
For 20-Somethings, Ambition at a Cost - jejune06
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/fashion/for-20-somethings-ambition-at-a-cost.html?hp&_r=0&pagewanted=all
======
rayiner
I swear, there should be a basic course in the fundamental concepts of supply
and demand required as a part of graduating middle school. I overheard a kid
(teenager) talking the other day about how he was going to work for a big
record label finding talent. I wanted to shatter his little world by asking
him: "do you know how much d--k you're going to have to s--k to work your way
up in that kind of job?"

The job market is weak, but there are jobs out there. Not just programming.
Nursing, accounting, etc. Tons of baby boomers getting ready to retire means
opportunities for young people. But those opportunities are not in
oversubscribed professions like media and music.

Before we had our daughter, my wife, being from the west coast, was like 'oh,
you shouldn't put too much pressure on kids--they should be what they want.'
I, being Asian, thought exactly the opposite. But now that the baby is here,
my wife has done a total 180. "Penn undergrad then med school" is her new
plan. Like a good little half-Asian.

~~~
kyro
This comment really rubs me the wrong way, probably because I was raised by
two foreign parents who had a similar plan for me. From the day I was born,
their wish was for me to carry on the torch of physician-ship to the point
where I was threatened to be cut off from all their support if I had chosen to
pursue a career I was more interested in.

Medicine is great and interesting, but I'd be lying if I said I don't
obsessively regret exploring my other interests on a daily basis. I'm now
$200k in the hole and trying desperately to incorporate my current medical
education with my other self taught skills that I wish I'd gone to school to
study. And lately I've been stressed out beyond belief as I need to make the
decision whether to fully commit to this career and dedicate another 5 years
of my life to grueling medical training that'll yield a comfortable living, or
to jump ship after graduation to follow a dream that might very likely leave
me broke, and maybe happier. All because my folks had a plan.

~~~
clicks
It greatly bothers me that rayiner's post is showing up as 'dead', presumably
because it was either downvoted too much or just flagged too much.

Anyway. So while we're all giving out examples and anecdotes, here's mine: I'm
from an Asian family of 5, I was the only one who was given the 'follow your
dreams!' advice out of the 5 (there's a long/funny story behind this). I did
end up being the only one who went to school for a non-STEM field
(literature/music).

Guess who's the only one unemployed out of the 5. Guess who wishes who was
forced to stick to a STEM field? If I have children, damn right I'll force
them toward STEM field, enroll them to a school with reputable robotics
programs, expose them to folks who're in engineering/medical fields, etc.

Do read qzxt's relevant post: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5308799>

And lastly, because the idea of censorship doesn't sit well with me, here is
what rayiner posted:

 _My parents had a plan for me and my brother growing up: I'd be an engineer
and he'd be a doctor. At some point when we were old enough, we asserted
yourselves, and I went into law and he went into banking. But in retrospect
I'm glad my parents didn't just tell me "follow your dreams!" If it were up to
me as a teenager, I'd just sit around all day masturbating and eating Cheetos.
Kids need more direction than that.

Here is the thing about kids: they're not very smart. And they don't know it.
My infant is convinced that if she sucks hard enough on my arm milk will come
out. At 17 I was no less misguided just about different things.

You can always quit your professional job that puts food on the table to
follow a more capricious path. But when your teenage dreams collapse against
the hard ground of reality, you can't usually do the opposite._

~~~
nostrademons
Couldn't that have been easily avoided with "Follow your dreams, but here's
what you're likely to get paid with each of your career choices..." advice?

My sister and I are both good little half-Asians. My (white) mom eventually
won the childrearing battle, so we were raised under the "Follow your dreams,
we just want you to be happy" advice. Guess what? We both ended up in high-
paying STEM careers anyway. Why? Because we both liked science anyway, and we
were aware of (but not beholden to) average career salaries for the various
fields we were looking at.

Now, there were a lot of times this could have gone otherwise. My sister
almost double-majored in anthropology; I almost majored in philosophy or
sociology. Oh, and I almost dropped/flunked out of college twice. But we
didn't, because we had this background knowledge of what the real world was
like and were somehow able to make smart decisions anyway.

There seems to be this assumption in this thread that teenagers are stupid. I
reject that - I certainly wasn't stupid as a teenager. Of my teenage friends
that were stupid, it was usually because their parents were stupid, and so the
parents wouldn't be able to make better decisions than them anyway. Rather,
teenagers are _ignorant_ \- they lack life experience, so they often don't
have the full picture. The cure for that is to provide all the relevant
information and then let your kid make their decision, it's not to make the
decision for them.

------
scarmig
At one point in the article, one person spends all night working on a $35k
marijuana harvest and gets paid in the morning with a breakfast burrito.

Someone is a spectacular failure at hardball negotiating.

~~~
patmcguire
"No pay, but great blackmail opportunities." But on a serious not, it mentions
she worked in San Francisco, so it was probably legal.

~~~
codexon
Isn't it illegal at the federal level? Maybe report it to the DEA?

~~~
davidtanner
You're a real piece of work. Maybe you should try and blackmail people for
committing the 'crime' of sodomy next.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Point of fact: sodomy is not a crime and is protected under the constitution.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_v._Texas>

~~~
davidtanner
Well that's awesome and I did not know that was now the case. Thanks for the
information!

My intent was that it's skeevy as hell to blackmail someone for growing
cannabis. If there were very specific extenuating circumstances then I'd take
that into account, yes. Still, federal prosecution of drug crimes often
results in long periods of incarceration. I don't think that's justified for
anything less than violent crimes.

HN readers might be advised to watch the new documentary called The House I
Live In - it has footage from 20 states documenting the ineffectiveness,
hypocrisy, and profiteering inherent in the War on (some) Drugs.

<http://www.thehouseilivein.org/>

~~~
brown9-2
I think you are missing the joke, or it went way over your head.

The point is that it's also "skeevy as hell" - plus probably really bad
management - to ask someone to maintain your $35,000 asset (possession of
which could also get you in a world of legal trouble) in exchange for just a
breakfast burrito.

Ignoring the morality of the entire subject, paying someone roughly $5 for
many hours of work maintaining a $35,000 asset is just poor decision making.

You probably want to make sure that the people taking care of your $35,000
asset (and the business that goes along with it) are happily paid, otherwise
you might find you don't have that asset anymore.

~~~
davidtanner
These are all fair points and I've upvoted you.

Apparently it's common to pay trimmers in 'scissor hash', ie what THC laden
goop one can scrape from cutting shears, bud to smoke and food. Perhaps this
employee was only paid with a burrito but I think it may be more likely she
was compensated in both food and drugs. This is not to say the employers was
acting fairly though.

------
peterhunt
I wonder if the fact that all of the example "rock star" professions are in
industries that are, at best in a transitional period and at worst are dying
has anything to do with the proliferation of unpaid internships and poor
working conditions and salaries.

The real problem is educating college students early on about the
ramifications of their choice of major. Perhaps this also calls for an
evaluation of which subjects are emphasized in American high schools as well.

~~~
nsedlet
This is an excellent point. In the five years since I graduated college, I've
seen so many friends blindsided by the difficulty of actually making a living
in their chosen professions. Now that some are considering having families,
they're shocked again at the impossibility of continuing their current jobs
while enjoying life in the city.

Colleges could certainly help by explaining that money matters (instead of
simply encouraging students to follow their passions, as many colleges do),
and that success in certain industries can be particularly elusive. However,
it's understandably hard for colleges to figure out what's going on in the
labor market, which is always in flux. It's actually REALLY hard to make sense
of the job options out there, and the risks involved for each: employers
aren't transparent about salaries, job titles are difficult to parse, and the
career trajectories + risks implied by various entry-level jobs aren't obvious
(even to the employers themselves).

~~~
sopooneo
Passion, yes. When I was in undergrad the rising mantra was "follow your
bliss." I think now it should have been "fund your bliss".

------
jwwest
Are unpaid internships something that's uniquely common in NYC? I scan
Craigslist all the time for freelance opportunities and almost every single
unpaid gig in New York is touted as an "internship". I have never seen this in
listings in Dallas or Austin. Internships are incredibly murky things. You
cannot, legally, get free labor from someone for the sole benefit of the
business. The DoE has cracked down on this type of thing before. One would
assume that in a strong liberal city like NYC, this sort of nonsense wouldn't
happen often.

~~~
rohern
Can you explain what NYC being liberal has to do with it?

~~~
reaclmbs
Liberals usually favor high minimum wage

------
johnny99
Interesting piece, though they focus only on what they call "rock star"
professions, like music, publishing, and the movies. Professions which have
always used their supposed status to prey on the young.

One solution: become an account or plumber, or software developer, and laugh
all the way to the bank.

~~~
wavesounds
Software Developer? A lot of the 20 something developers I know also work 60+
hour weeks while only getting paid for 40. Whether its because they want to be
'rock star' developers or because its just become the accepted norm in the
industry is up for debate though.

~~~
makerbreaker
They aren't making 22k/yr is his point though. A US based dev, who is working
60 hours per week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong (or chose
low pay for a cool company etc)

~~~
ruswick
Not necessarily. I think a lot of developers are subjected to employment
myopia, because they tend to reside in areas with a high concentration of
startups that pay well and have generous benefits and "perks." Outside of
those areas, the space is dominated by corporate entities, consultancies and
other bastions of bureaucracy. These companies can get away paying little
because they are entrenched in their market and face very little competition
for developers from startups.

People who live in or attend school in non-tech-centric cities are often
screwed. There are few companies that offer attractive employment
opportunities, and those that do are in a position whereby they can hire only
the best. (To be honest, I think that this is true everywhere. All startups
want to hire the absolute best, and only the best. It appears otherwise
because the best are the vocal minority. For every Google engineer on HN that
made 120k out of college and extols the ease of finding lucrative employment,
there are probably several developers who went to community college or a state
school that spend their days in a cubicle in a Palo Alto office park for 30k
per year. We just never hear from those people.)

So, I think a more accurate statement is "A US based dev, who lives in New
York or San Francisco who went to Stanford and who is working 60 hours per
week, and not making 50,000$+ is doing something wrong."

~~~
saryant
I'm not so sure. I went to college in a non-tech city in the middle of the
country and all of my peers, many of whom stayed local, were making at least
$55,000 working for boring companies (USAA being a big one). This was not an
elite school either.

No startups, nothing sexy but if any of those companies recruiting us offered
<$55k they were laughed at.

~~~
cpressey
[http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-
Developer-I-...](http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-Developer-I-
Salary-Details-Cleveland-OH.aspx)
[http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-
Developer-I-...](http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-Developer-I-
Salary-Details-Omaha-NE.aspx)
[http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-
Developer-I-...](http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-Developer-I-
Salary-Details-Boulder-CO.aspx)

So that does seem like the ballpark figure, with the following 2 caveats: I
don't know how reliable Monster is for this kind of data, and I picked three
cities off the top of my head roughly in the middle of the USA that I don't
think of tech centres but I don't know how out-of-touch I might be in that
regard.

~~~
saryant
[http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-
Developer-I-...](http://monster.salary.com/SalaryWizard/Software-Developer-I-
Salary-Details-San-Antonio-TX.aspx)

------
mhartl
It's interesting to note that (unless I missed something) _all_ the struggling
ambitious 20-somethings interviewed for the article are women. (I don't
include Ross Perlin, who was interviewed not because he's struggling but
because he wrote a book on the subject.) Is this a coincidence, or is it part
of a broader trend? If the latter, it suggests that the problem may be even
worse than it looks. Such ambitious careers arguably cost young women more
than they cost young men, since women use up a scarce resource (peak
fertility) not sacrificed by their male peers.

------
cm2012
I'm not a programmer, but I make a pretty good living at age 21 doing
e-commerce marketing. I also got married last December to my girlfriend of 7
years. I honestly attribute most of my early success to the fact that I
started on my career so young since I knew I wanted to be married soon, and
thus needed to have independent income (I.E. first side money business at 15,
first unpaid internship at 17, first career job at 18, etc.).

Thinking back, I definitely would have been an unprepared for life by the time
college ended if it hadn't been for that confluence of events. I never really
though about what I would do before, and I never had any economically sound
interests (I almost went to high school for voice acting and singing!).

------
ErikAugust
"According to a 2011 Pew report, the median net worth for householders under
35 dropped by 68 percent from 1984 to 2009, to $3,662." That's something to
think about: college debt, etc.

~~~
sopooneo
This may be dumb, but what does "householders" mean? I assume it's not
"homeowners". Does it just mean someone that is in a settled relationship (ie
part of a household)? Because I assume there must be some distinction from
just "individuals".

~~~
johnrgrace
Household, is a single person or group of people living together.

------
api
The "cooler" a field is, the more unbalanced it is from a supply/demand point
of view for labor and the more you're going to have to bust your ass to get
anywhere in it. People need to understand this.

It's even true within fields. You can usually find 40/hr week jobs in software
that pay a good or even great wage, but they're usually doing boring stuff:
business apps, IT support, financial stuff, etc. But in sexy areas like game
development you're into crazy 60-80 hour work week for no pay territory again.

------
nawitus
This article is a pretty good argument for Scandinavian style workplace
regulation. There's lots of bad regulation over here, but restricting working
hours is something that's easily justified. It's sad to see some people
working these crazy hours.

------
walesmd
And this is why I'm so glad I skipped college and enlisted. 6 years of
military and I walked right into a $75k/yr at 25 years old.

Had my 10yr reunion recently and I was the only one that owned their home.

~~~
redschell
I didn't really interpret this as a knock against college. More like a
cautionary tale about "entry-level" work in hyper-competitive industries that
end ups amounting to slave labor with no future prospects to speak of.

I really can't understand, for instance, why one of the characters here
interested in producing would seek toxic employment with the dying movie
studios. With platforms like Kickstarter that circumvent traditional barriers
to the entertainment industry (and other creative sectors), it's hard to
imagine a bright future for old, gatekeeping jobs. She would probably be
better served looking for marketing or sales work at a tech company.

------
Futurebot
Societies (particularly US society) are getting more competitive every single
day. Lowered barriers to entry, better tools, increasing automation, and other
factors are going to support this trend continue well into the future. We are
already seeing companies give some entry level jobs to interns (I'm sure some
of you have seen this, and there's more about this trend in "Intern Nation.")
For those who want to compete, it's going to be non-stop self-learning,
retraining, and networking:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-
relevant-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/business/to-stay-relevant-in-
a-career-workers-train-nonstop.html)

We've entered an era of "Hypercompetition."

------
pjscott
> The median net worth for householders under 35 dropped by 68 percent from
> 1984 to 2009, to $3,662.

In case anybody else was wondering, those figures are in 2010 dollars,
adjusted for inflation.

~~~
cm2012
Thank you. Do you know how much of that change happened between 2008-2009 (b/c
of recession), by any chance?

~~~
pjscott
Quite a lot of it; the youngest demographics were hit the hardest, by
percentage. See the section "The Great Recession" in the page the article
links to:

[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-
gap...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/11/07/the-rising-age-gap-in-
economic-well-being/)

------
DanBC
> _and representing their company at all hours._

Giving an over-tired, over-worked, under-paid child the password to your
social media accounts is probably a really bad idea.

------
philip1209
As a college senior approaching graduation in May, I am thankful to have
chosen an engineering path and to have learned programming.

~~~
sopooneo
I'm with you on that. But frankly, I'm glad my _passion_ was in STEM. Because
as a kid, I had no interest in thinking about my future financial security. I
just happen to be lucky that pursuing my interests coincided with good career
prospects. So what do we do with all the people that hate STEM as much as I
hate going to night clubs?

------
ruswick
I was particularly surprised by the referenced outrage over the 65+ hour-per-
week job solicitation. 65 hours per week, although inordinate, isn't entirely
outrageous. It equates to 12 hours per weekday plus a half day over the
weekend, which is effectively the hours I'm subjected to by school, and is
well within the realm of what I'd be willing to work if it was the difference
between employment and destitution.

~~~
nisa
> 12 hours per weekday

8am waking up 9am finished breakfast / shower 10am finished commute to work
10pm finished workday 11pm at home

even if you cut commuting out of the equation you won't have a life. that may
be fine with you if you work on something that is important too you... however
it is fine to be outraged by this!

------
betterunix
...and I thought graduate school was bad. I average a 50-60 hour week, but at
least my adviser doesn't expect me to be _on call_.

------
wyclif
Calling Bullshit on Unpaid Internships:
[http://www.irishstu.com/stublog/2011/06/30/calling-
bullshit-...](http://www.irishstu.com/stublog/2011/06/30/calling-bullshit-on-
unpaid-interships/)

------
abraininavat
This article might as well be about the game development industry

