As the curmudgeons say: pride goeth before the fall.
I'm not saying that Matt is wrong, or that the WSJ is right, but this essay was just a bit too...precious...for my tastes.
I don't have the answers, and I don't have much confidence in anything, outside of myself. That said, if I know one fact about the world, it's that very few of the self-confident 22-year-olds that I meet are going to get rich from their big brains and hard work. If history teaches us anything, it's that most smart people will fail -- repeatedly and painfully. So, while it's not the right time for the adults to shake their walkers at the children for running on the lawn, perhaps it would be prudent for the kids to hold back on the self-congratulatory essays, in anticipation of the day when it all goes pear-shaped?
I'm not much older than Matt, but even I can detect a distinct generational shift in attitude toward work; I know where the WSJ editorial is coming from, even if I don't agree with its conclusions. And while I'm sure that the brash 20-somethings that I know believe that self-investment and autonomy are the keys to avoiding their parents' fate, that probably has more to do with the abject failure of all previous models of work, than the proven success of this one.
In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be. Which brings me to another thing that the curmudgeons say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youth and arrogance are eternal companions.
Right, we'll all be happier. It's not about being rich, it's about being the primary beneficiaries of our labor and striking a proper work-life balance.
I think there used to be a different balance between various things. You could expect to find a 'good company', dedicate a lot of your live to it, and be more or less reciprocated. These days, it's "every man for himself". In Europe, they have, in some places, attempted to legislate this relationship, which I don't agree with, but sometimes I feel there may be something we are missing out on in terms of long term, loyal employer/employee relationships. I'm not sure I'd want that myself, having pretty much grown up with the hopping around + brutal layoffs style common in tech, but still... it makes you think.
I think that's exactly it. It's just taken a couple of generations to adapt to this new reality.
My parents (well, my mom at least, my dad was an entrepreneur) would never quit their jobs. This was something that was unheard of. Xer's would be happy with whatever job came their way. Now, the millenials are fully understanding that their jobs are about as secure as their car parked in the bad part of town.
Honestly, corporations have changed how they treat their employees, and so the employees are adapting.
It's not that Gen-Xers were happy with whatever job came our way, it's that we had rent to pay and food to buy (and had no desire to live with Mom and Dad). Once the economy got better (and our businesses succeeded), we got picky too.
You might have what it takes to walk the walk, but don't jump to conclusions before you've trod the path of a truly awful economy.
I was born in 1975, so I've been around the block... if not many times, a few, at least.
My point was that once upon a time, companies and their employees were likelier to stick together through good times and bad. These days the equation has changed: companies are liable to dump you when quarterly profits aren't good, and you're likely to dump a company at the first whiff of something better. That's better in some ways, but I think we've also given up something that may be harder to quantify. For instance, if you're a happy worker and not worried about the next quarter, you can also invest in the company long term, rather than strictly looking out for your own interests, and vice versa, even if there's a bad quarter. Said companies also had time to invest in things like creating Unix, and lots of other R&D that wasn't immediately registered as profitable.
I don't know that I'd be happy like that, and I think that the cream of the crop in today's world oughtn't look to other people's companies as a place to make their mark; still, I think it's something that bears thinking about. Perhaps the pendulum will swing back at some point in the future.
Right... it's a problem with solutions at different equilibriums (I'm not sure of the exact way to phrase that), and I'm not sure that what we are moving towards is necessarily the best for all people/jobs/companies: sure, there's more flexibility and responsiveness, but as an employee, I have figured out at this point that I don't really have any more loyalty to an employer than they are likely to have for me, and perhaps we both lose out because of it in some ways, at least for certain combinations of people/jobs/companies.
I'm not sure that what we are moving towards is necessarily the best for all people/jobs/companies:
That I think is the key. Everyone figures that it'll be great when we're all sitting around in our pj's "working", but will it? We're talking about a change to the fundamental nature of our society. There will be winners and losers, but that's a very different world from the one we know.
You should take a look at the book 'Supercapitalism" by Robert Reich - it may give you a new perspective on how business has evolved over the past 30 years.
One of the major themes is that the focus went from people as citizens and unto people as consumers. Thus the reason for corporations changing their behavior. It's as much the consumer's fault as the corporations'.
That's the thing with a corporation. It can only sell what people want to buy. It's like when people complain about Starbucks taking over the high street, well, Starbucks can't exist where people don't want its products and services, same as any corporation.
I have a pet theory that this is why some people have this visceral hatred of corporations: they're a mirror to the people, and people don't like what they see.
While it is true that a corporation can only sell what people want to buy, a lot of large corporate entities have spend a lot of time and money researching how to influence what people want to buy. To a really ridiculous degree. Furthermore, a lot of large corporate entities have no problem doing things that the vast majority of people would consider immoral (at the very least) to reduce their costs, or increase the likelihood of someone purchasing more of their product(s).
People who hate corporations for being corporations generally aren't really thinking about what they don't like about said corps, and also rarely take the time to consider how the corporations actions would be justifiable (in a human sense, not necessarily just in the profit-motive sense) to the people running them.
I think that what people tend to rail against is corporations like Monsanto. Sure, they can only sell what 'people' want to buy - but they also have no problem with showing utter disregard for human life or the environment, furthermore what they sell is not marketed at individuals - they end up being only able to sell what other corporations want to buy (who in turn don't know or don't care about said disregard for human life or the environment), and have enough money to buy their way out of most legal trouble.
Makes sense to me. I also have a theory that with the world becoming more and more related with media being more and more similar across countries, your neighbors are suddenly all the celebrities and people on TV.
And we know that you value your worth relatively to what your neighbors have. So with your neighbors suddenly being much better off due to them being celebrities, you end up feeling poorer and must play the consumerism game.
I'll try to rewrite this to make more sense later - pretty tired now.
I'm pretty sure that our parents had new technology, too. More to the point, I'll bet that when they were 23, they were bragging about how their new technology was going to allow them to change the world. It's almost a cliche, really.
Granted, our didn't have computers or the internet; technology has marched onward. But regardless of whether we're discussing the modem or the mimeograph, the story of the young usurping the old with 'modern' technology is a classic.
Yes, it's the beginning of a fairly tale, a standard mythological motif - by which I don't mean it is fictional or trivial, but that it is universal. BTW: Matt does acknowledge that the next generation will do the same to his (at the end).
He's right about greater productivity - but if everyone is more productive, then the competitive bar simply resets at a higher level. It's an endless trudge, if the finish line recedes as you approach...
There's a sophisticated argument that with a smaller firm-size, you have more CEO's. The problem with competitive success remains that not everyone can be a winner - it's a zero-sum game by definition. But everyone can have a family. Everyone can have the satisfaction of improvement and mastery. Everyone can enjoy the thrill of risking a lesser thing for a greater thing. Everyone can take pride in effort and sacrifice for a worthy goal.
And ultimately, these things are immensely more satisfying than vacationing for months in Europe.
(Actually, the research in question had caveats: absolute income correlated with happiness until one's basic physical & health needs were satisfied. After that point, it didn't matter: instead, what mattered was how well you were doing relative to your peer group. So for there to be winners, there had to be losers as well.)
People have their own definitions of winning. If I want to be a millionaire and I have 1000 dollars in savings I am a loser. If I want to own a home and I rent an apartment I am a loser. The parameters of the game are not well defined and the rules are not universal.
I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker from the Midwest and for the first time I understood how the defition of winning and happiness differs. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life where I needed something and couldn't have it whereas my co-worker had to work hard for everything he has. His definition of "winning" is having a nice place to sleep, being able to eat a nice meal, and go out every once in a while. And once he has that, maybe a little bit nicer place to sleep, a little bit nicer meals, and going out more often. What other people have is not important to him, therefore, in his world everyone can win.
My definition of winning pretty much requires losers. I don't understand how you can consider yourself a winner unless you are more/better/faster/stronger/etc. than someone else.
Some people have their scale of success calibrated to be absolute (my co-worker), and other have it calibrated to be relative (myself). I hypothesize that the absolutes are happy more often but the relatives have the drive to achieve a greater magnitude of success albeit less of the time, which explains why some people are happy with (relatively) little and others are unhappy even with extreme wealth.
Not all technology is created equal. The ability to communicate, coordinate, and compute has reduced the optimum size of the firm in many industries. What is more important, it has reduced the minimum size of a successful firm. Steam power and heavy industry, by contrast, had the opposite effect.
Ultimately, you both can be right. It's about where you stand relative to everyone else. If the younger folks are enabling themselves via tech faster than the older, it should be possible to position yourself better.
I think it's more a testament to the improvements we've made in technology how easy it is for kids to become BIG deals quickly with good ideas.
That's true, but I think that a serious argument can be made for the last few decades being the first point in time in humanity's recent history in which we are absolutely capable of achieving it.
There's definitely a shift going on. I suppose there has always been a shift going on - but it seems like throughout history the "shifts" have been relatively evenly spaced with regards to how they affect the "average persons" lifestyle, and what new things they enable us to do. The "shifting" going on right now, due largely to the advent of the internet, has obvious potential to radically change a lot of things about they way people live and organize.
It's become so much easier for a couple of people to start up a business doing what they like to do, and make a living off of it in the last decade that it's hard to believe - and this is almost all due to massive increases in the ability of people to communicate over large distances.
I'm young, but I really think that we may be living in a time where something closer to "utopia" for humanity (if you can ignore the cliche term) has moved, in about ten years time, from being the stuff of "nice ideals that simply won't happen" to "oh my this could actually happen, and is indeed happening in some areas".
Of course, just because we have the ability to doesn't mean we will. I would guess that as the average person becomes more aware of the sheer scale of the things we could be accomplishing that we will continue to move closer to all the failed promises and visions of the past, at an increasing rate.
To put it another way, the promises of the last century that you speak of were made by people who saw the potential of what could be done, but the advances were not enough to push the small groups ability to successfully implement things to the point where they could do so easily, or without a lot of capitol - large infrastructures, and people working 40 hours a week in said things were, at least partially, still necessary as business expanded to utilize the advances.
Now (for example) we have people paying their rent and bills by selling shirts that they silkscreen themselves in their homes, and they can sell to a global market with relative ease. A passionate individual or small group of people do not have nearly the amount of an uphill battle that they would have had even 5 years ago.
Granted, a lot of these people aren't going to be getting rich - but for a lot of people my age and younger (I'm 23), simply being able to have a roof over our heads and food in our stomachs without having to succumb to the 9 to 5 doing something that we absolutely do not care about at all (and that could probably be automated) is incentive enough.
Hm. I don't know...when people say things like that, it tends to reflect feelings of persecution more accurately than fact.
As recently as the late 1960s, American youth were idealizing personal freedom, quality of life and independence, and "adults" were criticizing them for it (probably in the WSJ). San Francisco is practically a monument to the era...
The people you refer to in the 1960's didn't actually _do anything_ they just talked about doing something (there's a great South Park episode about this).
Matt and many others are doing what he talks about.
Most of the Gen-Y's that I've worked with have been pretty intelligent, but very arrogant and largely useless, because they hide their inexperience behind their arrogance and claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.
> claim they're doing things a "new way" even when it's considerably worse than the "old" way.
I wonder about that. When LiveJournal first had its scaling difficulties in 2002, anyone with any experience in programming kinda rolled their eyes at what Brad was doing and thought "This college kid doesn't have a clue." I mean, writing the whole app in Perl? Relying on MySQL boxes that went down frequently and usually took a whole cluster with them? Walking clusters to build a page? Putting your object traversal logic in the app instead of convenient SQL queries?
Everybody knows that the way to build a scalable webapp is to write in Java or C++, buy an Oracle database and leverage the thousands of man-years they've put into making it perform well on top-end hardware clusters, use stored procedures and constraints to offload processing to that database, and getting a big SAN for storage. Scalable webapps were a solved problem in 2002: after all, EBay and Amazon had done it, as had dozens of Fortune 500 companies.
Fast-forward to 2008. Now, memcached is standard scaling procedure. Federation among dozens of cheap MySQL boxes is standard procedure, with boxes arranged as master/master pairs to deal with the pesky failure problems. Everybody uses commodity hardware, and big server vendors like Sun and IBM are in serious trouble.
I think the real issue is that young workers have much stronger economic incentives to embrace disruptive technologies. They have more work years ahead of them and less investment in existing technologies, so it makes a lot of sense for them to choose technologies that suck now but will (or could) be big in a couple years, because if their bet pays off, they're suddenly on a level playing field with people 20 years their senior.
It's not always blind exuberance, arrogance, and inexperience that makes young people choose new technologies that are "worse" than their old alternatives. They could be taking a very shrewd (and unverbalized, if they're that smart) "fuck off, elders" risk.
Sometimes that's true. However, it usually isn't, and the gen-y's usually can't admit it when they're wrong.
Most of the gen-y's I've worked with produced utter crap, and I've left a few jobs now because I got tired of fixing their stuff while they were busy taking credit for it.
And that's certainly the way the younger generations see it - so why not do your own thing? (Hey, I agree)
But given that most businesses require more work and eventually fail, taking a job is still much more secure. Perhaps this will change in the coming years, but not yet.
About 55% of startups fail within five years. Ok, so there's obviously some risk in starting a company.
How likely is a 22-year-old to find a job, even at a stable company, where there's a 45% or better chance that it's still worth going to work in 5 years? Not very. Most people get pigeonholed or down-tracked; not everyone can be "protege".
I'm 25 and on my fourth "career". I recognize that no single effort or job is going to deliver better than a 50% chance of liberation and success, but I have a hell of a lot of chances, and I've learned a lot and made great friends in each of my three cycles. I don't fear losing a job-- done that, bounced back-- but stagnation is terrifying.
In the long term, working on your own projects using the latest technologies and latest editions of popular languages, and having projects to show for it, will give you much more experience and credibility than working at a company for the same amount of time.
Over the years, I'm sure early adapters of Java, .Net, Ajax, Rails, Django, and Objective C did not have a hard time finding jobs. Companies typically try to convert existing developers to use new languages, and an employee hired for this knowledge will be an expert. A startup using the latest technologies will want to hire employees who already possess this knowledge. Finally, a user experimenting with new technologies might decide that he or she is so far ahead of companies who are still using old technology that he or she should start a business.
Bullshit. For every single Paul Graham there are hundreds of entrepreneurs living in abject poverty, wondering how they'll feed their kids or where they get the money to pay the mortgage.
You're taking a very small subset of extremely bright, assertive go getters and insinuating that this is the norm. It is not, and statistics show this.
Thanks for your reply. You will note that I was specifically writing about software entrepreneurs who learn and prove knowledge of the latest technologies and latest languages. They will never have a tough time finding a job if they needed to. Even before I edited and added onto my post, I mentioned that.
In my opinion, if they're broke, assuming they are software developers who use the latest technologies to create live projects they can demonstrate (and not some other kind of entrepreneur), then maybe they should "cash in" on their earned skills and work for a while.
Also, having lots of obligations requiring a steady income are needs that should be taken care of first. Everybody is in a different financial situation short term, but the fact is that if you give a startup a go, and use the latest technologies, you won't have a problem finding a job if you need to.
As to at what point a software entrepreneur should put off their ambitions and work at a related company instead for a while, that will depend on the startup and personal circumstances, so it is out of scope for my posts.
They will never have a tough time finding a job if they needed to
Talk to someone who went through the dot bomb. There was a while there where good programmers were having difficulty.
Software entrepreneurs can fail just as hard as any other entrepreneur can. It's hard work running your own business, even in software. This gets even harder and harder as you get older.
Even PG says to start young, when you don't have any massive responsibilities. The older you get, the higher your "minimum income" level goes.
Thanks for the clarification. It sounds like your example is somebody who is older, with family and kids to support, a mortgage or other startup debt to pay off, and going through the dot com bomb, as a counterpoint to my statement.
Again, it does not disprove that in the long term, somebody who is a software entrepreneur who learns the latest technologies and has visible projects they've completed, will not have a difficult time finding a job. I am not saying the salary will be huge or that you won't need to relocate, or that there won't be a bad time in the short term.
But in the long term, somebody who is competent will learn way more than they would have during the same time they would at a job, and if they have projects they can show off, they will not have trouble finding a job to pay the bills--that's the entire scope of my post.
Would it be correct to say that how entrepreneurs handle their personal and company funds are out of scope for what I said? In the long term, you will learn more from working on your own projects, and if you can demonstrate your projects, will have no problem finding a job (no more than any other person competing for the same job.)
Therefore, when competing for a job, somebody who has put to use new technologies that companies want to incorporate, and can demonstrate this, will likely do very well in the hiring process.
Also, when companies lay people off in a bad economy, it doesn't always mean that they can't afford to have that many people. They may actually want to hire experts (at a reasonable price), knowing that during a bad economy, there might be some looking for a job.
The older you get, the higher your "minimum income" level goes.
I'm 25, and my "minimum income" is ridiculous, and probably higher than most 40-year-olds'. The reason is that I live in New York. If I left New York, it would drop by a factor of 2-3, since rent is my biggest expenditure by far.
In practice, many people will be reducing their "minimum income" over the next ten years, because these financial problems are not going away any time soon.
I've also known grad students who've raised families (2-3 kids) on two student stipends. It can be done. Of course, they'll have to "sell out" and work for McKinsey in 15 years, when their kids are entering college, but that's far off in the distance.
You treat it like a foregone conclusion that sooner or later we'll all be married with children. I personally cannot think of a single logical reason for bringing another human being into this world. Sounds like an easy way to ruin a perfectly fun life.
I jumped into the middle of this discussion, so I'm not commenting on whether the Bulverism is applicable here.
But I really wanted to thank you for pointing it out. I've recently become more aware of how easily my own thinking can get knotted up in opinions, and get distracted from the facts or the actual problem. I have a limited short-term memory, and the issue itself can get pushed out - temporarily or permanently - without me realizing it (especially when emotions engage).
Although this is going to offend many people, I think a lot of people have kids because it is a dated decision, and people are forced to act before they are really ready to decide if it's the right path for them. The human lifespan's short, and fertility/gamete quality declines. Most people aren't economically ready to have kids until 30... but also want to make it to their grandkids' weddings, and given the reality of the human lifespan, this leaves a very short window in which the decision can be made, by people who are really too young to make it.
then what to do when your "secure" job is downsized because company can't get money because greedy criminals broke stock market and now you can't pay for your mortgage so those same people kick you out of house?
If history teaches us anything, it's that economic reality changes. In the 18th century, the optimal size of the firm was small. There were many independent artisans. In the 19th and most of the 20th, industrialization occurred and firms faced increasing returns to scale. Soon, the mega-corporate-conglomerate ruled the world. Now, information technology means that even small teams can be highly productive. Billions dollar investment funds are run by 20 people.
It is not unreasonable for young people to wish for or strive for the return of the artisan age.
You'd have to know Matt to know this, but he's about as unentitled as you get. His brash confidence is the deliberate brash confidence of the WC Fields variety, not the naive sort that comes from inexperience.
Well said. The funny thing is, there's nothing about this argument unique to our generation. Both the WSJ article & Matt's response could've been written at any time in the past, and perhaps at any time in the future.
Indeed, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I don't think that's true. There's been a fundamental shift away from working one job all of your life (as our grandparents did) and being more of a free-agent that could never have been said before.
Our grandparents are just one example I don't think most people started and ended the Great Depression working for the same company. I think today's world is much closer to the historical norm of lot's of small to mid sized companies fighting it out.
> working one job all of your life (as our grandparents did)
You know, you hear this all the time that people used to work one job all their lives. But I keep my 88 year old grandmother company often and she doesn't shut up, relating extensive biographies of the family tree going way back. If anything it sounds like major career changes were more common in the past. You definitely get that impression reading about colonial America circa the revolution.
I think maybe there was a brief post-war period where it was true? William Whyte's "The Organization Man" talks about the era.
I wouldn't be surprised - there are numerous assumptions in American culture about how things have "always been" that are only really accurate from the post-WW2 era on. The GI bill led to substantially higher college enrollment, which in turn had a tremendous influence on pretty much all white-collar jobs.
The "one company for one's whole life" era lasted... significantly less than an average human lifetime. It certainly wasn't present during the Great Depression. It began in the 1950s and ended in the '80s, but even then, people were more mobile than was often said. The difference is that the ideal was to have a long, monotonically increasing career at one company-- it didn't always happen that way-- and that a person who shifted was implicitly assumed not to be successful. A major change the '80s brought about was a recognition that most people's involuntary job changes were through no fault of their own.
Well-to-do 18th-century people prized generalism and aspired to be polymaths. The professions emerged in the 19th century, but these were structured as lifelong careers, not jobs, run by individuals who would develop reputations. Corporate paternalism didn't emerge until the World War I era, when workers moved into company towns, and more services (e.g. medical care) were provided, directly or indirectly, by the employer than the community.
"... I don't have the answers, and I don't have much confidence in anything, outside of myself. That said, if I know one fact about the world, it's that very few of the self-confident 22-year-olds that I meet are going to get rich from their big brains and hard work ..."
You will gain answers with time. Your confidence will grow. But chances are if your average "self-confident 22yo" lives in a first world country they are already rich surviving the ardor an diseases of childhood, being feed enough to grow. To have the opportunity to be educated enough to read and write. All that time living in a relatively stable environment.
"... In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be ... the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youth and arrogance are eternal companions ..."
I'll take that back. Probably one of the most astute things I've read this week.
Precious essay or not, his larger point stands: we are more on our own than our parents or grandparents. The Republican party and the ultra-conservative movement of the past 25 years has created a new wild west; it's every man for himself.
BTW this is not just for Matt's "Nintendo" generation (Y, I presume). It goes for aging generation X, as well.
It’s also largely intellectual activity, which is considerably more fatiguing than routine physical tasks. Jobs in information technology might look a lot easier than manual labor to an outside observer, but they’re not. Burnout sets in much faster...
Has Matt ever worked full-time in a factory or as a cashier at a busy grocery store? Nobody is disputing that intellectual work is challenging, but most physical labor involves a level of soul-sucking tedium and repetition that I'd suspect anyone with a college-to-cubicle story can't even imagine.
I'd add that my experience is that these environments are also often ruled with a totalitarianism that makes the worst office job look positively cozy.
I worked at McDonalds for $5.15/hour for a year in high school. I was satisfied because it was better than working as a bagger for the same wage, minus "union dues."
These jobs aren't so terrible as they are numbing. I don't remember hating these places, I don't remember them at all. I don't remember much of my youth before 18. That part of my life is simply gone.
I was a cashier for two years at two different places, then was a checkout supervisor for one. Ran a meat counter, worked the floor at a Sam's club and a Home Depot, and ran a restaurant, all before the age of 22.
One day I was having a discussion with a cashier in my neighborhoord. A kind woman in her fifties, who started this job before I was born. She used to be always cheerful and serviable, but not on that particular day. The conversation went like this :
"- What's going on ?"
"- I had an awful streak of horrible clients today, it really got me down"
"- Ah... Yes, I know what you're talking about, I used to be a cashier myself at X last year and some clients were just unbearable, I understand your pain."
"- Sure, but I'm not quitting my job in 6 months."
"- ..."
I just read your bio on a poker site. I saw that The Big Lebowski is your favorite movie. As someone a bit younger than you and who had his fair share of dirty jobs as well, I suggest you to rewatch another Cohen brothers classic : Barton Fink. Hell is not Hell when you're only a guest.
It's hard to know whether you're going to be a guest or not. Also, the cashier you reference chose to be a permanent cashier. She's nothing more than the product of her own decisions in response to the environment around her.
This essay is just silly. It makes it sound as if our generation is the first to invent entrepreneurship. Millions of our parents' generation own their own businesses. Entrepreneurship isn't a new discovery. My dad started a software company in the 70s. He didn't have hacker news and y combinator. He wasn't even in silicon valley. And guess what, he did have access to information. Maybe he wasn't inundated by it like we are today, but sometimes I question the value of spending so much time everyday consuming internet "wisdom".
Matt advocates working for oneself is an undisputed ideal, as if it would be better to be an independent owner of a pizza shop than an early (or even not so early) employee of Google.
I think it's likely our generation will have to work harder than our parents and for much less rewards. We have quite a mess to clean up. We'll have to pay for a 10 trillion dollar debt, endless wars, and a generation of retired baby boomers to support in social security and medicare. All this with a declining manufacturing industry and a totally dysfunctional financial system. Contrary to Matt's conclusions, our parents have had it relatively easy.
Starting your own company is an awesome thing to do but let's not fool ourselves into thinking we're privileged geniuses for doing so.
As someone at the older end of the Millenial generation, and someone who grew up in Europe and now lives in North America, I could only read the WSJ article - and all the comments - with some amusement.
What I really read - underneath the "durn kids" feeling - was a generation waking up to the fact that having some of the lowest vacation time in the industrialized world (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_statutory_minimum_emplo...) might not be such a great idea, and a generation of older employers not being happy about it.
While I definitely agree with the general sentiment in the post and here on HN (in fact, I recently tried to quit my job and they had to entice me with better work and more money, and the CFO actually tried on a few lines like the ones in the WSJ article), but I'm afraid we might be looking at this through the lens of privilege.
A lot of our peers, whether through lack of work, ability, ambition etc, don't have the same options we do (lots of money, lots of jobs, interesting work), but are still very much stuck in the old-style world.
This doesn't mean you didn't work hard to be in this position, just that our sentiments are probably limited to the top end of our generation and wouldn't make much sense to a lot of other people.
One finished a graduate degree in English last spring. She is now working as an admin assistant for $28k a year. People told her that she had too much of a sense of entitlement, when all she wants is a job doing what she's now very qualified to do: write. She is getting a teaching certification because public schools hire English majors and apparently no one else does.
The other has three degrees in business (two associates and a bachelors). He wants to be a manager, so he's applying for jobs as a manager. He has no experience (he worked as a sacker in a grocery store for about five years, but that's it), no skills (other than supposedly "management"), but since he has a degree in management, he thinks he can just jump right into it. Of course, this hasn't worked out for him so far, so he's working phone support for an ISP and living with his parents, rather than take a job beneath him (I've actually gotten him a higher-paying job at my company, and he didn't even show up for the interview).
One of these people has a pretty large sense of entitlement, the other one just doesn't want to use her masters degree as a secretary.
If you'll think about it, there is actually a huge difference.
The comment I replied to was talking about how as (mostly) programmers, we have a skewed perspective on the job market. Most people in our age range don't get the kinds of job offers we do, and are badly underemployed.
She took a job she was overqualified for anyway, because there was nothing else available, and hates it. He decided to mooch off his parents because he was entitled to a management job (he makes a small amount of money, but spends it all on entertainment).
Being underemployed, and realizing it, is not a sense of entitlement. Asking for handouts because you can't get the job you want (when others are available) is.
> People told her that she had too much of a sense of entitlement, when all she wants is a job doing what she's now very qualified to do: write.
There are plenty of jobs for tech-writers. Advertising and marketing is a lot of writing and pays well.
If she can write and can't find a job writing, then either she's in a "no employment" zone or she's unwilling to write what other people will pay her to write.
Yes. The average liberal arts major makes almost $9,000/year off their writings. You can make twice that much by rehearsing the phrase "Would you like fries with that, sir?".
The sad thing is, that blurb should be read in the beginning of every English class. Writing, like music, is a "night gig" for 99% of the people passionate about it. You still need a day job to cover your rent and lifestyle.
But even they're better off than their parents. Their parents toiled away their lives in abject poverty while someone else benefited from their labor. The lower end of our generation spends their lives playing Guitar Hero and various extreme sports in abject poverty while nobody really benefits from their labor.
At least from a selfish perspective, that's a vast improvement. I'd rather be poor and have fun than be poor and work all the time. In fact, I'd prefer it to being rich and working all the time.
Neither are as good as having fun and making a decent (or beyond) living, especially if you can make working fun too. So yeah, I'm lucky to be in that group.
I think you've got your generations a little mixed up.
Millenials are children of boomers. Boomers in no way have spent their lives "in abject poverty while someone else benefited from their labor".
Boomers spent most of their lives getting high and partying in the ultimate self indulgence. That's why their kids are the way they are.
Now, if you're X, you're parents were kids during either the depression or the war, and as such the values from those times run strong in you. (Added to that the fact that you're always eating the boomers scraps)
I am not sure that being poor and playing Guitar Hero wears less on the nerves than being poor and working, in the long run. I admit I've never tried either.
A lot of our peers, whether through lack of work, ability, ambition etc, don't have the same options we do (lots of money, lots of jobs, interesting work), but are still very much stuck in the old-style world.
The "old-style world" is falling apart. It will die within our lifetime, possibly soon, and those who depend on it may be stranded, but a lot of them will become ambitious and entrepreneurial when they realize that corporate paternalism n'existe pas. As for differences in levels of talent between HNers and the "hoi polloi", the natural component of the difference between us and them is much smaller than we tend to think it is. Even the "average" human mind is incredibly capable.
This country went from a hideous economic depression to full employment in less than a decade, and can do it again. People are extremely mutable.
I'm an Xer (75). Let me just say that based on my experience, which includes a few years in management, the WSJ article is an accurate and fair description of the millennial generation (from a purely stereotypical pov).
Now, that's not to say I disagree with Matt. He does however use many counter arguments that are more applicable to Xers than millenials (Yers). Yer's have never seen much of economic downturn, and the "meager, middle class lifestyles" they been living are have showered them with seemingly endless material wealth.
I think Matt has misread most of the WSJ article, to be honest.
I don't doubt that the description is fair, but I think that it comes down to this: if a few entitled slackers expect 6 figure salaries straight out of college, that's their problem, but if an entire generation of would be slaves aren't eagerly strapping on the chains, that's management's problem.
As a gen Yer, I got the sense from the article (and I'm sure this is full of bias) that the onus was on me to "shape up." I think the exact opposite is true, that management is going to have change expectations (which the article does address).
I didn't get that sense to be honest. WSJ's audience is mainly boomers in management roles, not you. (although there's an example of what the article is trying to say!)
I agree though that this isn't your problem at all, and I think you're seeing that shift with the notion of flex time, etc. These things only exist as a response to your generation. Xer's would have loved them, but we never had the numbers.
And that's the other key: your numbers. The last generation to cause this much havoc in the workplace was your parents'. I think it's funny that it's them that will need to deal with the fruits of their labour, to be honest. :-)
And it's interesting you point out that the parents will have to deal with their own children, because it's probably the case that children of the "management elite" (who are now facing a problem) are likely to be the ones with the greatest sense of entitlement, as opposed to say the kid whose dad was a construction worker.
I think both matt and the wsj are off. It's not about a sense of entitlement or superior productivity (which I don't believe for a minute). The wsj "brat" characterization doesn't match the "lazy" characterization I've more commonly seen.
The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has. They know they won't see a dime of their substantial FICA withholdings. They know they will not ride another bull market to retirement and collect government checks. Perhaps at some level they have even sensed the precarious state of the dollar and the potential futility of trying to squirrel away wealth. Why work hard when the government will tax or inflate most of it away, and you're unlikely to get good compensation in the first place?
The older generations are too invested in the system to reach similar conclusions. (Though it's interesting that doctors and lawyers are leaving the professions in droves.) It's the psychology of sunk costs. Asking around about social security is highly illustrative. A large fraction of young people will come right out and say SS is probably going to collapse in coming years. Very few people in their 40s will admit to this obvious truth.
This pattern where the younger generation senses the jig is up and gives up the struggle before their elders can admit it is not rare. You can see the same thing in Japan. You saw it in the Soviet Union before the fall.
The real story is that the younger generation doesn't want to work hard because at some subconscious level they understand that the current system will not continue and will not reward hard work as it has.
Pundits said exactly that about Generation X in the 90s. They turned out to be mistaken, as you are.
Social security is not going to collapse unless the rest of the US goes first. It's no more an "obvious truth" than "global temperatures are going to rise 10 degrees by 2100." Yes, it could happen, but only if we do nothing policy-wise to fix it, which is unlikely.
Medicare is another story. Look at the this graph to get an idea of the difference:
It was a little tangential, and making 100-year predictions about global warming probably set off someone's troll-o-meter (wasn't me). Don't worry about 0 or -1; it's usually just a gentle reminder to be polite in these discussions.
(Note: nothing annoys people more than commenting on moderation instead of the main article.)
Don't mistake Entitlement for Ambition either. Ambition isn't walking into a company and expecting to be well-paid with a lax dress code and ample time off. Ambition is starting your own company and making something you know will be awesome.
I'm 28, and I've worked with some of these millenials. They talk a big game, but they have no follow-through. All I hear is about how awesome they are and how they grew up with technology and are so productive compared to the crusty older generations. But all I see are a bunch of kids waxing rhapsodic in a mirror lined echo chamber while the rest of us get something done.
Ambition isn't walking into a company and expecting to be well-paid with a lax dress code and ample time off.
What I've noticed about "my generation" is approximately the following:
The best have a strong desire to work-- to be productive, to keep improving their skills, and to develop their careers at a rapid rate. They're willing to do grunt work, but only if they learn from it (and hopefully, can automate it so that they don't have to do it in the future). They have no loyalty to institutions and very little to individuals aside from close friends; their loyalty is to their projects and education.
The worst of our generation are lazy and yet have the same prima donna attitude. They're annoying. On the other hand, their most damaging trait is their laziness rather than arrogance, and our generation doesn't seem to have fewer or more lazy people than any other. So this isn't really a flaw that is particular to any specific generation.
People like the WSJ are angry about the former set of people: talented people who value growth and productivity over playing nice and paying dues. In essence, they're angry that they can't find the hot girl who thinks she's ugly.
Your best share the traits of the best of every generation. Because they don't fit even for whatever reason.
Your worst is your vast majority. And it is the arrogance that breed the laziness. They already know they are awesome and deserve all this stuff, so why aren't people just giving it to them already. Not to mention, the WSJ article seems to imply that there is a high reward/low risk expectation from these people.
And what you say about "talented people who value growth and productivity over playing nice and paying dues" is nearly the same traits that made up the stereotypical "arrogant computer person".
Bravo Matt Maroon! Bravo! That was the PERFECT rebuttle to the WSJ article in every way, strong, accurate and pointed. I felt great reading this, every sentence or two I found myself nodding my head in agreement.
Yeah, the article has too much self congratulation. I do think matt's right about our capabilities, but the whole attitude doesn't help things. We need to keep our ambition and drive, but drop the sense that people need to bow to our whims. It is much more effective to learn our work environments and how the system works, and work that to our advantage.
In short, both generations make the same mistake. Both treat their management like parents, and are dependent on them. Consequently, they both use children's strategies to get their way. One goes the goody two shoes route and the other goes the pouty route.
Same here. Amazingly well written post.
A experience for myself was that I could relate so closely to the post and the sentiments even though I sit here in India.
My parents who fall into the majority middle class educated white collar segment have toiled their 35+ years of work experience hoping for a rosy day, which they would have never seen if we, trophy kids had not changed our attitude and ambition.
PS: Even here miles apart our parents dealt with us - trophy kids - in the exact same way described on wsj - lot of appraisals & proud moments, challenging higher achievement all through.
Another interesting connection I do feel is the outsourcing mundane tasks to India part, though it happens in-house or the company next door. Which implies in India there is a gray segment of the generations that exists.
What's up with this "war of the generations" you have in the US? It seems to me you have terms for every possible obscure group or phenomenon related to cultural differences between parents and their kids. Everyone blames everyone for something: being ungrateful, snobby, fickle, controlling, etc, etc. It's worse than anything I have ever seen. Seriously, why?
It's paradoxical that some of your age groups blames a younger group for things they themselves did when they were younger. How can you complain about the work ethics of your grandkids when you spent five years high, wandering around at rock festivals?
American culture baffles me in so many ways. Someone should write a book about all the major cultural directions and conflicts in the US, but it would probably be a massive read.
(Building) Architecture may be an anomaly to Matt's belief that the new generation is better, but I've noticed a precipitous decline in ability of graduating architecture students over the last decade. Its so bad now that I simply can't afford to hire anyone right out of school because the cost to my firm of both extensive training and loss from mistakes is so high. The problem I see is architecture schools focusing on trends in aesthetics such as deconstruction rather than teaching students how to actually build a building. This is probably different than CS schools in that the deconstruction philosophy necessitates divorcing building from reality, which hopefully there are no parallels for in CS programs.
Architecture has been in awful state for the past 80 years. Just compare buildings built in the 20th century to those in the 19th century. My girlfriend is getting her masters in architecture now and it's an awful waste of money. She's learned a lot about "aura" and generating weird building designs from algorithms, but precious little about how to create buildings people would enjoy living in. The schools should be shut down and boarded up before they do any more damage, and the architecture profession should return to an apprenticeship system.
The new trend in using algorithms to design buildings is a fancy way to divorce the building design from the problem at hand - a classic principle of deconstruction.
As far as the state of architecture in general over the last 80(!) years, I disagree with you. The current philosophical trend is deconstruction which is making some architects adhering to that philosophy quite trendy and famous, but there are many other architects who could care less about the latest trend and pursue their own work with a different core philosophy (myself included).
In most cities or college campuses the older buildings are all more beautiful than buildings built after 1940, at least to my eye. The worst are the brutalist and modernist buildings of the 50's and 60's.
"Beautiful" is a concept completely lost in Architecture in trends dating back many decades. I am a big fan of the beautiful, as are some other architects, but the general trend has been to not even consider the idea for quite a while. The most trendy thing now is sustainable building - also having nothing to do with the beautiful and in many cases detrimental to the idea.
Another way to look at this is as long as it's trendy to make art that ignores the beautiful, so too will architecture ignore the beautiful. It has to do with culture and philosophy, and fortunately there are still some people who desire beauty in their buildings and demand it from their architects, but not nearly enough.
Indeed, sustainability is the new trend. However, recently I came across a random blog comment that noted that 19th century buildings were far more energy efficient:
But look at lower Manhattan and all the traditional pre-war New York skyscrapers . . . in fact, look at any great pre-war building . . . they are all 10x more energy efficient than any modernist structure.
They tended to have thick masonary walls and windows that opened. (That's why people had paperweights). They were also more slender and indented than the sheer glass slabs that the "less is more" crowd have forced on us.
Traditionalists like Ernest Flagg and Sanford White were building for natural ventilation and energy conservation because there was no alternative. And they managed to solve this problem with soul-soaring art that was funtional and profitable.
Thom Mayne is attempting to invent something that had already been perfected generations ago but discarded in the name of "progress." But isn't that so often the case. If he weren't so self-absorbed he might have learned something from his elders.
I agree that the new SF Federal Building is really hideous looking, but it has some state of the art sustainability features that far surpass the good old days. Could this have been an attractive building with those same features? Sure, but the trend followers want it this way - ugly.
FvB is on the right track, I think. It is not the style itself, but the interaction between the style, the culture and the political system, that created the problem.
Perhaps modernism is so successful because it's so hard to do well. It's a classic academic fuck-you: create an unsolvable problem and then solve it. Can you build a beautiful building out of flat, bare concrete? I can. Guess my SAT must be higher than yours. Pity about that, poor chap.
It's pretty easy to see how this essentially repellent attitude can thrive in a New Class world, where academic accomplishment is the only legitimate form of social status. It's also easy to see how the emperor's new clothes syndrome developed, and so many second-rate buildings, in which the subtle elegance was so subtle as to be nonexistent, got built.
Innovative architecture doesn't have to mean ugly architecture - just as innovative furniture doesn't (always) mean ugly furniture. But as long as architectural decisionmakers are juries and committees rather than eccentric, Randish corporate tycoons, Dilbert is here to stay. Playing by the New Class rules gives us New Class buildings - the architecture we deserve.
An extreme theory, but after spending a lot of time hanging around academia, I'm inclined to agree.
My girlfriend is just graduating as an architect. She just likes very modern or minimalistic designs. I do not think she appreciates classic buildings or decoration. To me it seems like a big loss. But I am only a software engineer.
I think the overall "fail" rate of new buildings have gone up even as better tools have become available. Now we can debate what's a failing design, but when a building needs significant work within 20 years of being built I think is a strong indicator, and at every level this has been going up.
I think the idea of deconstruction has promoted the idea that the architect is supposed to pick what a building looks like and as soon as people approve his design his job is basically over except for the building phase.
My cousin studied architecture at Cooper Union from '97-'99 but left because he couldn't stand deconstructionism. That doesn't help train more competent architects, but maybe it's a signal that schools will see.
Wow, if what you're saying is true then the cultural rot made it into a field with practical, physical consequences. That surprises me. When I encountered deconstruction and such things, they were only thriving in environments like literary studies.
On the other hand, architecture as a field (at least the elite stuff) seems to have been moving away from "reality" for such a long time that perhaps this is just going the whole hog.
It seems to me the people who promote these sweeping negative generational generalizations are usually those who have a vested interest in promoting them - this article being a prime example. Hmmm let's see, the WSJ article's arguments were based on:
1.The opinions of a few consultants (who no doubt make at least part of their living offering seminars for the poor managers on how to deal with these 'millenials' as well as seminars for the millenials on how to be effective with their new bosses).
2.Anecdotal evidence from a couple HR people and a couple managers, one "study" by Collegiate Employment Research Institute and MonsterTrak, an online careers site (they did a study - it must be true!)
3.A survey by another career site where even by its own metrics only two dimensions showed a clear majority opinion (higher pay and flexible work schedules - something the workplace has been trending toward for years anyway).
Every generation has been negatively characterized one way or another (the 60's hippies turned into the 70's/80's yuppies, generation "X" aka "the slackers", and now the "millenials" aka "the entitled". Somehow all the generations previous and present did fine and I suspect the same will be of future generations as well.
Yes they do exist. They exist because those people are us. Nobody argues that the WSJ was wrong about the data they collected, but they were horribly wrong with their conclusions and assignment of blame.
I couldn't tell whether this entry was satire or not. It started getting a little over-the-top at "If we seem to have high self-esteem, it’s because we’re better."
Regardless, I don't see why the original article merits a response. There will always be people who don't like you, think you have it too easy, and are willing to paint a whole generation with that brush. Ignore them. There's little you can say that'll make them change their minds, and usually they'll just take your rebuttal as evidence of entitlement or arrogance anyway. Actions speak louder than words.
The Republican Party has spent the last 28 years systematically destroying unions.
The decline of the unions had much more to do with 1) competition from the American south, Mexico, and Asia, and 2) the rise of an American tribute empire, where America's primary export is debt that then gets inflated away. This enriched those connected to the debt creation ( Wall St, government workers at all levels, licensed occupations, people in real estate) but devastated manufacturing.
I've read plenty of both Krugman and others like him that make the same point. I find it entirely very unconvincing. For instance, take the city of New Haven, where I went to college. In the 1950's the city had a thriving industrial base and tens of thousands of high paying union jobs. Over the next few decades many of these businesses collapsed due to competition from lower priced manufacturing in the South and West. Manufacturing jobs went from 43% of New Haven employment to 20% by 1973. The famous Winchester factory went from an employment of 10,000 to around 700 by 1979. In that year there was a massive strike. The strike caused the factory to hemorrhage money and corporate actually ended up selling it for peanuts to the employees. But even as an employee owned enterprise, it failed to make money, and eventually it closed completely. Today Winchester rifles are manufactured on a multinational basis, with some parts being made in Utah and others in Portugal. This same story was repeated across the rust belt, from Detroit to Philadelphia. None of this fits Krugman's story. The unions were strong, they were just asking for more money than the market would pay them (although the market was rigged, as I note below).
If your interested in reading more, I highly recommend Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and its End. Here is an except from Google books that talks about the decline of manufacturing in New Haven: http://books.google.com/books?ei=FgwCSeeYGoLmygS73cy3Cw&...
A lot of the worst downsizing did indeed happen during the Reagan presidency. But that had a lot more to do with Volcker's strong dollar policies, high interest rates, and the resulting rise in the trade deficit, than it had anything to do with Reagan's policies. For the past thirty years, foreign governments and investors have been selling the U.S. cheap manufactured goods and then buying our financial securities. This has decimated our manufacturing sector as domestic producers have been unable to compete with manufactures in countries with an artificially weak currency. But its been a windfall to everyone in the U.S. who borrows money - from leveraged buyout firms to the government itself.
There seems to be much more to it than just that though. From Krugman:
"Second, again like Reagan, Bush has used the government's power to make it harder for workers to organize. The National Labor Relations Board, founded to protect the ability of workers to organize, has become for all practical purposes an agent of employers trying to prevent unionization. A spectacular example of this anti-union bias came just a few months ago. Under U.S. labor law, legal protections for union organizing do not extend to supervisors. But the Republican majority on the NLRB ruled that otherwise ordinary line workers who occasionally tell others what to do -- such as charge nurses, who primarily care for patients but also give instructions to other nurses on the same shift -- will now be considered supervisors. In a single administrative stroke, the Bush administration stripped as many as 8 million workers of their right to unionize."
You can't simply explain the death of unions by saying manufacturing has gone overseas. Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized. Now they're not. Why?
Unions in some sectors are more powerful than ever. Nurse unions in particular are very strong, much more so than they were fifty years ago. The education sector, construction, and government employees at all levels, have very strong unions. If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?
Also, to a large extent occupational licensing has replaced unionization. See this paper for instance: http://ftp.iza.org/dp3675.pdf
Excerpts:
"During the early 1950s, less than 5 percent of the U.S. work force was covered by licensing laws at the state level (Council of State Governments, 1952). That grew to almost 18 percent by the 1980s with an even larger number if federal, city and county occupational licensing is included. By 2000, the percent of the workforce in occupations licensed by states was at least 20 percent, according to data gathered from the Department of Labor and the 2000 Census. ...Our multivariate estimates suggest that licensing has about the same quantitative impact on wages as do unions - that is about 15 percent..."
It's hard to unionize a hair salon, because anyone can open a competing hair salon and undercut the prices. So instead, the hair dressers lobby the legislature to pass occupational licensing laws which create barriers to entry, thus raising the pay.
Those jobs were replaced by retail and service industry ones which, in the 70s, were also largely unionized.
Were they? Places like Sears or Sandy's Drive-In were not unionized in the 1970's. Which service and retail jobs were unionized in the 70's that are not today?
One theory is that its hard to establish unions in industries that are mobile and have low costs to entry. If Walmart employees unionized, it wouldn't be long before a Target moved in and undercut their prices by using non-union workers. Pre-1950, factories were only profitable near rail lines and ports. The rise of the highway system and power lines made factories much more mobile. This allowed factories to move to locations where unions were not so powerful. This is the Doug Rae theory from the book I recommended above. I don't really buy it though.
More likely, I think the high unionization rates of the 1950's were a result of New Deal and World War II corporatism. As the giant "organization man" corporations created by the New Deal gradually declined, so did unionization.
I'm curious. You run a company. If you were interviewing a potential employee, and he announced to you that he might strategically refuse to come to work at some point in order to extract a higher wage, would this make you think twice about hiring him? Do you think the government should make it illegal for you to hold the candidate's comment against him in the hiring process?
If government policies destroyed the unions, why are the public sector unions so powerful?
I think it's mainly just because politicians don't want to shit where they live.
I'm in the capital city of my country, ~50% of the jobs here are public, you can't turn around here without bumping into a government department. As slow and plodding as any public bureaucracy is, if the politicians were to start attacking the public service union, they can say goodbye to any hope of getting anything done, and they know it.
In my country, the early to mid 70's was probably the peak of the left-wing socialist ideal prevailing as the popular paradigm. This scared the hell out of conservatives (of both major parties) and they've been doing their damn best for the last 30 odd years to pull the political spectrum so far to the right that even the left-wing isn't very left-wing anymore. Curtailing the power of unions was part of their strategy. It wasn't just an unintended byproduct of ostensibly peripheral phenomena. And you know, I'd actually have a lot more respect for those guys if they just came out and said: "Yup, we don't like unions and we're trying to gut them for reasons X, Y and Z."
I'm not trying to argue the all in, pro-union line either, but lets call a spade a spade.
I think you're mistaking my comments as pro-union, they're not. It's one of the few areas in which I agree with the Republicans. I very much thank them for their systematic destruction of them.
Nonetheless, that's what they've done. Unions as a whole are much less powerful today than they were 30 years ago, even though some have grown stronger.
Grocery was one area of retail largely unionized. Some still exist under the UFCW, but are being cannibalized by non-union department stores such as Wal-Mart and Target which now both offer groceries.
Just curious - have you read Supercapitalism by Robert Reich? He tries to explain the reasons for the various changes in American capitalism over the past 50 years.
I think you should take a look. I found it pretty interesting. The general idea is that we sacrificed our citizenship for consumerism and the world adapted to people having this new role. It's well written and an entertaining read, even if you disagree with the points.
Nonsense. Unions have been targeted ever since the civil rights movement; the labor movement gave rise to organized communities of (African-American) workers eager to get rights outside of the shop floor.
Its one of the very reasons the labor movement in this country stays dead. People in power aren't interested in upheaval.
I agree with the general sentiment (no point in having company loyalty, longer hours without a purpose and suit/strict work environment not leading to greater productivity), but the people posting on news.y.c are slightly different from Gen Y'ers as a whole.
First most of us are technology professionals who by the time they started their first job out of college had already had work experience (contracting while in college and in my case, also working while a high school student during the dot-com boom).
We however, tend to gravitate towards Internet and specifically web. Outside of these industries, even in software, there is very little chance to work in the sort of relaxed environment that we work in.
For example, several of my friends studied Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering as undergraduates: they want to do work that is more hardware and algorithm related, to put their education to a use. Nonetheless most of these companies (e.g. Intel) are very much "be there at 8:30, or we'll have a chat" sort of places, where starting salaries are low and advancement is slow.
In the end there are people who are forced to choose between a more relaxed environment and a chance to put their education to a use and work on problems they find really interesting.
Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and ambitious professionals who would love to use their skills in a less rigid environment. Start something other than a web application company and capitalize on this.
(Same holds true for financial companies - many high end finance geeks are now getting layed-off in mass droves -- again, feature, not a bug)
> Note to entrepreneurs: this is a feature; there are lots of young and ambitious professionals who would love to use their skills in a less rigid environment. Start something other than a web application company and capitalize on this.
A lot of this is because of the structure of the industries. Software is as pure intellectual capital as it can get, outside of tenured professorships. As a result, the firm's entire capital base exists in the minds of its employees, and this gives them enormous bargaining power.
Hardware companies take significant physical capital to start, so employees can't just leave and do their own thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious youngsters going into hardware. They can't - not without venture capital and a network of suppliers.
Same goes for financial companies - sorta. In finance, the primary capital base of a firm is its reputation and network of dealmakers. When you're just starting out, you have nothing here, which is why newbie I-bankers work 16 hour days and only get paid in the high 5-figures. But once you've been at it for a couple years, you've built up a network, and those clients are yours, which is why experienced I-bankers rake in the dough and have nice working conditions. They simply have more bargaining power.
| Hardware companies take significant physical capital to
| start, so employees can't just leave and do their own
| thing. That's why you don't see a flood of ambitious
| youngsters going into hardware. They can't - not with
| venture capital and a network of suppliers.
I suppose you meant 'not without'. This is still largely true, but there are also FPGAs and HDLs and simulators: you can do your R&D and prototyping with fairly low costs (and take VC funding by the time you're ready to market and manufacture a product).
You still have a significant point in this respect, however, and what I meant was more along the lines of entrepreneurs could do something to address the problem of "I didn't spend 4-6 years studying engineering to write PHP, MySQL and Javascript" -- ideas that appeal to those who want to solve harder problems (and perhaps problems related to hardware, but solved in software). If you look at openings at places like Intel you'll see they also employ a great deal of people in software functions (from compilers to data mining/machine learning (for manufacturing)).
There are lot of problems outside of social networking / advertising / web content (not that these are bad problems to solve, no offense intended to anyone) that take low capital to get into yet are complex enough to attract a pool of talent that has fewer options.
In finance, the primary capital base of a firm is its reputation and network of dealmakers. When you're just starting out, you have nothing here, which is why newbie I-bankers work 16 hour days and only get paid in the high 5-figures. But once you've been at it for a couple years, you've built up a network, and those clients are yours, which is why experienced I-bankers rake in the dough and have nice working conditions.
I'm sorry, but I've worked on Wall Street, and you couldn't be more wrong.
I-banking analyst positions are for mediocrities full of empty ambition. Workhorses who'll suck up the shittiest tasks and say, "Give me more." Anyone smart who is interested in finance tries to find a hedge fund that'll take him as a quant or trader... or to get an MBA first, Analysts do not usually have these sorts of options; they endure the miserable lifestyle because they, by and large, are not especially talented or qualified people, and they simply wouldn't otherwise be eligible for the exit opportunities (top MBA, private equity) made available by this path.
Third- and fourth-year bankers do not have their a personal client base... not even close. Additionally, it's logistically difficult to "steal" clients; investment banking is an oligarchy and I think it's extremely difficult to start an independent investment bank. It would also be extremely unlikely that a client would switch loyalties based on the movement of a peon VP. Finally, investment bankers don't have decent working conditions until they attain Managing Director level, and that takes about 10-15 years. Your odds of success as a serial entrepreneur over 15 years would be much higher than the odds of making MD before washing out.
The primary capital base of a banking firm is partly its reputation, but largely the money itself, since even the vanilla operations of banking are costly and risky.
Spoken like an arrogant suburban raised kid. Do you know that literally BILLIONS would love to have that "meager middle-class lifestyle"? Did you ever pause to consider the luxuries afforded by a middle class lifestyle. By all sane metrics we live like fucking kings.
The American poor/peasants (75+%) have crappy health coverage, no economic security, overpriced and ugly houses built from makeshift materials, food loaded with hydrogenated oil and high fructose corn syrup, a suburbanized lifestyle that fosters alienation while destroying the environment, and menial, servile jobs with low autonomy, inflexible work schedules, and a meager two weeks' vacation allowance... but a Fucking Shitload of consumer trinkets.
no one forces these people to waste their income on shiny baubles. many MANY people could get by working less if they cut their consumption.
you act as if health coverage, economic security, underpriced nice houses, a healthy diet, complete social adjustment, and happy fulfilling jobs with lots of vacation are an inherent right.
Yeah, i wish we lived in a world of unlimited resources too. But we don't.
I read this as you being so out of touch with reality that you don't think that middle class or hell even lower class suburban living is a life of ease compared to the world average. when you compare it to history it's even better. You have so few worries that you're able to worry about the future (security, health, diet). That in itself is a luxury.
Has there ever been a generation which hasn't claimed "This time, things will be different!"? If you'll look back on what was written caustically about (and in rebuttal by) the Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers, I'm not seeing much difference now.
There are going to be a few of us in each generation which set out to be entrepreneurs and will tenaciously stick by that world-view our entire lives. The readers of this board are a self-selecting group (and aren't necessarily representative of the latest set of graduates) but many will still end up employee grist for the cubicle mill after their first dozen major setbacks.
There have been some (like X) that were too small to cause large change due to much larger numbers of the previous generation still being in the work force.
Marijuana may not be legal yet (in most states) but a lot has changed.
On Whole Foods and the return to the cities, that's a reaction against mistakes made by prior generations. Processed food and suburbia are falling out of favor not because the Boomers fought against them in the '60s, but because all generations are recognizing them as harmful and moving away from them.
What happened with the Boomers and drugs in the '60s is a blip on the radar. That generation is now the greatest obstacle in repealing the War on Drugs, which draws its support from moralistic, reactionary Boomers. Xers, as a general rule, are too pragmatic to dump hundreds of billions of dollars into ineffectual and damaging moral pissing contents.
In fact, the naively utopian druggies of the 1960s fucked up a lot of opportunities for discovery. Humanity's knowledge of powerful and potentially very helpful (but also dangerous when misused) chemicals like LSD and psilocybin is decades behind where it should be, since the illegality of these substances also entailed a research ban. LSD/psilocybin research was considered completely respectable in the 1950s and '60s-- LSD's inventor was a respected chemist who used it experimentally but rarely, and lived to be 102. This was before a small set of clowns, driven by half-baked knowledge and clouded judgment, started publically recommending these drugs to everyone. That sort of idiocy, of course, hasn't gone away; these days, we have moronic 17-year-olds posting salvia videos on Youtube... although that is definitely not a drug to take likely.
Frankly, I don't get this attitude. Who is fighting Matt and his generation? Life is at is always has been, business and ambition is as it always has been.
If you want to strike it out your way, then do so, it's not a fight and nobody will battle to stop you. Just do it in silence, calmy and as if it is perfectly normal, because it is.
The battle is in your head. You see everyone working in cubicles, so your mind is telling you that that is where you should be, but your heart is telling you something else. The struggle is inside you, outside, nothing and nobody really cares what you do with yourself.
Boy, "better educated than previous generations"? Give me a bloomin' break.
There hasn't been any seriously good education in this country (except at a few places like Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, CA and the two St. John's campuses) since about 1880 when the good Dr. Conant (president of Harvard) decided that science trumps all, and started heavily diluting what was a fairly decent liberal arts education.
Perhaps "better educated" in the sense that if I want to learn how something works, I can do so - I am not limited by whether or not I am in college, or what is available to learn at my college, or the quality of professors - I am limited only by my desire to learn.
I wonder if the ability to absorb new technology has driven neoteny in us, since our beginning?
Maybe the next generation is always evolutionarily fitter than the previous generation, due to being able to absorb new technology more easily because (1). uncluttered and unconfused by the old technology, and (2). immature humans are simply better at learning (the immature young of many species have more plastic brains - they soak up patterns like sponges).
Within that next generation, those who are better at absorbing technology (i.e. ways of doing things), and those that stay in that immature-stage of rapid learning for longer, will be more successful at surviving and passing on their genes. They don't have to be great at it, just better at it than others who can't absorb it as well (or for as many years).
i guarantee Matt will cringe when he reads this in years to come. some valid critiques of the worker-bee lifestyle, but a completely off the mark sense of true utility, value and cross-generation contribution to such. any small amount of serious study of historical "effort" would cause an about face hear. there is little else to say.
I wrote one of those "advice for college graduates" articles after only working for 2 years -- 1 year in a cube farm where you were a thing, not a person, and another in larger company that gave people offices, windows, had wellness programs -- basically gave a shit. People have told me that I would "regret my writing X s/months/years from now" but I still don't.
I (still) wouldn't willingly work in a cube farm. If they're so pressed/cheap for space, I'll gladly work from home instead.
matt, really well done, right or wrong the points are strong and presented in a very interesting manner. I've read a lot of your blogs here on yc news and have rarely agreed with you, in Maroon vs. WSJ article, I'm all in on Maroon.
Ya'll made me feel old today :-) I thought it was us Xers who were the rambunctious "zomg, how will they ever function in the work place!" hyper-ambitious folk making the boomers shake their heads...
I'm not saying that Matt is wrong, or that the WSJ is right, but this essay was just a bit too...precious...for my tastes.
I don't have the answers, and I don't have much confidence in anything, outside of myself. That said, if I know one fact about the world, it's that very few of the self-confident 22-year-olds that I meet are going to get rich from their big brains and hard work. If history teaches us anything, it's that most smart people will fail -- repeatedly and painfully. So, while it's not the right time for the adults to shake their walkers at the children for running on the lawn, perhaps it would be prudent for the kids to hold back on the self-congratulatory essays, in anticipation of the day when it all goes pear-shaped?
I'm not much older than Matt, but even I can detect a distinct generational shift in attitude toward work; I know where the WSJ editorial is coming from, even if I don't agree with its conclusions. And while I'm sure that the brash 20-somethings that I know believe that self-investment and autonomy are the keys to avoiding their parents' fate, that probably has more to do with the abject failure of all previous models of work, than the proven success of this one.
In ten years, some of you will be rich, successful and powerful. Most of you -- despite all of your hard work and independence -- won't be. Which brings me to another thing that the curmudgeons say: the more things change, the more they stay the same. Youth and arrogance are eternal companions.