
Young People Are Screwed: Here's How To Survive - dkasper
http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/09/young-people-are-screwed-heres-how-to-survive/
======
ChuckMcM
While it is true that a four year college degree at Yale, or Stanford or USC
can easily set you back $200K, the only reasonable thing about 'point 2' is
that we don't need Spanish Majors, but we do need scientists, mathematicians,
and engineeers. And a California State education is about $5k a year [1] or
$20K for four years. Same cost as a car these days. You can pay off a car with
a 60month loan, why not your college education.

[1]
[http://www.calstate.edu/budget/fybudget/2011-2012/documentat...](http://www.calstate.edu/budget/fybudget/2011-2012/documentation/14-mandatory-
fees-table.shtml)

[2] [http://www.commerce.gov/news/press-
releases/2011/07/14/new-c...](http://www.commerce.gov/news/press-
releases/2011/07/14/new-commerce-department-report-shows-fast-growing-stem-
jobs-offer-hig)

~~~
sswezey
College costs a lot more than just tuition. You have room and board, fees and
'service charges' galore, textbooks, living expenses, etc.

~~~
ChuckMcM
I am aware. I've got one in college, one recently graduated, and one entering
next year. And many of my kid's peers are currently in college. All of the
room and board costs in every college we've looked at, or sent someone too,
could be paid with a part time job taken at the same time as attending
classes.

The idea that getting a STEM degree is outside the reach of kids today without
going into lifelong debt is a myth.

~~~
jere
Agreed. I went to a dirt cheap state university and worked part time
throughout college. With help from my not very well off parents, I came out
without any debt at all.

One of my gigs was Resident Assistant. While it may not have been the most
lucrative job, it did cover room and board and included a stipend which easily
covered textbooks and fees.

------
moocow01
A lot of this article has points I agree with but feels swarmy and
misdirected.

The take-away seems to be "forget about getting educated, pick up a few
O'reilly books, make a website, make sure your friends are doing the same".

Yeah a lot of stuff is tough for young folks. Yeah we probably have got some
tough things coming. We've got a lot of collective debt, healthcare problems,
student debt, global warming, etc etc etc.

I agree with avoiding debt - it should be every young persons first priority.
Go to college, work on the side, take a year off, work full time, go back etc
IF you want an education. Yeah it sucks but its better than coming out and
realizing you essentially are enslaved for the next X years of life.

I also feel like these articles always skirt the issue that education has a
very strong correlation to earnings - even still today. If you take on huge
debt your actual earnings may be different but the macro-trend is that
education increasingly correlates with high pay and high employment. At the
same time, everyone needs to be realistic - look at the prospects for what you
are getting educated in (ex. wanna-be social science majors and prospective
law students should look before they leap).

Lastly I feel like everyone needs to get better at doing things themselves and
being sustainable. Cant afford a ton of food - start learning to grow a small
vegetable garden and cook for yourself - its cheaper and way better than the
shit you are going to eat at Chiles. Cant afford a big screen TV - well
congrats you dont need one, marketers are just going to tunnel shit to you
through it. In other words, a lot of the things and systems that have been
setup in US and integrated into normal living are really not needed and
sometimes surprisingly undesirable - Im not suggesting we all live in huts but
it wouldnt kill us to all be forced to learn skills that fall outside of going
to work and swiping our credit cards for everything else.

~~~
pnathan
About two years I broke out the BLS data for US employment % vs level of
education into a series of graphs.

Numbers for the non-HS degree went up to about 17% unemployment worst
scenario. Grad degrees topped out at 4%.

The biggest differentiator was high school: that dropped outcomes by about 5%,
iirc. Some college - not even completed college - dropped about 4% down in the
outcome. People with BS+ degrees did quite well.

The big takeaway from that was, "education pays off". Anecdotally, people who
are willing to move and be self-motivated could do well even with a Humanities
degree.

Of course, I only know one CS guy who couldn't get work.

~~~
randomdata
What I've been always interested in is _why_ people leave school at given
intervals, statistically speaking.

If, for argument's sake, 90% of high school dropouts are dropouts because they
were too lazy to go to school, it stands to reason that they will also do
poorly in the workplace, being too lazy to go to work. That doesn't mean the
remaining 10% who had to drop out due to unfortunate life circumstances will
also have trouble finding and maintaing quality work the same way.

Because of that, it is really not clear what role education plays. Does the
education and degree count for something, or does increasing levels of
education just increasingly filter out those who lack the qualities that are
appealing in the workplace, placing a bias towards those who have more
education with respect to such interpretations?

The answer to that makes a _huge_ difference in determining if education pays
or not.

~~~
pnathan
That's a really good question. I don't have a data-driven answer. I think that
its a mix, to be honest - you have to have grit to get through education in
the US, and success comes via grit quite often. But you can have grit and not
an education.

------
ruswick
Other than the overt sexism, ("They are no smarter than you, and they are
definitely way less organized and far less attentive to detail. So go show
them what you are made of.") this article makes some fair points. That said,
the author seems to be on a vendetta against post-secondary education. H
asserts that an education "probably won't" pay for itself. This is a total
falsehood. The nontrivial positive returns of collegiate degrees have been
documented by numerous studies.

([http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/education/21college.html?_...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/21/education/21college.html?_r=0))

Moreover, this is not, as he asserts, only true of top 25 schools.

([http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/bs_collegeRO...](http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/bs_collegeROI_0621.html))

On this front, he appears to be talking out of his ass.

I do agree that the world has changed drastically over the past 3 decades, and
that the precedents for education and occupations have irrevocably changed for
the worst.

I thinks some qualification is necessary for his contention about "making
things." This is not necessarily a recipe for success, especially if what you
make is superfluous. If the economy tanks, you'll still be the first to go. To
ensure career resiliency, one needs to pick a field that 1) won't be obviated
by technology in the near future, and 2) is fundamental to society and thus
will never go away. If anything, I think that this skews towards more abstract
fields that are removed from physical labor. All physical labor can or will be
able to be performed by technology at far greater efficiency and far lower
cost. Machines won't be able to think anytime soon, which is why coding is
such an attractive profession. Computers aren't going out of fashion, and
will, for the foreseeable future, require people to write software for them.

------
andrewljohnson
Exactly right, glory to the makers I say.

I graduated college in 2003 with a business degree from CMU and 10K in debt. I
played poker professionally for about a year, then went to work for an ad
agency for 18 months, then worked for a start-up doing marketing for 18
months.

At the start-up, I learned that you can work really hard at marketing, spin
your wheels with all sorts brochures and websites and conference speaking and
presos, and not do a bit of good. That's a scary thought - that you might just
be useless, or at least that your job is only a multiplier to the people
actually building the thing.

The start-up marketing experience (and living with two software developers)
made me start to worry and yearn for change. As the start-up I worked for
began crumbling in 2007, and I began to get whiffs of pending financial
meltdown in early 2008, I made the switch to making software, instead of
making brochures.

And that was either a very smart or very lucky choice, because if I had tried
to find a new marketing job, I'm not sure where I'd be today. But making
software sure does pay OK, and having people use your software sure feels a
lot better than having people NOT read your brochures.

------
klibertp
"Your parents and grandparents want what is best for you. But they do not
understand your world in the slightest. You should probably ignore them."

This is great advice. It was true when I started my career, some ten years ago
- I think it's even more true now. The path I chose in life was, and probably
still is, incomprehensible to my parents. They have the best intentions, I'm
sure, but for the very long time they couldn't understand that my computer is
for work, for example. And later they just didn't want to believe me that I am
actually working (I was telecommuting) and kept repeating things like "get out
of the room and go find some job".

Most parents wish all the best for their children, but they are frequently
completely incapable of understanding the differences between their and our
situations. And the worst thing is you cannot tell them this, because you'll
be rude, and on the other hand they are not going to understand on their own,
because they are "older and they know already".

So ignoring bad advice from parents while pretending to do what they wish is
the only sensible choice, but a hard one. I have many friends who followed
their parents dreams - mainly journalists, but also many others - who are
really screwed now.

It's a real problem and someone should write a guide how to respectfully
disagree with one's parents and how to convince them to at least stop
complaining.

~~~
unimpressive
The ideal solution I think, is simple:

"Followers of the Way [of Chán], if you want to get the kind of understanding
that accords with the Dharma, never be misled by others. Whether you're facing
inward or facing outward, whatever you meet up with, just kill it! If you meet
a buddha, kill the buddha. If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch. If you
meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If
you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then for the first time you will
gain emancipation, will not be entangled with things, will pass freely
anywhere you wish to go." - Linji Yixuan [0][1]

Before you object with something to the tune of "But I'm living with them!", I
said it was simple, not easy.

[0]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linji_Yixuan>

[1]: I'm fairly sure he doesn't mean it literally, but then I've never read
the quote in context.

~~~
prewett
If I understand Buddhism correctly, then since everything (including you) is
really just ultimately nothing, going to college is unimportant, unless it
helps you in realizing that everything is nothing. Debt is bad, because it
will enslave you, and likely lead you to think that money, etc. is actually
something. College is may also be unhelpful, because it may lead you to think
that an Education is not nothing. If you truly understand that everything is
nothing, then the only logical choice is to spend your life helping others
escape their enslavement of thinking that they truly exist. College may not be
useful for that.

On the other hand, if you think that we do actually exist and that college
might actually be worth something, then I don't think Buddhist philosophy is
going to be helpful.

~~~
unimpressive
I'm not exactly a Buddhist, but I'm 99% sure that's not it:

Yamaoka Tesshu, as a young student of Zen, visited one master after another.
He called upon Dokuon of Shokoku.

Desiring to show his attainment, he said: "The mind, Buddha, and sentient
beings, after all, do not exist. The true nature of phenomena is emptiness.
There is no realization, no delusion, no sage, no mediocrity. There is no
giving and nothing to be received."

Dokuon, who was smoking quietly, said nothing. Suddenly he whacked Yamaoka
with his bamboo pipe. This made the youth quite angry.

"If nothing exists," inquired Dokuon, "where did this anger come from?" [0]

[0]: <http://www.101zenstories.com/index.php?story=82>

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101_Zen_Stories>

------
brianchu
Firstly, it's misleading to say that the cost of a UC Berkeley education is
$210,000. That's the price is you're an out-of-state resident _and_ you
receive no financial aid. In-state residents without financial aid end up
paying roughly $120,000 (and the cost is even less since most students live
off-campus after their first year, but I digress). Going to the flagship state
college in the state you live in is generally a highly affordable choice for
anyone.

Secondly, a private school education typically runs around $200-240k, a number
that is calculated to _include_ room, board, books, and living expenses.

Third, you need to realize that most people get financial aid at private
colleges (and state colleges). The irony is that top private colleges (i.e.
Ivy Leagues) are actually _more affordable_ options than state colleges for
low-income students because of financial aid policies for which households
earning even low six-figures can qualify. The only people who actually pay
full price are people whose families have gross incomes of ~200k+. If they
have a sibling in college at the same time, even then they might get financial
aid!

Fourth, for middle-class families that straddle the line between "too rich for
significant financial aid" and "too poor for parents/myself to easily pay,"
students should be aware of merit scholarships. Many liberal-arts colleges
offer them. USC, despite its reputation as a wealthy private college, is well-
known for "buying" good students by offering them generous scholarships (full-
ride, half-ride) dependent on your performance on the PSAT.

~~~
bane
>Secondly, a private school education typically runs around $200-240k, a
number that is calculated to include room, board, books, and living expenses.

That's not entirely correct. The tuitions at many private schools these days
lists at ~$200k for a 4-year undergrad and _does not_ include expenses.

For example

<https://undergraduate.admissions.gwu.edu/costs-attendance>

Lists just tution at $45,735 while R&B is $10,530. So, assuming the rates
don't change, _tuition_ for an undergrad is $182,940 and other expenses run
another $58,600 for a grand total of $241,540. So yeah, it's at around your
upper bound, but _just_ the difference between your lower and upper boundary
was literally the entirety of my undergrad + grad degrees.

~~~
brianchu
Your math doesn't add up. The total for 4 years is $225,060. Which falls in
the range I provided.

EDIT (reply to below): Okay, adding the un-cited items adds up to just about
$240k (keeping in mind that some of those fees are one-time only). Which is
right at my range.

Obviously, $200k-240k is not some sort of hard-and-fast rule. It's an estimate
I threw out there, and it doesn't really detract from my point to nitpick at
it.

~~~
bane
You didn't include the other expenses from their site (linked previously).

------
johnfuller
Networking is seriously important. It will be valuable now and for the far off
future. It's the worst thing holding back my buddies at our small town back
home. They don't know anyone who is successful and wouldn't have anything to
offer a successful person anyways. So, they are stuck in their small ecosystem
of the local pub and trading tips on low paying low skilled jobs.

Combine skills, networking and the leverage of reach (through the internet)
and you might find yourself in a position where you are wondering what all the
fuss is about. There is a ton of work which needs to be done out there, but
too few people who have figured out how to change with the times.

Edit: In other words, things may change so much to be unrecognizable in ten
years. So, networking is the only thing that you can really count on to always
be important.

~~~
Kluny
I'm still trying to figure out the networking thing. I think this article kind
of got it though - worry about friends, not your network. Today I had a really
great chat with the director of the co-op program at my college. She's a
pretty good professional contact, and has experience running her own business,
as well. But I think she'll remember me as a friend after today.

Same with a specialist doctor I see. When I met him, I was 17 and he was a
fresh grad on his first week on the job. Now we have a 6 year relationship and
we're kind of on equal terms.

I'm trying to think of more people in my life this way - people I previously
thought of as unapproachable elders are becoming friends. Hope I'm on the
right track.

------
rfurlong
This article, like many articles on Hacker News equates the value of education
into dollars. Education, intrinsically, cannot be solely measured in dollars.
The problem isn't people getting useless degrees, its degrees that don't
correspond to high paying jobs in the current economy costing too much. THERE
IS NO SHAME IN GETTING A DEGREE IN LITERATURE. Education should be free.

I just get a knee jerk reaction to any article like this because it wholly
overlooks how education is supposed to make you a better human being, not a
money making machine.

Articles like this take the easy way and basically say ASSIMILATE or die. Yea,
thats going to solve the problem...

~~~
Domenic_S
> _THERE IS NO SHAME IN GETTING A DEGREE IN LITERATURE._

I agree with you, but the supply side of the education system agrees with you
all the way to the bank.

The real point is: the traditional education model is usually a bad financial
deal. If you want to learn, do so -- but don't be swindled into taking out
loans for it.

~~~
rfurlong
I agree with your real point, however, I would not say the current model is
the traditional or even universal model. Countries other than the US have much
better models. I just get tired of the discussion not focusing on the problem
and instead accepting it. Universities are often the best place to get an
awesome education in the humanities. Withholding that opportunity because
education has been transformed into some financial investment, instead of a
holistic investments that not everyone can take is just plain sad.

I think its also important to point out that the skills and concepts you learn
in areas such as the social sciences and humanities are still financially
lucrative. As long as our economy is dominated by big corporations there will
be managers and CEOs whos only job is to delegate tasks to and organize the
humans beneath them. Understanding human power structures and having the
ability to persuade and communicate effectively with people will always be the
real big money ticket.

~~~
ucee054
Absent massive political change, the only way the price will come down for
humanities degrees is if people stop signing up for them. Supply and demand.

It is the logical next step to tell the colleges: "No, I will not pay the same
for your Art History degree as for an Engineering degree - Engineering will
pay for itself at that price by getting me a good job while Art History
won't."

------
jkat
There's plenty of money to be made, it's a question of hard work. Luck? You
were already lucky to be born in the western world.

I think education is the answer, but not the type people seem focused on. I'm
talking about life skills _children_ can learn from good teachers and, much
more importantly, good parents. Work hard, it's important. Learn life lessons,
like cooking...all the basics that are more basic than the 3 Rs.

~~~
Kerrick
It's not just a question of hard work, it's a question of hard work _in the
right field_ , and _at the right place_.

~~~
jkat
True, but fields around math, science and engineering have (as far as I'm
aware) been rather reliable.

------
BenoitEssiambre
Since the beginning of the financial crisis the media has constantly been
repeating that the housing market was key to recovery and that the government
had to do things to help prop up house prices.

As someone who would like to own a house in the future, I find it quite unfair
that the government is helping to maintain bubble prices. It is yet another
way for current homeowners to to extract as much money as possible from the
next generation. However, that is even not the main concern for my generation.

Here is an interesting fact: My house whenever I can afford it, will _not_ be
the most expensive thing I will have to buy in my life. My retirement savings
are.

With lower expected long term investment returns and interest rates, the
expected cost of securing a retirement annuity goes up steeply and there is
much less money left for everything else.

All the news article I read on the subject of house prices assume that low
interest rates prop up prices since they allow for cheaper financing and lower
mortgage payments. However, as a 30yo who would like to one day be a homeowner
AND also one day retire, this is not the effect low interest rates have on my
budget.

The low interest rates are currently more than offset by low expected returns
on investments which make it much more difficult to secure retirement.

I decided to try to quantify the effects of low returns on my budget:

I calculated that if I managed to get 4% _real_ returns on my savings, which
is what most online savings calculators assume by default and about what the
previous generation got, I would need to save 23% of my income to maintain
standards of living after retirement (This includes home equity and what the
government saves on my behalf, those "entitlements").

If real returns were 3%, I would need to save 27% of my income, if they were
2%, I would need to save 35% and 1% would require saving 42%. This assumes a
saving period from the age of 30 to 60 and retirement from 60 to 90. This is a
somewhat optimistic scenario but with two equal periods of 30 years, it makes
one data-point easy to calculate: With 0% real returns, to maintain standards
of living. we would spend half the money before retirement and half after so
we'd have to save 50% of our income.

Long term real returns going down from 4% to 2%, increases the amount we need
to save by 12% of our income. This means we have this much less money to put
on housing and other things. For example, if our after tax household income
was $50 000. We would need to save an additional $500 a month ($6000 a year)
for retirement.

Is it even possible nowadays to get a safe 2% real (~4% nominal) return? The
investment opportunities I see are closer to 0.5% or 1%.

Meanwhile the cost of financing a $200 000 mortgage go down by about $4000 a
year or $333 per month when mortgage rates go down by 2%.

If I bought the same house when returns and mortgage rates both went lower by
2%, I would need to find an additional $166 per month ($2000/year) to keep my
retirement savings on track. If I decided to recoup this $166 per month by
buying a less expensive house, at 4% interest, it would have to be $50 000
cheaper.

I realize that expected returns and mortgage rates don’t necessarily move in
sync and it may be that mortgage rates have bigger downward moves than
expected returns but this still all makes me uncertain about my ability to
spend while saving for retirement.

Here is the graph I made showing how much we have to save relative to long
term real returns on investments to maintain standards of living at
retirement(
[https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/d4vj9i43MIPd8H7MqUq_Bt...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/d4vj9i43MIPd8H7MqUq_BtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink)
).

Here is the math I did for reference (let me know if I made any mistakes):

I : Annual Income S: savings ratio

The amount saved each year of my working life is I x S The amount spent each
year of my working life is I x (1-S)

For example, if our household after tax income I=50k and we save 10k for
retirement, S=0.20, we get to spend 40k that year.

We would like to maintain our standards of living after retirement which means
we would like the amount we spend I x (1-S) to be equal the amount of our
retirement pension payments. That is, if we save 20%, (spend 40k, save 10k) we
would like to get a 40k pension at retirement.

The value of our savings at retirement should be enough to give us this
annuity. To calculate S, the proportion of our income we should save to
achieve this goal, I take:

Future Value of my savings FV(I x S) = Present Value (at retirement) of the
pension annuity PV(I x (1-S))

Taking the formulas from here:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_value_of_money>

I arrive at

S = 1/( x + 1 ) where x=1/((1-1/(1+i)^m)/((1+i)^n - 1))

(See
[https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/rdEbvkw5wx78_dnqZuL4Qt...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/rdEbvkw5wx78_dnqZuL4QtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink)
)

i is the real (above inflation) returns on my investments which, assuming I
don’t take too much risk, should follow the trend of long term real interest
rates. n is number of years we are savings m is number of years we plan to be
retired.

Lets say, that I start saving for retirement at 30, retire at 60 and live to
90. That’s 30 years of savings and 30 years of being retired, a somewhat
optimistic scenario (n = m = 30).

Here is the graph showing how much we should save relative to long term real
returns on investments (
[https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/d4vj9i43MIPd8H7MqUq_Bt...](https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/d4vj9i43MIPd8H7MqUq_BtMTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink)
).

~~~
brudgers
Why do you want to own a house? Is it as an impediment to relocating? For the
risk of a highly leveraged investment? Or so that you can spend time and money
fixing leaking pipes on Tuesday evening and patching the gypsum board on
Saturday?

Ever notice how most small businesses deal with real-estate? Hint: they don't
negotiate a thirty year lock-in.

~~~
ChuckMcM
This is probably a contentious topic, but housing security is a useful thing.
Owning a residence, and perhaps more saliently owning it without debt,
provides a certain level of housing security that is quite precious when you
are older. The other benefit of owning property is that you can use it to
generate income when you're not using it. While being a landlord is a pain, if
you're willing to give up some of the return you can negotiate that out to a
third party and that provides a bit of income security.

Sometimes having one less thing to worry about can be the difference between
taking a risk that changes your life in a positive way and not taking it.

The bottom line for me is that I've never heard anyone say "I wish I had more
things to worry about."

~~~
philwelch
I own a house. I can't wait to sell it. For me, the house is one more thing to
worry about. On the other hand, my apartment lease gives me no worries.

If I was rich, I might like to own a house, but only for the freedom of doing
whatever I want with it.

~~~
chii
I cannot understand why leasing (or renting) can be considered superior to
owning your own place. Sure it does prevent you from just moving on a whim -
something i don't think people should be doing anyhow - but the money paid as
rent is like throwing it into the sea!

~~~
repsilat
> the money paid as rent is like throwing it into the sea!

The same can be said of mortgage interest. The fair comparison to the renter
with no savings is the homeowner owing the full value of the house to the
bank, and the fair comparison to a mortgage-less homeowner is a renter with
investments and savings equal to the price of the house they're in.

Better arguments for your position might be

1\. Mortgage rates are lower than rental prices in many places,

2\. Paying off a mortgage is "enforced savings". People leasing property
mostly spend the difference instead of investing it.

3\. Some kind of projection of house and rental prices rising more quickly
than the market.

~~~
chii
> Mortgage rates are lower than rental prices in many places,

its unlikely that mortgage payments are lower than rent - otherwise, it'd be
better to pay the mortgage than renting! You would buy a place, and rent out a
room or two, and have the rent income plus your own money to pay the mortgage.

I m not against renting - but i just don't want people to think that a
mortgage is some baggage that they are better off not having, and instead just
pay rent. I want people to make the smartest choices, so that the only way
rent rises is because costs to build houses rise, not because the landlord got
greedy. To me, rent is like a tax on being alive.

~~~
frobozz
>its unlikely that mortgage payments are lower than rent - otherwise, it'd be
better to pay the mortgage than renting!

In some places, they are, and it is. However, I would be incredibly surprised
if there is anywhere where the mortgage payments on a 100% LTV mortgage are
lower than rent; and this is one of the reasons why many settled people don't
own their own home. They can't (yet) afford a sufficient deposit to make the
repayments affordable.

~~~
fluidcruft
In my city (a) renting is with very, very few exceptions uniformly explicitly
forbidden by home owner association agreements (bans that are now backed by
recent state supreme court victories, the only places you can rent are in the
small regions of the city that predate the explosive subdivision-based growth
that started in the 70's--presumably driven by white flight, but I don't know
for certain), (b) renting is made very unpalatable by a number of policies
made by the city itself and (c) homestead property tax exemptions for
homeowners that make owning very, very expensive if they don't live in their
house themselves.

------
bbthorson
I may not be applying to the easiest jobs to get but I'm finding it incredibly
difficult to even get an interview. After graduating from a top 25
undergraduate business program in 2 years and then going on to earn my MA in
econ in another 2 all the while playing Division 1 football I thought it might
be easier than normal to get a job. Ideally I'd like to be at an audacious
startup and even rode my bike 215 miles to a midwest tech event
(<http://goo.gl/JX1ud>). No such luck, unemployed as ever.

On a positive note, it's my opinion that energy prices are a better indicator
of economic growth than interest rates and energy prices should continue to
fall for the foreseeable future. The only problem is how quickly the economy
will artificially inflate after years of QE.

~~~
jacalata
I might have misunderstood either you or the article, but the main point of
the article seemed to be that people don't really have much use for
business/econ grads - they need people who will write the software. So you're
clearly pretty smart, but are you hoping to be a programmer/teaching yourself
to program, or what? How is your story a response to this article?

~~~
bbthorson
I think point 1 is largely that business/econ isn't needed, however a large
part of econ is dealing with data sets. Regardless, college isn't a tremendous
metric of ability; how many times has the fallacy been sold that it doesn't
matter what you graduated in, just that you graduate? Programming and comp sci
are largely about logic, and teaching oneself how to program is certainly a
fine suggestion but it's not a very efficient solution for somebody who has
previously demonstrated aptitude and is still going to face a learning curve
once employed.

Stepping away from the startup scene and simply looking at businesses in
general, it's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you
to work with no training. Also a hire should be a long term strategy, turnover
is very expensive and destructive to company culture.

"Building something" is a relative idea. Aptitude is not. My story isn't
specifically important, just that hiring is maybe overly focused on buzzwords
and the short term. But I don't know.

~~~
nicholas73
"Tt's ridiculous to think that an employer would hire you and put you to work
with no training."

What changed from the past is that now businesses are focused more on the
short term. They want someone who is plug and play right out of school. When
the managers themselves might hop job in the next year, there is no incentive
to do anything but what helps them right away.

The way to show you can do the job is to show you have done something similar.
For software it is some side project or open source contrib. I'm not sure for
your case, but you need something you can talk about.

------
jpdoctor
Note that the article draws on a graph from the blog Calculated Risk. I have
followed CR for years, and after reading the pando article, I'm am convinced
the pando author is completely out to lunch.

Just as one example: The author is cherry-picking CR's data. Here is the graph
of unemployment vs education level: [http://cr4re.com/charts/chart-
images/EducationUnemploymentSe...](http://cr4re.com/charts/chart-
images/EducationUnemploymentSept2011.jpg)

And still the author recommends avoiding higher education? Anybody who follows
such clownish advice despite the data deserves what they have coming.

BTW: CR is an excellent source of economic information, but it will take you a
year or so to truly digest some of what is being put in front of you. (The
comment board is of mixed value. It used to be the best on the web.)

------
icegreentea
While its certainly fun to toss marketing under the bus, that's not really
fair or reflective of reality. An engineers work only has value as long as it
has customers. Marketing definitely has a real and important role to play, and
really is worthy of the attention of smart, hard working young people.

I think the problem is that marketing was overdone. Too much of a good thing
so to say.

------
sjg007
You can get loan forgiveness in public sector jobs: teachers, peace corp, and
government service. You can become a nurse after college, you don't have to
write code, but it is not for everyone. The boomers will be retiring so there
will be a huge need for medical and care givers. Also when they go, the jobs
they left will open up (minus some losses for productivity). You can go the
trade route as well, or accountancy etc...

~~~
mjmahone17
Capitalism has an unnerving tendency to force people to work in the jobs that
"no one wants to do" or that everyone needs, and aren't viewed as jobs that
deserve high incomes. For instance, the US went to war partially because its
citizens were being impressed into a foreign navy for essentially no pay.
Young people were forced to become soldiers via the draft. Entire racial
groups were forced to do manual labor that was "beneath" freemen. My guess is
that, unless healthcare workers are able to demand higher wages in some way,
that we'll "find" a cheap labor supply, be they foreign workers or "recruited"
young workers. Or, for much the same reasons that teachers are underpaid
compared to their skills and education level, society as a whole will refuse
to raise healthcare wages once those jobs become a cornerstone of our society.

------
Suncho
While I think he's made some important observations and I agree with some of
his advice, I don't agree with his conclusion that young people are screwed.

Here's an important insight that I definitely agree with:

"But won’t a college degree pay for itself? It probably won’t."

It won't. You probably shouldn't get one if your goal is to make money.

Here's some advice I disagree with:

"My advice to young people is to figure out how to make something. That means
either working with your hands, or learning how to type code with them."

The job market is a game of musical chairs. You can give a person a strategy
for winning at musical chairs, but it doesn't change the fact that there are
fewer and fewer chairs each round.

It's not reasonable to tell young people (or any people) that their goal
should be to find a job so they can be self-sufficient and they can support
themselves financially.

~~~
angersock
_It's not reasonable to tell young people (or any people) that their goal
should be to find a job so they can be self-sufficient and they can support
themselves financially._

Are you kidding? How am I supposed to parse this properly? It reads like you
are suggesting that it _is not_ reasonable to suggest that you should get a
job to keep yourself secure.

~~~
Suncho
Yes. That is what I'm suggesting. And I am not kidding. Do you disagree?

~~~
angersock
I'm concerned that I'm maybe putting the wrong emphasis on some bit of what
you said, because if I'm not then yes, I disagree with you.

There is no reason historically that people have not had to work to support
themselves, and so to suggest that they not do this suggests either that you
desire them all to become layabouts dependent on welfare or that you want them
to stop working and die off. Please explain an alternate interpretation of
this.

~~~
Suncho
I don't want them to die off. I do want them to depend on welfare. Whether
they layabout is up to them.

Historically, if you go way back, everyone grew/hunted their own food and
built their own houses etc. This was a very brittle/brutal existence. Drought,
disease, or a cold winter means I might die or my family might die.

So we learned to be efficient by dividing up tasks and specializing. This
reduced the total amount of work that needed to be done to ensure our
survival. Over time, technology (algorithms) continues to get more efficient
thereby continuing to reduce the work necessary for survival.

Of course, this natural progression eventually leads us to point where the
work necessary for our survival is completely automated. We're not there yet,
but there will never again be enough jobs that everyone can have one.

That's a good thing. It frees people up to do what they want with their time.

~~~
georgemcbay
"That's a good thing. It frees people up to do what they want with their
time."

I agree with your premise.

IMO, socialism, like or it not, is an inevitable result of a highly technical
society.

This is a good thing in the long term but it is going to result in decades of
horribleness, at least in the US, because so little of the population is going
to accept this until it is clearly inevitable.

~~~
Suncho
Yes. There will be growing pains as we adjust to this new kind of economy.

When talking about socialism, it's important to distinguish between goods and
services that have a level of scarcity and those that don't.

We have the resources to provide food for everyone, but we don't have the
resources to provide private jets for everyone. That means there should be a
market for private jets. There should always be a market for luxuries. There
should never be a market for things we can easily give everyone. As technology
advances, old markets will collapse and new markets will rise.

The government should provide for its people as much as it can. No more. No
less.

The good news is that once society recognizes that having a job is optional,
we no longer need to worry about silly things like minimum wage, living wage,
or unions. You'd be working at a job because:

A. You enjoy spending your time that way. B. It pays enough that you're
willing to sacrifice your time in order to gain access to luxuries.

If a job pays $3 an hour and you don't like it, then don't work at that job.
It's in no way tied to your survival.

------
BobWarfield
The scariest thing in the article is the unemployment graph from Calculated
Risk. Isn't it interested at how Wall Street has gotten better and better at
inflating bubbles that take longer and longer to recover from.

I just wish the gov't was more focused on creating jobs instead of all the
other BS they're fighting with each other over.

~~~
muzz
Huh? You do realize that we are in month 60-something, ie the upswing, of that
graph that began in 2007. Private sector has been creating jobs for over 3
years now, etc.

What that graph really shows is _how deep_ the Great Recession was-- it should
be compared to the Great Depression rather than the garden-variety recessions
we've had since then.

~~~
rrmm
Indeed. Today's kids may or may not be screwed, but I don't think CR's chart
implies what the article's author infers from it.

Starting the article off with post-apocalyptic imagery seems to be the wrong
tone to make any constructive statement.

------
spydum
There is a lot of focus on programmers , which is absolutely fine: they are
usually the "makers". However I wonder why admins get overlooked. Just like
the plumber or the electrician, sys/net admins are the handyman/tradesmen of
the computing world, and as software deployments grow, so will their demand.

~~~
munin
admins are going to be replaced by programs that software engineers write
(consider devops, heroku, aws, etc).

~~~
spydum
All of those services are run by sysadmins using software, not by software
themselves. They just moved up a level of abstraction (take a look at the SRE
listings, places are crowded with trying to hire proper devops/SRE). They have
become the utility, which is where my plumbing/eletrician analogy comes in.

You might argue this is just suggesting there is a greater demand for software
engineers, and that may be true, but I would be very skeptical of someone
saying sysadmins would be replaced. Why haven't we replaced
plumbers/electricians? Clearly we have utilities/plumbing/wiring that has been
deployed for decades with little to no maintenance? Yet the profession still
exists. The reality is, it still takes these tradesmen to build new
environments, and support the frequent changes that technology throws us.

~~~
BobWarfield
Nooooo. They are being managed by software. Facebook has 1 admin per 1000
MySQL instances. You can't do that except with software. If the DevOps guy is
spending much time touching servers, you got the wrong guy.

I've been through this multiple times. In each case, I hired a good Devops guy
and told him to work his way out of a job ASAP. Typically, he was down to
spending 1/3 of his time on ops of any kind, including DevOps, within 6
months. At that stage I had him helping Prof Svcs, QA, and the Developers by
directly writing product code.

------
xiaoma
I really don't get generation-based hatred from the author. My grandfather
(who raised me) worked long and hard for decades, first as a marine, later a
railroad worker and then finally a manager at AT&T/Bell. He paid far, far more
into the social system than he was ever able to take out. I've felt the pain
of our increasingly stratified society first hand, but I have little respect
for the practice of blaming a generation who have given so much and taken so
little in return. Yes medical expenses are spiraling out of control, but
that's a structural problem, not a sign of a generation as a whole "screwing
young people".

------
agorabinary
I feel like this article would have a greater thrust if it focused more on the
perils of college and the job market nowadays and less on software programming
as the overarching solution for young people. It really hits a more accessible
tone that way, because frankly, only a small fraction of young people are
interested in a coding lifestyle. A young person with little or no debt and a
good head on their shoulders is in pretty good shape, regardless of the waters
they dip their toes into.

------
vy8vWJlco
> _"My advice to young people is to figure out how to make something."_

Problem: patents.

Good luck making things as a "little guy" with patents (software or otherwise)
in the way. Patents and similar government-granted monopolies are all, by
definition, obstacles to economic activity through an accessible and
competitive market. They are also the most difficult to overcome for those
starting at the bottom.

Want economic recovery? Break monopolies.

------
cfn
Although the article has some good advice I have to cringe at the us versus
them mentality set at the start. Blaming the fate of the young on the
healthcare bill of the old is a false dichotomy.

Our parents reached a fairly good finantial state that we may not be able to
attain but I have to ask if blaming them for the current state of affairs is
the easy way out. Is it not like blaming immigrants for lack of employment?

------
crazysaem
I'm wondering how this article compares to other countries. In Germany you
don’t necessarily need to pay expensive medical bills, and Universities have
either no fee at all, or a very small one (500 € per Semester usually).

So after getting a Bachelor’s degree, you can be pretty much debt free.

Is this then only a problem for the USA?

~~~
secure
Consider that many German students (I don’t have numbers, just a subjective
impression) get Bafög, a government-issued loan to pay for fees/rent/living.

------
usaar333
I'm finding it hard to reconcile Lesson 2 which implies a school even of the
caliber of UC Berkeley isn't worth it with Lesson 4 to get successful friends.

A selective college is probably the best place to develop close friendships
with people destined to be successful.

~~~
leoedin
I completely agree. Meeting smart and driven young people without the luxury
of college is hard. Convincing those people to be your friends when you don't
have a shared background is even harder.

------
cmbaus
I've always considered Prop 13 as a way for the babyboomers to screw over
their own kids.

------
nazgulnarsil
Idiots who don't plan their future are screwed, everyone else is perfectly
fine. This isn't a change from the past, it's just that today's idiots are
visible due to the internet.

------
jakeonthemove
Another piece of advice: take your diplomas and expertise in Law, Journalism,
Medicine and others to developing countries. They may not pay as much, but the
jobs are there...

------
jjsz
This may be OT but it relates to survivalism for our generation (I'm 20). As I
get older, like the OP, I'm seeing Entrepreneurialism and, personally, Agorism
as two of the many strategies that should be focused on to influence people,
mostly non statist capilists who don't innovate as much as they should, to
change their philosophies so that disruptions, subsidies, and investments can
occur in various other markets here in Puerto Rico besides the pharmaceutical.

I don't classify myself as libertarian, I'm all about direct democracy and
believe highly in sovereignty, however the ongoing regulations and the
centralization and manipulation of the housing sector, the energy sector, and
the food and liquor sector here in PR have gone overboard just like in the
states and it has lead me to believe that all of this is caused by us
submitting into conformity after we have generate a bit of passive income
without focusing on taking down some barriers and instead we're maneuvering
around them.

Why the hell does someone that has a self sufficient house, windmills, solar
panels and all, takes water from a deep well STILL have to pay a minimum
electricity bill or the government would regulate his energy and tax him like
if he were to be selling it. To us country folk that do not like to be taxed
on our own property, this sort of regulation is going to be taken down- it'll
only get worse when more ways to decentralize markets happen and we get our
hands in them like 3d printing.

I'm naive and you can justify calling me a fool but this is modern day
slavery, and that's what the article is generally touching upon. Not sure if
the above was the best example, but to me it's the most relational.

We're obligated, enslaved, to fix many problems that we haven't caused on top
of worrying about the elderly before we retire, as shown by some of the
comments here- no problem, people had it harder back in the days..Especially
here in PR. Have you seen Clint Eastwood's Super Bowl Half time commercial?
That's what came to my mind after finishing reading this..

Besides showing an interest in a certain market by crowdfunding capital and
displaying market interest how can one influence non statist capitalists to
invest lets say in informing the majority of the Puerto Rican population to
take the current issues we should really be focusing on seriously? I know my
kind and they're not generally inclined to think on these things day by day
but please be kind enough to criticize my philosophy. Focusing on mostly the
pharmaceutical market, the general PR'an population won't stand a chance to
adapt to this change of thought on survivalism..

Again excuse this if it's OT, this is my first post.

------
AYBABTME
So the obvious solution seems to fix this world while we can, so we can retire
and leave something better for our heirs.

I find this distress motivational.

------
elisehein
I am loving these illustrations

------
chuckreynolds
This post is so dead on... love it.

