

How twentysomethings are coping with the recession. - Poleris
http://www.slate.com/id/2214712/

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jdminhbg
Classic Slate-reader cocoon types:

1) Works for a library/museum-centric non-profit (degree unknown)

2) Works for a political campaign, expensive degree from private university
(BU)

3) Works for local government (degree unknown)

4) Left job with architecture firm due to move, current job unknown

5) No job, MA in English, can't afford to get desired PhD in
Literature/Women's Studies (sob!)

So basically, not a single person (bar possibly #4) willing to get their hands
dirty in the private-sector business world. Also, not a single male. What
exactly are we supposed to take from this?

~~~
vaksel
That if you want to get laid, it helps to major in liberal arts?

~~~
lsb
Not necessarily. Just start conversations with a low impedance to join. That's
why a common greeting is "Nice day, isn't it", instead of, "I was debugging
some comonads in Haskell the other day".

~~~
nostrademons
But comonads are so much more fun!

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walesmd
This 25 year old is enjoying a new high paying job (that he absolutely loves)
after leaving the military. After one month of employment we've eliminated
half our credit card debt and will tackle the rest over the course of the next
six months. We're currently shopping for our second vehicle and educating
ourselves on the VA Home Loan process as we intend to buy a home at the end of
the year.

~~~
nostrademons
27 here, working at Google and loving it, saving close to 80% of my monthly
take-home pay. Debt free, with investments relatively intact.

However, I've got a friend from college (history major) who's about to turn
26. She's ensconced in grad school now, but previously had a string of
temp/secretarial jobs. She wrote this lately:

"What's really got me bugged is the possibility that I might do everything
right, I might have been a good student, good friend, good worker, good
citizen, and still might not ever have a home or a family. That I might have
done everything a "successful" person does, yet end up with none of the things
I truly wanted most. It's not that I have a specific image of that "picket-
fence" life. I'm not worried about "having it all"; it's the fact that I might
not be able to swing any of it.

"If I knew this in high school, I'd have done more drugs."

It seems like one's success in today's world is directly proportional to your
ability to believe that all your elders are lying to you. I was always pretty
contemptuous of authority, so I did the end run around all my teachers and
school administrators and taught myself stuff - stuff that was useful outside
of school, not just inside the academic bubble.

Perhaps this is as it should be - I remember in one upper-level physics class,
the professor said "You should be getting most of this out of the textbook"
and a student helpfully added "Or in class." The teacher said, "No. If you're
only learning from class, you're in trouble. I should be mostly superfluous."
The students were basically flabbergasted.

But if your success is proportional to how much you believe authority figures
are lying to you, what does that mean for the authority figures? "Fool me
once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." What happens to the social
structure when people realize their leaders are basically lying, cheating, and
stealing from them?

~~~
endtime
This is a more banal explanation, but majoring in something more useful than
history might have helped. My sister is about to graduate with a BA in history
and she can't find a job either.

Put another way, I study CS and I've never had a hard time finding work...and
I don't owe it to mistrust of my elders.

~~~
nostrademons
When I was looking at schools, the advice I got was "Just get a degree. It
doesn't matter what it's in - employers like liberal arts as much as technical
fields because it shows that you know how to think. While if you get a degree
in something specific like engineering, your job will probably end up
outsourced to India."

Luckily, I happened to like computers anyway, and learned quite a bit of
programming on my own. Plus, by sophomore year I'd basically figured out this
was bullshit and employers really _do_ care about concrete skills. But had I
not been interested in programming as a hobby, things could've turned out very
differently for me. I considered majoring in sociology, after all. ;-)

~~~
menloparkbum
_"Just get a degree. It doesn't matter what it's in"_

I wonder who has a better chance of getting a job at Google: a history major
from Stanford or a CS major from , say, CSU Chico?

~~~
nostrademons
That's an interesting point. I suspect it depends a lot upon their concrete
programming skills as demonstrated in the interview. It's funny how my first
reaction - even as someone who always says "Your degree doesn't define you,
and talent will find jobs no matter where you went to school" - was to assume
that the Stanford history major is much smarter than the CSU Chico CS major,
and just happened to pick the wrong major. But that's not necessarily true:
maybe the guy from Chico is a Zawinski-class programming genius that happened
to grow up in a family with no money and no college expectations. The point of
the interview is to tease out circumstances like that so talented people from
bad situations can rise to the top anyway.

It's also interesting because I know some Amherst history majors that I could
never imagine getting a job at Google. But I also know an Amherst Asian
Languages & Civ major who _does_ work at Google, albeit in a non-technical
position. Yet I don't know anyone at Google from a CSU: my friends here are
from Rice/Brown/Brown/Amherst/Stanford/Berkeley/
Stanford/UChic/Cornell/Berkeley/Berkeley/ CMU/Duke/UCSD.

~~~
smokey_the_bear
I got into Google from Iowa State. But then, I was an employee referral
because of someone I met interning at Microsoft. I don't think I would have
gotten the Microsoft interview coming from Iowa State if I wasn't a girl.
Microsoft hired four interns from Iowa State that year, all female.

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wizard_2
This 25 year old is keeping his day job (server admin/help desk) with a
friendly boss who doesn't mind him working after work. I'm doing
business/computer consulting after 5pm and on the weekends and am currently
involved in a few projects for websites and small business server
infrastructure. I've got very little credit card debt (under 2k - mostly
operating expenses) and even though I never finished college I still have
about 8k in student loans but should have them paid off in a few years. I save
about 30% and have recently had to apply some of that to take on some extra
family related expenses as my folks have been hit a lot harder then I have.

I can't say I'm enjoying the economic climate and watching all layoffs (At my
day job and with my friends and family) but Its motivated me to take some
hobbies and work that normally took a lot of energy and figure out how to do
more with them. I can now go from sales/brainstorming to invoicing a lot
faster and easier then I could even just a few months ago. I think that will
pay off in the long run.

Also, saving now, and putting into my 401k and roth/IRA's should help a lot
when I'm older. I'm glad I can put money in markets now when they're low! (and
I'm lucky I got confused and pulled out about 2 months before markets crashed!
They weren't making any sense to me.)

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steveplace
Well, I'm in an interesting situation here.

24, married, no kids, 1 dog. We're both planning on quitting our jobs in the
summer with no direct plans for seeking employment. Quite an interesting
situation.

I've got my products released and am working on some bizdev leads that have a
high probability to go through.

We have been looking for jobs in our new location; however, it's been our
experience that it's a much higher probability of success to start a business
than go kissing ass and submitting resumes.

So we're at a big inflection point. We're either going to be living with one
set of parents (which we have discussed and are prepared for) or we won't have
to worry about money for the next several years.

I've always thrived on volatility, and my wife and dog are just along for the
ride.

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truebosko
23 year old here.

Girlfriend and I are moving to a different city (Montreal) in July. I leave my
job in June but gave huge advanced notice.

Everyone around me keeps asking if I've found a job yet and they always cringe
when I say "No." To be fair, I haven't sent out TOO many resumes but I'm
starting to pick up the pace.

One side of me just wants to forget about senidng out the resumes and try my
hand at freelance work, consulting, and whatever else I can think of to make
money. Work from home and try something totally new and exciting. I have
savings an the GF will be going to school so the government (loans for
university) + part time job will keep her money in check.

It's definitely scary I'll say. Like the one comment said, you could have done
everything right but in the current situation you may not get anything that
you could have 5 years ago. I say forget about all that and just go full force
into trying it out.

We twentsomethings are young and we can always bounce back a few times before
we end up on the streets :)

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nimbix
Ah, yes... the recession. I keep hearing about it, but I'm just not feeling
it.

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ibsulon
I always wondered if I did the right thing by accepting my parents offer to
pay for college if I stayed at the home school. (I started at a community
college, and transfered to a local university.) Then, I looked at the fact
that I was a commuter and never "had the college experience." Now, I am
grateful for the complete lack of debt I have today.

~~~
wizard_2
Yea, but they have the debt. It's still in the family. Heck it's still in the
community, and the city. The biggest problem I'm having now is dealing with
people who are making money but can't afford to pay all their bills. It's
usually because they have some debt left over from when they were making more
money, or when projections looked a lot better then they are now.

It's fortunate you aren't immediately bound by the debt of school, take
advantage of it. But the debt does still exist.

~~~
ibsulon
The debt doesn't exist -- my parents paid up front from savings bonds they had
been buying for a decade precisely for my education. Between 97 and 2001, my
education costed approximately 2000 dollars for the community college portion,
and 10,000 for the university portion. I lived at home and worked to pay the
additional expenses.

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ahoyhere
I am continually saddened by all the people who knew their jobs were
superfluous, who knew all they did was push paper & supply a warm body, who
are surprised when they are laid off. And surprised at the businesses for
overstaffing (while still probably providing a low standard of service.)

Sure, lots of laid off folks truly did generate value. Not all are like the
people I described. But there are lots of them, on both sides (employer &
employee).

------
Enlightenment
Suck it up!

