Narcissistic College Graduates In the Workplace? 1316
SpuriousLogic writes "I work as a senior software engineer, and a fair amount of my time is spent interviewing new developers. I have seen a growing trend of what I would call 'TV reality' college graduates — kids who graduated school in the last few years and seem to have a view of the workplace that is very much fashioned by TV programs, where 22-year-olds lead billion-dollar corporate mergers in Paris and jet around the world. Several years ago I worked at a company that did customization for the software they sold. It was not full-on consultant work, but some aspects of it were 'consulting light,' and did involve travel, some overseas. Almost every college graduate I interviewed fully expected to be sent overseas on their first assignment. They were very disappointed when told they were most likely to end up in places like Decater, IL and Cedar Rapids, IA, as only the most senior people fly overseas, because of the cost. Additionally, I see people in this age bracket expecting almost constant rewards. One new hire told me that he thought he had a good chance at an award because he had taught himself Enterprise Java Beans. When told that learning new tech is an expected part of being a developer, he argued that he had learned it by himself, and that made it different. So today I see an article about the growing narcissism of students, and I want to ask this community: are you seeing the sorts of 'crashing down to Earth' expectations of college grads described here? Is working with this age bracket more challenging than others? Do they produce work that is above or below your expectations of a recent college grad?" We discussed a similar question from the point of view of the young employees a few months back.
Re:They give you a false impression in school.. (Score:4, Informative)
And there is good money in being a developer if you work hard. EE is no easier.
What's wrong with Decatur? (Score:3, Informative)
At least while they're there they can watch some Thunderball [uprightcitizens.org]!
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it was over fifteen years into my career before I was sent anywhere interesting. And even then, you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
What most new college grads don't seem to understand is that everyone in the industry wants to do the fun stuff and go the fun places, and as a college grad, everyone in the industry has more experience than you do. You have to pay your dues like everyone else.
I hve not seen this (Score:3, Informative)
I know this reply isn't particularly exciting, but I can say I have not seen this happen. The grads I meet are excited, interested, and humble. Maybe we just hire the good ones?
Moving beyond "work" (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.whywork.org/ [whywork.org]
See especially:
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html [whywork.org]
"Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act."
See also:
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html [smallisbeautiful.org]
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."
On the other hand:
"Blame It on Mr. Rogers: Why Young Adults Feel So Entitled"
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB118358476840657463.html [wsj.com]
And, extending that theme:
"Blame the Bailouts on Mister Rogers?"
http://emac.blogs.foxbusiness.com/2008/12/12/blame-the-crisis-on-mister-rogers/ [foxbusiness.com]
Maybe there are deeper issues here on all sides? From:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/72330a22bcae8928 [google.com]?
Consider who could pay for food or water (or copyrighted content or patented
processes) in thirty years, if robotics continues to develop just at the
current rate over the last thirty years.
Check out clerks?
"Your supermarket cashier may not know a kiwano from a tamarillo, but
Veggie Vision does."
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_thinkresearch.nsf/pages/machin [ibm.com]...
Cab drivers?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge [wikipedia.org]
Heart Surgeons?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuitive_Surgical [wikipedia.org]
Airline pilots?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopilot [wikipedia.org]
Nurses?
"Robot nurse escorts and schmoozes the elderly"
Re:As a young college graduate... (Score:5, Informative)
You know, Masters and Doctorate programs have nothing to do with the "real world" of non-academic jobs. There IS a lot that you don't learn in college, but you are expected to learn it on the job.
This may be true in the U.S. but its not true everywhere else. In many European countries, like my own home Sweden, a master's degree in engineering is not at all uncommon. In fact, for most engineering jobs a master's degree is required.
Re:Yeah, well, you know what? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
Business travel is awful. You fly somewhere really exciting and interesting - work your ass off, have zero social life, feel incredibly lonely as you wonder around your hotel, then you fly home. The important thing is to make up lots of stories of how great it was, all the crazy people you met, what a great bunch of lads your customers/colleagues are etc..
Re:It isn't their fault. (Score:3, Informative)
Also, rooms are "much bigger" because it's more of a pain in the ass to film on smaller (but conceivably more accurate) sets than it is to film on nice big sets.
Most of the New York apartments I've seen on TV are considerably larger than their real-life counterparts.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
What about those of us who were never told by our parents we were good at anything, rather below average than precious snowflakes. Where do we get our sense of exelence and whatever else makes us think we should be paid huge amounts of moneys?
If you want an edge, pay attention to spelling and grammar. It works amazingly well as a differentiator.
I'm serious. Practice it everywhere; email, Warcraft guild chat, even Slashdot comments. It's surprising how many senior execs equate the quality of one's written language output with intelligence or the ability to do. If you apply a bit of polish in everything you do, then you end up looking polished yourself. When everyone you know can write 1337 code just like you, the only thing that will advance your software career better than fluency in Hindi is fluency in English. Rise to the top -- use a spell checker at the very least.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, it was over fifteen years into my career before I was sent anywhere interesting. And even then, you end up spending so much time actually working that I got very little time to actually go look at the historic European city I was sent to.
It was a bit longer for me, but I was working in OS development. It wasn't until I was finishing up a system for a specific customer that I got to go somewhere interesting, and that was my first international trip for business.
As others have posted, traveling for business can be a real grind: you are typically there to do a specific job as fast as humanly possible. I work all day at the client's office, get dinner, go back to the hotel and catch up on my email with the rest of the company, then go to sleep. Repeat all week and hopefully go home on Thursday so that I'll have Friday for dentist appointments and other personal tasks that can't be done on the weekend.
What most new college grads don't seem to understand is that everyone in the industry wants to do the fun stuff and go the fun places, and as a college grad, everyone in the industry has more experience than you do. You have to pay your dues like everyone else.
The only time I get to do "fun stuff" is when I arrange two back-to-back trips to stay over the weekend. I've done it several times, either by plan or when forced to do so by weather (and a canceled flight). But, trips to "fun places" are rare, especially when your clients are in company towns that have little else to see or do.
However, the part that some don't realize: you aren't going on a trip unless you have the skill, knowledge, or experience to meet a need at the remote location. Travel costs are far too high to send people on junkets. Furthermore, companies are becoming more comfortable with various "tele-presence" systems enabled by the 'Net, whether it's a conference bridge, NetMeeting/GotoMeeting, or even full-scale video-conferencing systems.
Re:The decline of work experience during college. (Score:2, Informative)
You *are* old if you worked during college. These days, college is an expensive, full-time responsibility. Student loans come with high interest rates. The job market is treacherous, to say the least. Failure to obtain a degree, let alone get a job quickly after college, is financially crippling. Working a minimum wage job comes nowhere close to making up for the lost opportunity cost of time that could be spent studying, and making better grades. And college students aren't usually considered for jobs that make more than minimum wage.
I will agree that there is a huge disconnect between academia and the workplace. But it sounds like you aren't aware of the realities of college.
Additionally, speaking as someone who didn't graduate but who has lots of "front-line experience" that you claim to value, somehow I doubt you would even consider me for a job I have been doing quite successfully for over six years.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
Oh, I used to lie awake at nights, dreaming of being sent to Indianapolis. Or was it nightmares.
Little Rock was my favorite.... I actually have enjoyed not traveling for the last 3 years. Airports suck, economy class seats suck, most hotels - even the $250/night variety suck, rental cars suck, the food can be good, and it's interesting to meet the people sometimes, but hardly worth the rest. Side trips can be nice: Big Sur, the Swiss Alps, Oahu, those were cool, but on the whole, I'd rather stay home.
Don't consider college equal to experience (Score:2, Informative)
I'm a Senior Programmer myself, I've been in the business for over 16 years, and I find myself doing a lot of hiring as well.
One of the things I've found most valuable is to ignore the college credentials altogether. I look at previous jobs and look for consistency in what they are working on over the past few years or so. If they are focused on narrow range of tech that is relevant to what I'm hiring for, and that focus has a span of a certain amount of years then I will interview them. Otherwise they get put at the bottom.
In reality most of my best hires have not been college students at all. These are the people that usually learned there stuff early in life and went directly in to pragmatic use of that knowledge. Most of them are either influential in the Open Source community or are Self Employed and loving it.
I've rarely seen any good work come from a college grad. I usually have to spend at least a year to get them up to speed on how this job really works - how to learn the tech they need to know, what it takes to solve the many problems they will continue to face at random, and simply give them the bare tools and knowledge to do the job they were hired to do. In this field you are doing yourself a grave injustice to go to college instead of working. In the years you've spent learning you have lost the good positions to your peers who decided to get a jump on you and are now holding enough experience to make enough to pay for college out of pocket in one year -- yes even in this economy.
I do have one slight caveat to my speech here. I am a business owner as well. I run my own company so that I can get the jobs I want to work in. In essence I work for myself but without the freelancer label :). Oh, and I've never been to college a day in my life. I wasted some money on a correspondence course in Hardware Repair for a few months while I watched computers being outdated by the day it seemed, and I coded because it's what I've done since I was 12. I'm 30 now.
I also run the big projects out there. The ones that IBM, AT&T, Cisco, and Williams F1 Racing hire for. Those are just some of my clients. I'm not trying to be cocky, just trying to point out that this really works -- and it takes a lot of time and effort to get there, so don't waste it in college.
So to summarize, look for the applicants that have enough stable experience in the tech you are looking to use, college grads will probably disappoint you for the first few years but with enough effort on your part with anyone you can apprentice the type of worker you need and they will be what you need indefinitely .. college is a waste of time unless you are already working and don't give up any work experience while learning.
Upward creep in expectations, reversed by crash (Score:5, Informative)
One problem is the "middle class", according to the Wall Street Journal, now starts at around $250K/yr. Few people will ever make that much money. But most college graduates think they will, or at least did until Q4 2008. There's been an upward creep in expectations during the boom. This happens during booms; it happened in 1922-1929. It's not an age thing; it's a boom thing.
The extreme form of this is seen in MBA students. The major MBA schools had (definitely "had") become feeder teams for consulting firms and Wall Street, which, for a while, really was seen as a path to becoming a multimillionaire before turning 30.. In New York City, finance employs 10% of the people, but pays 40% of the salaries. (Well, it did; those are 2007 numbers.)
Being in the robotics field, I saw the better robotics people going off to finance. But recently, I was over at Stanford, and was chatting with a grad student who'd been at Lehman Bros. and was back in computer science, which now looked more stable than finance. The traffic direction has reversed.
We might even see smart people going into manufacturing again. Which we need.
Re:They give you a false impression in school.. (Score:1, Informative)
Gates' family was already rich when he was born, and it made its fortune in law, not technology.
Microsoft got where it is by writing clever contracts -- especially by piggybacking on IBM's monopoly power and then throwing IBM itself under the bus -- not by creating anything novel.
"Life isn't fair" is the credo of somebody who plans not to pay you what he owes you. Get your own lawyer ASAP.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Informative)
I'm going to give you the old-fart speech now, so you may tune out if you are disinterested in how business works.
I pay you $70,000 a year. You benefits and taxes cost me about 40% of your salary; we'll round it up to an even $100k to make the math easy. You will be "working" for about 1800-1900 hours a year - i.e. not on vacation, holiday, or out sick. If you are a gung-ho employee with a nose-to-the-grindstone ethic, of those 1800 you will already be spending about 20% unproductively - getting coffee/soda, going to the bathroom, chatting with co-workers about non-work stuff, surfing slashdot and doing adminstrative tasks like filling out your timecard or getting new pencil lead. We'll throw in a couple of days of training and round your productive hours to 1400. In all likelihood, you won't be 100% productive, especially right out of school. You'll take about 10-15% of a more advanced engineer's time, and a similar amount of your own, to figure out how we do what we do. You'll have to redo some things, sometimes two or three times, before you get it right. Counting the trainer's time against yours, you're going to lose about 40-50% of your time to learning the ropes, and another 10% to down time between assignments (meetings, startup, shutdown, etc). We're down to about 700 actual hours of production in your first year, and closer to 1000 your second and third, peaking near 1200 after that.
So you're "cost" to the company in your first year is about $100/hr. Since we have to add overhead to that it's closer to $130 fully burdened. The company, to survive and be worth the investors time (private or public) should be between 20% and 30% profitable before they pay taxes, so we'll need to bill your time at $160/hr. There are very, very few things which a fresh-out college student can do which is worth $160 and hour. What would you willingly pay a fresh-out college grad $160 an hour for (happy ending jokes aside)?
And you want to take some company time to explore cool stuff? At $1200/day in opportunity cost, I think your manager would much rather go to Aruba.
In case you feel I'm being flip, I'm not. I happen to be an engineer with 20 years of experience, 2 technical degrees, and I run a small consulting engineering firm. Fresh outs, by the way, bill at about $65-75/hr in the real world, and about 50% more in the biggest cities. Senior engineers at my level up to double that. Note that I'm ignoring high and low outliers in those figures; data is not the plural of anecdote. I recently hired a freshout. He's pretty smart, got a double technical major (engr and physics), and writes better than 90% of the engineers out there. He cost me about $25,000 out of my pocket the first year, and will barely break even this year - he might make a few thousand. Next year I'm hoping to make back my initial investment. Three years to break even, and he's not making $70k. That's easier to absorb in a large firm, by the way, due to sheer numbers and volume of workflow. "Fun" isn't really an option unless you land one of the very few cool jobs where all they do is fun stuff, or you work for a firm funded by VCs who don't watch the books (very rare), or your company just has piles of cash flowing in the door and can't figure out where to store it all (Google).
BTW - if you're going to be a good manager of technical people, you'd better be good technically as well as a good manager. You need to know your basic engineering backwards so that when an engineer comes to you and the answer they've come up with is wrong, you can both recognize it is wrong and explain - from basic principles - how to get them back on track. Once you're a manager, you don't have to know the answer to 1%, but you have to be able to get within 10% in your head (without a calculator or a computer). There are lots of bad managers our there, by the way. Don't become one.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:3, Informative)
Although I agree, the perverse thing is I know many people who will only watch the show at the beginning for the absolute train wrecks.
Yes. No one's experience is unique. (Score:2, Informative)
The problem with this kind of "in my day" topic is that it was your day. When I started my "professional" career in 1986, I was one of those dewy-eyed, easily disillusioned, "nothing in use is any good" developers.
It took me about 8 months at my gig before I was totally disabused of this notion. I had loads to learn. True, I could code and debug.
But I couldn't design worth a shit because I didn't understand the business, and I didn't understand user behavour. I didn't understand why my boss would get upset when I'd spend a weekend re-writing something that was working pretty well to begin with (I just didn't like the style), and I didn't quite get office politics.
And I suspect those kinds of things that people don't want to admit to when they're in the middle of saying "This job isn't what I thought it would be."
NO job is ever what you thought it would be, especially your first one. I thought I'd be coding and writing all kinds of neat stuff in my first year. Instead, I learned how to run cables from office to warehouse (not complying with building codes), debugging arcane tax calculations, distributing reports, re-writing MRP and MPS calculations, etc. None of this stuff I'd ever learned in college.
In the end, I accepted the situation, and made the best of it. I learned a ton of useful stuff, and then got out of there as soon as I could line up a better opportunity in what I wanted which was working in commercial software development. But there is no way I could have ever gotten that gig without going through my first job.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Informative)
...and what's so funny is that he gets the reputation of being a horrible, cruel person.
Generally, he simply cuts straight to the point and says what everyone's thinking anyway "You're really a horrible singer and should think of some other career." People are just so shocked by his lack of euphemism and unwillingness to play by certain overly polite rules of social interaction. He's a staggeringly successful businessman in a business that is ephemeral, superficial, and entirely about aesthetics: if he doesn't apply his judgement quickly and accurately, he will not be successful. The people he's reviewing are simply the products he will be promoting, and he's (essentially) given over the ability to choose which product is most likely to be marketable to a giant focus-group-vote.* That takes some courage, so he's GOT to control it by weeding as aggressively as possible. It's NOT a charity, so as much as the poor little crippled kid with the abusive mommy and the amputee daddy might *want* to be a famous singer, pity isn't going to get butts in the seats night after night after night in some mediocre auditorium in Vegas on a 3 year contract. Further, I can imagine it's a HARSH business. It's all about image and everything, and if your precious little snowflake of self-image melts at his criticism, you probably don't have the strength of character to be on stage.
* although I personally believe that after Ruben Studdard, he controls the voting behind the scenes, at least to some degree.
I have only once heard him say something that (by my standards) crossed the line, and that was when he told some woman she was disgustingly fat and an atrocious singer...and she was, honestly. But there IS a concept called tact - this was the selection process and at a certain point simply saying "No, sorry" is enough. (Then again, two points: first, I'd probably be a little cross after listening to 00's of people caterwauling and then being annoyed that you don't 'appreciate' their awesomeness; second, in that sense there is a filter-value to being a little intimidating in the early shows, to weed out the unserious long before they waste his time.)
Re:solution: (Score:2, Informative)
This is why projects like Linux and Android are so important.
Wait, what? How did we get from "college kids are narcissistic" to "Linux and Android are great"? Are you actually going to attempt to blame college kids' shitty attitudes on Microsoft?
Or are you saying Linux is simple?
Seriously...?
you talkin' to me?... (Score:2, Informative)
i am 25 years old, male, have my BS in CS, and have switched jobs 4 times in the last 4 years. i now make twice as much as when i left college, and i am what you would consider a "senior" developer.
i think the narcissism is completely true for my generation, albeit it is the fault of the generation before mine. granted i don't consider myself in the group that is the target of this topic, because i'm not that way. i have my cubicle, i make decent money (less than $100k but more than $60k), and i am pretty content with it. i don't need to go overseas. i am using a 3 year old computer to program with. my job isn't glamorous by any means. i'm sure i will remain this way for a few years, and that's fine with me.
the problem is what the parents of my generation have done.
the generation before mine raised their kids to think that last place is just as much entitled to the benefits of first place. so is it so mind-blowing to think that a kid coming straight out of college is going to think he is entitled to something belonging to those who have worked harder and longer? his baby-boomer mommy and daddy did it to him/her.
i would also say, in my defense, that i think my generation is required to know much, much more than the generation in front of me. the depth and number of languages required by a recent college grad vs that of someone 10-20 years ago is night and day. truth be told, we have to know a ton now to be remotely marketable. that being said, college students should be researching this, and should be preparing themselves for such things.
as far as seniority goes, it is hit and miss. there are some senior guys at my job who are amazingly brilliant, and who i would not doubt for a second. but there are also a lot of stupid, older guys who don't do shit any more because they only know COBOL and maybe FORTRAN and can't comprehend object-oriented languages. they sit, earn $90k a year on their baseline gov't contracts, and ride it out 'til they retire.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:3, Informative)
Putting it in perspective for those who haven't seen the financial side of the business is pretty important. Otherwise, they think they only cost $35/hr (70k/2000hrs). Most people grossly underestimate the overhead required to run a business, until they go out on their own. It's a hard day when you realize that on January 1, you've got to bring in $200,000-$300,000 in business before your office of 4 makes a single penny in profit; or that on the same day, you could fire everyone in the office and you'd still be on the hook for $100,000.
It matters because when you see your billing rate and think either (a) you should get paid more or (b) the company should let you explore more independent research, you need to know that a lot of things happen for that hour of billing to turn into an hour on your paycheck.
I usually get modded down for such revelations. I must admit it depresses me, too, that it takes 8 hours of my salary to pay for 1-3 hours of another, similar professionals time. It just seems so damned inefficient sometimes.
Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay (Score:3, Informative)
If you want to be the next Bill Gates, build a biotech or nanotech business.
There will never be another Bill Gates of the software world. That plane has boarded and left.
On second thought, a fundamental breakthrough in AI might be the ticket. But most widely-used software is thoroughly commoditized.