I planned poorly or business conditions changed, and it turns out there isn't actually enough money to hire someone.
2. I don't believe you are smart enough/ capable of learning what I will have to teach you to do the job.
3. I don't believe you are trustworthy enough. Most of the jobs I have, well, involve the ability to destroy me completely. (which is a problem, yes... but it's not an uncommon problem, for sysadmin jobs.)
Upon hearing either of those reasons, it's perfectly natural for the applicant to be angry and/or defensive. 1. is quite clearly my own fault; I'm wasting the applicants time through my incompetence, so obviously, that's going to be irritating. 2. is where my feedback could actually help the applicant, maybe? but even there, it's hard. It's hard to be told you aren't good enough, and many people react badly on that level... and sometimes their defensiveness is justified; evaluating people is hard and even really good hiring managers are quite often wrong. Hell, different hiring managers look for different things; One guy says to act more confident and take control of the situation; the other says the opposite. These decisions are often made on 'gut' (which is another issue... but it is what it is) and sometimes, well, the hiring manager does not understand him/herself what is going on.
This is before any of the legal bullshit.
I think what we are (re)discovering is that _education_ is a luxury, for the wealthy class. What the bottom 90% of the country needs is job training, not education. Or at least job training _first_ ... and education as a hobby.
Germany is getting it right: http://goo.gl/aRhvk (recent article from The Economist). They have a society where what we refer to pejoratively as "vocational training" is a valued segment of society, and many kids coming out of school gladly and enthusiastically choose that path instead of the academic track.
Somehow in north america we have adopted a culture where going and getting an honours degree in English Lit from Yale at $240,000 USD (4 x $60,000/yr) is valued more than going to college and becoming a licensed electrician or plumber, for example.
Like I said... education is for the (already) wealthy, privileged class. It's time that the middle class stop pretending otherwise. All we are doing is getting ourselves into debt. Instead we should train for jobs. Get educated in your spare time. University is not job training.
On a related rant ... obviously there is no real difference between a Yale education and a state school education ... academically speaking. What you get at Yale is the social network and the "badge" ... so (as you say) you can walk into any job on Wall St., Publishing, Consulting, etc, and have an immediate "in"... just because of the badge and the social connections.
The idea that there us upward mobility in today's society is a farce.
So far, it has been very difficult to even get call backs from recruiters. My suspicion is that it looks bad to potential employers when somebody goes back to school in their late 20s (or later).
I find it hard to believe you cannot find a rewarding job in software these days! Assuming you are good, it has to be your presentation (in whichever format, paper, voice or email).