

Frayed Prospects, Despite a Degree - wallflower
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/20/business/recent-graduates-lose-out-to-those-with-even-fresher-degrees.html?hp

======
nostrademons
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.

~~~
reader5000
If you run a 100,000 user website, why acquire a degree in the first place?

~~~
mangala
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?

------
rayiner
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.

~~~
lsc
>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.

~~~
dopamean
> 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.

This is precisely what I'm hoping to do now.

------
lsc
>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.

~~~
peterlongnguyen
Sounds like it might be a sit-down-for-coffee styled chat, as opposed to
anything formal.

~~~
potatolicious
Right, but the point stands - if someone is with hiring authority at a company
responds to your job search, you have not yet been disqualified.

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.

~~~
kolektiv
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".

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
lsc
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.

This is before any of the legal bullshit.

------
plg
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](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.

~~~
rollo_tommasi
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.

~~~
plg
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.

------
chantech
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

~~~
ebiester
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?

~~~
chantech
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.

~~~
reader5000
The core problem is exploiting inelastic demand in charging 30k for something
that could be provided at 2k.

~~~
eru
You are not paying for the education, you are paying for the signalling. And
the signalling is basically auction.

~~~
reader5000
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".

~~~
eru
Oh, it's an auction in the sense that the students bid for education-
signalling. With their money and their (prep-) time.

------
cliveowen
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?

~~~
rayiner
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.

~~~
kaybe
How much more do you want to produce?

~~~
eru
Most people don't have everything they want, yet. So the answer is: more.

~~~
obstacle1
People have an infinite capacity for wanting, so towards infinite growth we
go, I guess? Seems sustainable.

~~~
eru
Not all wants are wants of material goods.

------
bbeckman
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).

~~~
UK-AL
Its common to back to school in your late 20s for business school.

~~~
nilkn
But he's not going back to school for an MBA.

------
seivan
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..

~~~
eru
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.)

~~~
seivan
My SO is from Singapore, and they tend to give jobs to degree holders without
any hitch (pay grade is a different question).

~~~
eru
See [http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-
visas/employme...](http://www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/passes-
visas/employment-pass/before-you-apply/Pages/default.aspx)

~~~
seivan
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.

