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.
Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
....mom and dad always told them they were incredibly special, and would do amazing things.
It never occurred to them that there's a hell of a lot more jobs that are sheer drudgery than are a thrill a minute.
In the almost seven years since I graduated from college, I've never been sent overseas for work. I have been sent exciting places like Indianapolis.
But I always had a job during college, too. And because of that, the only thing I expected after graduation was a better salary (but not amazingly better).
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality. Some even a bit more.
Anyway, you get what you teach. Many are taught that capitalism is all and that anything comes at a price. Would it then be strange that the same person puts a price on his/her ability (whether deserved or not is immaterial to the principle).
Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
It isn't their fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
They've been systematically lied to. Western youth has been aggressively fed a vision of fun, laid back jobs that inexplicably pay huge amounts, coupled with an excessive consumer lifestyle.
Remember the apartments they lived in in Friends? Remember what they did for a living? Exactly.
Its why there was so much consumer debt - people thought they were entitled to a lifestyle beyond their means, and were willing to take loans to get it.
Blame the parents teachers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They give you a false impression in school.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You do have a shot:
If you do a good job at one of those for a while, I think there's a decent chance of turning it into a paying job eventually.
This just in! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think no matter what age bracket you fit into, you or someone you knew as a post-student entering the workforce for the first time had their expectations shattered.
It's neither shocking nor news, and it certainly doesn't make you narcissistic. It makes you inexperienced, which is kind of the whole thing, isn't it?
On the other hand, there are more young people succeeding that do make it that far that quickly nowadays, so maybe you could say that the variance is increasing - more people expecting greatness and being shocked, but also more people going directly to greatness.
Furthermore, the example of one prospective employee thinking that what were in reality fairly standard and expected skills made him a unique snowflake doesn't mean he and every other post-student is narcissistic. More likely, in school he WAS cream of the crop, teaching himself new skills and so on. What he doesn't realize is that the people he's comparing himself to are now working at McDonald's; he now needs to compete against the much smaller group of people like himself. Depending on the school, he may have never met anyone else from this group.
Anyway, not narcissism, not egotism... just a mix of inexperience, naivete, and optimism/idealism.
Re:As a young college graduate... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
anecdotal evidence (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is based on nothing but anecdotal evidence. The person who wrote the slashdot summary (named, strangely enough, SpuriousLogic) relates some more anecdotal evidence. Now slashdotters are requested to supply even more anecdotal evidence.
I teach physics at a community college. Any generalization you can make about my students will be true about some of them and false about some others. Yes, I have encountered some students whose self-esteem seems unrealistically high. Yes, I have also encountered some other students whose self-esteem seemed to me to be unrealistically low.
If you want to show a trend over time, like increasing narcissism, you need quantitative data from two different times, and you need the random and systematic errors on those two data-points to be small enough that they can be shown to be unequal with a high level of confidence.
My default hypothesis about any educational reform movement is that it will have absolutely no effect on anything. I'm only persuaded to the contrary if solid quantitative evidence shows up to the contrary. My default hypothesis is that the self-esteem movement has had absolutely no effect on students' self-esteem, or on their achievement, or on anything else. Students tend to be pretty realistic. They look and compare themselves with other students. They know if they got an F on their physics exam and their lab partner didn't.
Re:Blame the parents teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
But you are doing exactly what the article predicts that you would do - it's everyone's fault but your own. Yes, yes, they do share blame, of course they do. And I know as much as anyone that children are not at truly fault for how they're raised. But at some point, it may be their fault - but placing blame really doesn't fix the situation. Only you can fix the situation, and it doesn't really matter whose fault it is.
I'm speaking as someone whose parents really messed him up in many different ways - but ultimately, they are not going to fix it, I have to. And placing blame really does nothing but remind me of the past, instead of looking to the future.
Put shortly and bluntly, who gives a fuck whose fault it is, I care more about what you do with your life and who you are *now*. :-)
Re:People, not "students" (Score:4, Insightful)
Might as well replace "students" with "people". The whole concept that this is somehow limited to graduates of whatever reeks of the "dirty intellectuals" cultural revolution mentality.
It's not graduates that are getting narcissistic, it's much of our society that's changing this way, of which they are but a subset. If you think that the people who don't finish high school and suckle on the NYC welfare tit for much of their life are any less narcissistic, you've got a dose of reality coming...
Our society has removed a system of intrinsic rewards that involve satisfaction from doing one's job well, and providing for one's family, and replaced it with a money-grabbing race for being buried with the most stuff. But make no mistake about it - this phenomenon has far less to do with education, and far more to do with the destruction of family as a concept.
Uh, wut? How does not having a solid family structure make you more narcissistic? Personally I have found that people that had to fend for themselves and didn't have mommy at arms reach more humbled and harder working.
Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay (Score:5, Insightful)
While I understand where you're coming from, this argument is very disingenuous at best. Basically, you're saying there's no value to someone having more work experience in a field (or several fields). I can't count the number of times I've seen a problem arise (or even a request for suggestions) where the younger people throw out solutions that are quite simply moronic. Or they'll cost a ton to implement. Sure, it happens with "senior" staff, too, but oftentimes their answers tend to be on the more practical side. And it's largely because they're more familiar with the myriad aspects involved. Or they are a major part of the institutional knowledge that is required to competently resolve the situation. Unfortunately, many people never seem to realize this. And they're often the ones pulling the group down as a whole. So is it any surprise that they're the ones who tend to make less?
People are stupid (Score:2, Insightful)
Most people have no idea about anything, or how anything works.
The more skills the more education they obtain the less they try to gain the knowledge of the world around them, making nice little pocket worlds that almost everyone lives in.
We simply don't want to believe the things we know are true.
My generation (The college students/graduates) are the worst. Because of Google and Microsoft we think we're all going to become rich tomorrow if we go into the tech career path, but most of us have no idea how those companies filled niches in the world and the non-coding brilliance it took for them to rise to the top.
We expect our pay out to be like our video streams, done downloading before we've started to watch, when reality is that it's slower than a 56K client downloading from another 56K client.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
While I think you're right about the attitudes of many parents, a greater contributor to this problem is in academia. If I had a dime for every skill that the Career Services department told me was instant top-of-the-stack material... well, I wouldn't have had to spend months searching for a job below my level of education.
Universities are still businesses, and one major source of income is bright-eyed young freshman who believe they will be able to conquer the world in four years, if only they invest $120,000 in a bachelor's degree. It doesn't benefit the universities (in the short run) to dispell that illusion.
What the hell? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm 18, and I'm about to leave my secondary school and head off to university (assuming I get my grades). I've always had an interest in tech an computers - so I learnt (or started learning) C/C++ at around 14 to try and get a step ahead of just the typical 'wannabes'. I now consider myself, four years later, to be a pretty competent coder. Besides that though, I don't consider myself 'special' in any way or form what-so-ever.
In fact, the only 'special' thing about what I just mentioned is the age I was when I did it - what I actually did (self teaching, as per the java beans example) is painfully uninteresting. Yet people I meet routinely single this out as 'strange' and 'amazing' (people in other fields, that is).
I don't share their enthusiasm - why is self-teaching so amazing? Am I really that cool for doing the simplest thing ever - teaching myself. Or are the other people I'm being judged against too fucking retarded to teach themselves?
I think that's the main scary thing this article touches on (and something I've experienced) - self teaching is now some kind of oddity. I'm pleased I learnt C/C++ when I did: Not because of what it is, but apparently, in this new age of retardation, self taught *anything* is some amazing feat to be behold. I think that's the scarier prospect than overly narcissistic students/graduates
Try going to school with them (Score:2, Insightful)
Seriously, if you think they are bad in the work place, try being in an environment where they aren't fired if they can't mesh with the rest of the group. I'm fine with self confidence, but the arrogance of some of the students is more than frustrating. Since they think they have it all under control, they don't care about learning some of the lessons that college tries to teach them.
I still see a lot of concern about how many programing languages you know, not how well you can think and solve problems. Oh my, you've worked with 6 languages, including Javascript!
Please tell me it gets better. I am scared.
Re:Blame the parents teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
Open source? Internships?
I'm not saying it's easy. But doing the not easy stuff is what differentiates one from the rest. At least in the beginning, who knows, you might have to sacrifice pay for experience. But the investment will pay back.
Unless your parents are abusive, they are only there to guide you - your motivation and your willingness to step out on your own to figure stuff out is what's going to really give you what you need. Ultimately, parents and teachers are only there to tell you how to stick your foot in the door. What happens once it's there is entirely up to you.
I don't think I'm saying this right. Oh well. It's Sunday.
Actually... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not until we all started working and actually failed at something that we got knocked back down to reality.
Re:Blame the parents teachers (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the web contributes. You can find websites with ready-made "communities" for any absurd group. Facebook, Twitter and the like feed on the inherent ego-centrism & narcissism of the age group - as if people really CARE what you're doing minute to minute. It all fosters a false sense of importance and belonging that just doesn't exist in the real world. On the other hand, shifting the blame to anyone but yourself is another issue. Sure, your parents told you you were special, but you believed it.
We do kids a disservice by constantly telling them how wonderful they are. Fact is, people build a real sense of self-worth by working hard to overcome challenges, not by being given prizes.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a uk based software engineer
There's the difference right there. As a European, travelling internationally is not all that different than domestic travel in the US.
The nearest foreign territory to me (Bermuda), is an hour plane ride, or several hours on a boat.
Re:It isn't their fault. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember the apartments they lived in in Friends? Remember what they did for a living? Exactly.
I seem to recall that the apartment in Friends was rent-controlled at a level that had been set some time in the 60s, and they were illegally subletting it from a elderly relative who had long since moved away. Also, the show had some good stories about the financial issues of people living in Manhattan.
Nitpicks aside, though, you're right about Friends (most of the time) and TV in general. But then, TV has always lied about a lot of things: everybody is good looking and has no weight or fitness issues (unless they're evil or they're somebody's funny sidekick). Bad people always suffer for their badness, and good people are always rewarded. Nobody is ever at a loss for clever thing to say. All complicated issues get resolved one way or another after 48 minutes of interaction. Etc., etc.
Re:Yes (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
compiler design and kernel hacking (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not an office? (Score:5, Insightful)
When the delta cost between an modest office and a cube is around $2k/year, I frankly have a hard time seeing why a $50k professional shouldn't have one if he wants it. If he asked you for $2k additional salary to work for you, you'd give it to him. So why not a $2k office?
That he's expected to settle for a cube is almost pure PHB. It says that the organization is more interested in the petty politics of oneupmanship than the are in their employees' comfort and productivity.
On the other hand, my eyes head for the ceiling when the guy who has been there two weeks starts explaining the half dozen major changes we should make to the business. Spend six months learning how to do it my way you greenie! When you're fully trained on the job, I'll be interested in your opinions on how to improve it.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of capitalism, not the goal. The principle is that if I value your skills more than I value X dollars per year, then that's what I'll be willing to pay you. If you won't work for less than X + 10000 dollars per year and that's more than I value your skills, we don't have a deal and I'll keep my money.
If you want something without giving anything in return, what you are talking about isn't capitalism.
Note: By you, I don't mean you, I mean them.
Re:They give you a false impression in school.. (Score:5, Insightful)
There was no special trait about Bill Gates that led him to the riches he has today, unless hard work (like it or not, the guy has spent a lot of time and effort to get where he is today) and knowing when a good opportunity was passing his way (hello, QDOS!) are somehow special traits.
A virtuous man ensures fairness of opportunity, not fairness of outcome. Attempting to create a fairness of outcome--in other words, creating the expectation that the world owes you something--is the first step toward a terminally fucked society.
Travel Sucks (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up
Travel (even international/intercontinental) gets very old, very quickly when you're doing it constantly. Travel for work is not like holiday travel; all you see is the inside of another identikit hotel and another identikit office, and the little you see of your exotic location is the taxi between them.
And catching an 0600 flight every Monday, followed by a 9+hour day in the office *hurts* after about a month.
Re:They give you a false impression in school.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I assumed that if he really wanted to work on compilers or kernels, then it must be a personal interest.
If he would view working on open-source compilers/kernels as an unpaid chore for "the man", then it's probably a good thing that he didn't get a job working on such software in the first place.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
I really do blame the baby boomers. They grew up in a sort of fantasy world, where they could preach peace, love, and not war
Right. You're living in your own fantasy world where it has become convenient to blame the baby boomers. I'm a baby boomer and lived through those times. We had to fight to "preach peace" in opposition to Johnson and Nixon and their wars - and those fights were sometimes, perhaps often, bloody.
But it has become the accepted truth (and as such never to be questioned by those who accept it) that the baby boomers are responsible for all that is evil and horrible today. You might try pulling your head out of your butt and read some history - you'll find that nothing is as simple as you would like it to be, nor is it necessarily simple enough for you to understand it without work (which, I suspect, you're unwilling to do).
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
Well said. I'm a contractor, so that means I move from place-to-place. Utah, Oklahoma, Michigan, South Carolina, New York, Virginia, Maryland, Jersey. My job as a contractor means I live inside hotel rooms, which doesn't bother me at all, but it also means I can't "settle down" because I'm always moving.
If you want to get married and raise a family, you need to stay in one spot with a permanent job.
If you want to travel to "exotic" places like I have, don't do it through work. Do it through vacation using your own money, and take the wife & kids with you.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:4, Insightful)
More than just kids-these-days (Score:5, Insightful)
The older generation always scoffs at the younger generation. There is always a large component of kids-these-days to these types of arguments. That being said, as a 40 year old college professor who's been doing this for 8 years, I do see a shift in the behavior of students, primarily the average-to-below-average student. The bright students who are motivated and mature don't seem to suffer from the problems I'm about to describe. One big problem is that many students simply are unwilling to do more than a fixed amount of work that they don't want to do. In college they place aspects of their lives which are not academic at a higher priority and get annoyed when their performance reflects this. I see more and more of this. The main things are: socializing, work, and family. It's not that I didn't have those thing when I was in college, it's just that academics always came first. Many students simply refuse to dedicate the time they need to do well; it's not that they're dumb.
A lot of students really do have the precious-snowflake chip on their shoulders. A junior faculty member in my department who has only been teaching for a couple of years and who is very student-focused told a student who was struggling in one of his classes that her main reason for not doing well was that she was not working hard enough (and he was right). How did she take it? She went to the dean and filed a complaint against the professor. This same student is always passing notes and talking to another student in one of my classes. I have confronted them in class and they will shoot me dirty looks, shut up for a while, and start back up again the next class. The professor I mentioned above has spent hours and hours with another student trying to help her with the subject material and to show her appreciation, she accused him of "destroying her passion" for her major.
The precious-snowflake syndrome is strongly tied to the immaturity problem which plagues a lot of college students. I think students are simply putting off growing up, and I am regularly dealing with high-school crap in, for example, sophomore-level science classes (courses in the students' major even!) which I simply never had to deal with before.
When I am in one of my more cynical moods, I take great pleasure in the idea that these kids are in for a really rude awakening after they graduate in the current economic climate. Maybe it will be the splash of cold water in the face that they need to grow the f*ck up and realize that the world does not exist solely for their own entertainment, and that simply gracing me with their presence in class does not get them an automatic B.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
No, I think Apple has nothing to do with it. Frankly, I don't think any corporation does. The reason is that a corporation exists to make money, and thus to market to the people whom they want to make money from. Once a corporation comes on the scene and starts doing things a certain way, it's because it's *already figured out that that's what's going to appeal to people of that demographic*. TV, Radio, Apple., etc. They're not causing the problem - they're a product of the problem. The worst that can be said for them is that because of the power of their machine, they take what could have been an easily managed problem that already exists and throw it all out of proportion.
No. It's the parents. If parents would parent responsibly, make sure their kids did stuff that benefited them rather than damaged, held their teachers' feet to the fire to do the same thing... we wouldn't be hearing about any of this.
Apple., etc., only has an inroad into the psyche of children because there's a parent shaped hole that isn't filled.
Reward System (Score:2, Insightful)
Too many people are chewed only to be spit out by the "machine".
So people tend to grab what they can the faster they can (wallstreet, anyone?)
Young people were told that they would be rewarded for putting the effort of going to college, right? Where is it then? If you make about the same money/benefits doing difficult work why should you do it? Different work, same reward.
And I'm talking about making a living, not doing something for pleasure. If you happen to like what you do for a living that shouldn't matter.
Carefully now. . . Rants say as much about. . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow!
If I were handing out awards, I'd give you one for the amount of effort required to transform your thinly disguised personal hate-on into a bogus rhetorical question capable of passing through the Slashdot filters. Why not just post something about how, "young, single mothers are a drain on the social security net"?
There's nothing new about the phenomenon of expectations among young people being out of sync with reality. The funny thing is that when people believe they deserve something, they often get it. Perhaps that's the thing which bugs you the most; have you set your sights too low?
There is a middle ground between wishful thinking and high expectations, and it's called, "Reality".
What's going to drive you absolutely mad, is that when an over-seas spot opens up at some conference, there is a much higher chance of it being given to the boy who believes he deserves it rather than to you.
-FL
Linus Torvalds disagrees with you (Score:0, Insightful)
he said, in an interview, quite literally, that if he had not grown up in a socialist country with a good safety net, he never would have created linux.
i imagine the above poster is in the same boat. maybe working 50 or 60 hours a week at a job... it is kind of hard to justify to yourself putting in another 20 hacking the kernel.
now, someone posted 'well if you did that, maybe you would get a job hacking the kernel'. yeah, well, maybe you wouldnt.
it is the argument of the well off and lucky person, the Steve Jobs yelling 'do what you love and the money will follow' on stage, meanwhile, people in his iPod factories are working 80 hours a week, living in cramped dormitories, and having almost no rights whatsoever.
your attitude and philosophy is just... ... divorced from reality.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
"Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality."
Unfortunately, its worse that than. A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Ironically as business is such a competitive environment, narcissistic behavior gives a competitive advantage, so they force to the top. It also sadly means that society as a whole is structured to reward the behaviors of the NPD minority, to the detriment to the majority of people. The core problem is narcissistic people by definition lack a lot of empathy. They are wrapped up in their own views and only want people around them to agree with them. They will get angry at anyone who opposes them even if that opposition is to tell them something which would help their company.
The way society as a whole is structured is why every country is run like a Plutocracy (ruled by people with money) even though some people in some countries are told they have a democracy. Its not a real democracy, anywhere in the world, as all career politicians are middle class wage earners regardless of which party they belong to as they all belong to the same groups of people with power and money, so don't represent the majority of people. Worse still, since the financial collapse, its highlighting we are near the extremes of a Plutocracy bordering into at times a Kleptocracy, (Ruled by thieves), where they help themselves and their rich friends to millions of tax payers money in their attempt to prop up and maintain their rich lifestyles.
Unfortunately, these are also the people in power, they make the laws, which is why so few will be punished for their behavior. Which takes us back to society as a whole is structured to reward these behaviors.
Re:As a young college graduate... (Score:3, Insightful)
I knew, coming in, that whatever I learned in college was just the tip of the iceberg;
And the reality is that you don't get to use what you learned in college in entry level jobs anyway :-) It all sounds so exciting: high particle physics, building an OS from scratch, international monetary policies, building a skyscraper. But then you end up fixing typos on web pages, fetching coffee, updating Sarbanes-Oxley paperwork, etc.
Re:Obligatory (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't just your generation. sadly. This is every generation. There simply are only a small fraction of people who get the core of everything done that requires thought or initiative. The catch is these people are often the same ones who lose interest when a task or project is no longer challenging... which is where the others come in to finish it off.
Crappy system, but it's worked so far for humanity. The problem is, if you have too many highly functional people located together they disagree too frequently to get anything substantial done.
You will probably find during your professional life that you do 2-5x the amount of "work" as your comrades for the same pay. Eventually you'll get over the injustice of it all and learn to use it your advantage. Good luck.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
+1.
I travel every week for work - fly out on Mondays, and fly back in on Thursdays or Fridays. Granted, sometimes I go to interesting places, but even then I rarely get any time to do anything fun or interesting.
Most of my time is spent working, and having dinner/drinks with the client and colleagues. And when it's time, I hit the sack (in a great hotel room where I get to spend may be 8 hours, and all of it sleeping).
I hardly ever get any time to spend with my girlfriend (despite the fact that she "lives" with me) or my friends or family.
Travel for business sounds wonderful, until you actually have to do it. You read about it in books or watch it on TV and it all looks great -- you go to fun places, you eat at fancy restaurants and unlimited free drinks that are paid for, you get to stay at great hotels etc. But what they don't tell you is that you don't enjoy any of it. Not a moment.
Perhaps they are just being nice to you? (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the people in other fields are being polite and showing interest in what you've done, as well as a degree of being impressed by you teaching yourself to program. Well done, keep learning, keep going for it, but also remember to listen and learn from others as well.
Clearly it's made you feel good that people have told you you're doing well. Perhaps also learn these social skills to help you in situations you'll find yourself in at university and beyond - consider how to find the positive in your peers rather than referring to them as "fucking retarded". Try to see things from their perspective, they may have some valuable insights to offer you.
Re:Yes, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
I come from poor white trash, but I worked hard - got a Ph.D. from a top English university (I grew up in Canada), and now I work in DC as an overpaid consultant. I drive a fully paid for BMW, am looking out my window at an awesome view of the Capitol Building as I type this.
Hard work does indeed pay off, but you also need to make smart long term decisions with it.
Regarding the nurse and teacher - they do what they do because they like it. I understand, I volunteer 700+ hours as a firefighter in one of the rural communities here.
Work hard, but find a balance - that's the key to success / happiness.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:4, Insightful)
My generation is afflicted entitlement mentalities and an aversion to actually doing anything to better themselves. It's sad.
QFMFT!
What we are experiencing is what happens when spoiled kids grow up to be spoiled adults.
I hope, for the OPs sake, that they are not hiring these narcissistic fools and bringing a little learning with a quick stroke of reality called 'DENIED'.
Some advice to help remedy the situation: Tell them WHY you did not hire them.
Re:Yes (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's utter tripe. Sure, once you've made it you might not have to work hard if you don't want to. But, unless you're born to it, you do have to work hard to get places - even if you're lucky or even corrupt. I used to have this attitude too, figuring that I'd just do the bare minimum of work that would give me the chance of getting that golden luck. It got me absolutely nowhere - if you really want to build a business or launch a product, you've got to work your freaking arse off.
I'm not entirely sure where I got the idea that if I'm working hard then I'm not doing it right, but I know that it sabotaged me for years. Hard work by itself doesn't directly equate into wealth - if you're not working on something that won't be particularly profitable, no matter how hard you work you're not going to get much out of it. But not working hard means you're definitely not going to make it, unless you'd prefer to count on winning the lottery.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:1, Insightful)
"Everything comes at a price" is a consequence of reality, not of capitalism. Do you seriously think everything is free in a communist (or whatever you think is a better system) ? It merely takes favors and bribes instead of money. Same goes for any type of dictatorship.
Fact, no matter how well we control nature, there are a number limits that remain, and there are always more of us, which means "the pie" needs to be cut into more slices every day.
Capitalism works by making "growing the pie" everyone's business, and rewards one directly in relation to how much the pie grows due to his/her efforts. Communism works by keeping production methods constant (that's what govt burocracy does in practice), which, due to (amongst other things) the constant changing environment, in fact shrinks the pie (because one can be sure as hell that what was an efficient factory yesterday won't be tomorrow). Since in communism the people at the top don't think their part of the pie is allowed to shrink, everyone loses (including them when they get strung up for being incompetent losers by the next batch of incompetent losers).
The way this is avoided in capitalism is by market forces. Capitalist politicians are every bit as crooked, corrupt, self-centered and greedy as communist politicians. But they are fighting the market, which will tend (in the very long run) to reward people with their actual worth, and if necessary will do so by inflation, making even a democratic senator's dream salary represent his actual worth to society.
Everything comes at the price. Blame (or thank) God for that. Or gaia. Or the climate. Or the flying spaghetti monster. Or barack obama if you like (but remember the real messiah doesn't spend his way out of a recession, you see Jesus saves).
Don't blame (or thank) capitalism for prices, it has nothing to do with prices. Capitalism is something that gives you an accurate estimate for the real worth of an object, which enables you to spend, work and live more efficiently than any human mind, or group of humans has ever been able to do without it (never mind living efficiently with so many on a planet so complicated and varied as ours).
The reason North Korea, Cuba and others aren't growing like South Korea (or any capitalist nation) is simple, the reason it's such a miserable country stuck in the middle ages is : it can't fix the problem. It's people have no idea which objects they need and which they can do without. They don't know what they can trade and what they should use, so they are terribly handicapped when they try to cooperate with one another.
Imagine there being a tomato country and a ranch-filled part of North Korea, like in, well every country. You'd think in the tomato region people would eat more pizza, spaghetti, and less meat, because transport costs would be high for meat and low for tomatoes. And on the other side, they'd eat more meat. That would be more efficient ... wrong. Prices are mandated, and tomatoes are expensive where they're grown (because they pay for the transport costs as well). The same goes for the other side. Meat, in the house next to the farm is the same price. Suppose that price is low ... well then every shop in the country becomes empty and doesn't sell tomatoes anymore. Suppose some disease spreads amongst the cattle ... then nothing is done until some govt. bureaucrat decides it's more important to save cattle than pay for his next cadillac.
That's the alternative to capitalism. The only one.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
To be completely honest with you dude, your post comes off just as narcissistic as the people you're describing. "I am in the top 5% in my class in ability (grades are another matter". So you can't be bothered to actually do the classwork, and I dunno, *prove* that through hard work and grades?
"Oh yeah my grades were lousy, but I was really the smartest person in the class". Yeah I'm sure that'll fly at the job interview.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to pay your dues like everyone else.
You don't understand Narcissistic people at all
Only common people pay their dues, treating a Narcissist as common would be seen as a personal attack by them.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Carefully now. . . Rants say as much about. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
There is no doubt in my mind from reading your post that you're one of the people this article is talking about.
The 'I deserve' generation is really going to be royally burnt by this recession a nice dose of reality for all of you (and sadly me too)
Re:Obligatory (Score:5, Insightful)
"The boys i mean are not refined
They go with girls who buck and bite
They do not give a fuck for luck
They hump them thirteen times a night
One hangs a hat upon her tit
One carves a cross on her behind
They do not give a shit for wit
The boys i mean are not refined
They come with girls who bite and buck
Who cannot read and cannot write
Who laugh like they would fall apart
And masturbate with dynamite
The boys i mean are not refined
They cannot chat of that and this
They do not give a fart for art
They kill like you would take a piss
They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance"
-- E. E. Cummings, 1926ish
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:1, Insightful)
Mommy and daddy may have told you that you were a special snowflake, but they were the only people to do so. Our schools are designed as factories to indoctrinate students to routine boring working conditions. Every few minutes there is a bell, and on the sound of that bell you are trained to do something. We take "timed tests" assessing our performance on our work. Most of the time these tests are in completely meaningless bullshit about stuff you have no interest in learning or doing. To say that people who graduate from our schooling system aren't prepared to handle a boring tedious job is completely incorrect and goes in the face of 16 years of school indoctrination. We teach our kids that they are to learn things they are uninterested in learning and the be assessed on the work they did learning it. And you wonder why people are surprised that so many people turn to drugs and alcohol. A world in which people spend the majority of their waking hours doing work that they personally believe is meaningless has inevitably lead to a nation of alcoholics.
Re:Education fads (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea, is that kids get praised all the time as a means of positive reinforcement
The problem is we told the kids that they are special and the kids heard they are special and everyone else isn't.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
I visited my alma mater recently, and I was stuck by how much changed in just ten years time. The students are doing "cool" projects that I can only dream of doing in the real world. (Example - Programming a robot to swim across a lake and collect trash.) It makes me wonder if they will be disappointed with their first jobs, which will mostly consist of sitting at a cubicle all day and writing documents.
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it? Ok, there is the money and having a less difficult time at getting a job, but, I see it as a tragedy if a company some time to explore cool stuff because it's worried about micro-efficiency. Considering this, I'm reminded of something a friend (double major CE & Chemistry) once told me: Education is dumb because you work really hard to accumulate all this knowledge only to be placed in management and never use it again. I'm sure that's not true for all situations, but I do think I'd be disappointed to not apply what I've learned to what I'm interested in.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:4, Insightful)
That's why as part of the interview team you need to set up some programming tests that constitute basic pass or fail. Like: do basic CRUD in a pseudo language of your choice. Reverse a string of characters in a pseudo code. You'd be surprised at the proportion of "MS" degreed people who can -barely- get through the string reversal. But when you get someone who's a true coder, it's a breeze and a joy watching him do it and talk about it. And he will not suck as a full time coworker.
Lowered Expectations (Score:5, Insightful)
"....mom and dad always told them they were incredibly special, and would do amazing things."
There's a great line from that movie about the math teacher Jaime Escalante, Stand and Deliver. In the movie, Escalante is arguing with an Anglo teacher, who is worried that Escalante is raising their expectations too much. She was one of the "villains" in the film, but she had a great line, one that should be stamped on the brain of every teacher in the world. I can't find the exact quote so I'll have to paraphrase it from memory here:
"
You've convinced them that they're all geniuses, that they can all be Einstein and Newton. But the truth is, most are ordinary, and one day they'll realize that despite what you say, they're nothing special. And they'll hate you for it.
Our school systems tell our kids that they all have the potential for greatness. Not just being good at something, but great at something. And that's simply not true. The truth is, most of us are ordinary, and with hard work, we can become competent, or even solid. And that's just fine. That's the way of things. As the saying goes, if everyone was special, no one would be. And yet, the "self-esteem" movement in schools tells kids that they're all potential writers, artists, engineers, presidents, etc. Very few of us go on to do anything like that. Most of us lead middle-class lives with middle-class jobs, with middle-class pains and joys. Many of us don't even get that far. Not because of any conspiracy, or bad schools, but because that's the state of humanity. That's what we are. A few bright minds, a lot of workers, and some dim bulbs. John Lennon was wrong. We don't all shine on. Very few of us do. Unfortunately, too many teachers preach Lennon's line at students. You don't want to discourage students from trying to reach higher, but you also want them to be realistic about the world.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:1, Insightful)
This is nothing new. I saw the same thing in the early 90s. I would ask others in the same program as me what sorts of other languages are they learning. To them pascal was enough (it wasnt).
When I graduated I did not expect a job above 35k for many years. Computer programmers just did not make that kind of money anymore (at least at the time 50k was considered a TOP dev).
The skill I missed was getting out and meeting people. It has hurt in many ways. It is now not in my personality. It is not who I am now. It is difficult. I got too focused on learning every minutia of computers. I am good at that and everyone comes running to me when it comes to figuring out something. But they do not come to me to get something started or connect with others. BUILD that skill it is more important than you can realize.
Nothing is given to you. You will need to earn every damn dime of it. You will see others given things they do not deserve. Do not let it get you down. The bar is just that much higher now for you. You need to not only do what the duffas that got the cool award did you have to do your job and EXTRA.
Doing your job does not get you anything, thats why they pay you. Doing your job and making sure everyone around you can do their job better. THAT gets you recognition.
It is still feeding into my theory that nothing really new has been invented in computer science since the 70s :). I kid...
I am sure there are people from the 80s, 70s, 60s and so on that could say they saw the same things. Just different views of it.
It is sad. But not just in your generation. You will see when you get out into 'the real world'. That you will see the same thing at every level of strata in organizations. Help them do their job better. They need it. It is amazing how something that seems simple and a no brainier to you can mean they can finish their work in 2 days instead of 2 weeks. Many times people are put onto projects where they have no clue how to do it.
I am currently training a dude who recently graduated. He does not have the basics to code an application. He has quite a bit of theory. But does not know how to even divide and conquer the design. He is common. You will find this all over the place.
Best lesson I ever learned though was to shut my mouth and listen to what everyone is saying, only popping my head up enough to ask questions. THEN start making suggestions. Dont jump in and start fixing things. It is tempting to do. But you will end up with more ideas and a better understanding of what is going on.
Most people will like the fact that you have such a broad range of skills (sounds like you will do ok). But do not get fixated on them. Do not brag yourself up all the time. Most people can not stand it. In college it is ok to do. But out 'in the real world' watch peoples reaction to it. You will see them trying to ignore you.. They only care what can you do for them right now. Not what you did 20 years ago.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
You are right. What i miss in most people around me is devotion to what they are doing. In the school everthing works out for you if you do what you are told. Sadly most people never get used to the idea that to be among the best at work you need to enjoy it, so you better get positive about it or do sth. else. This does not mean you have to work 80hrs a week, it just means that you always do (think) a little bit more than you are forced to. Maybe it's ten minutes per day when you reflect your work. What did you do today? what did hinder you in progress? How can i do better the next time (yes, sometimes well all fuck up something. The best is to at least admit this to yourself and try not to do it the next time.)? If you discover sth, where you just dont know to to go ahead (or how do it better), there are colleagues. When you take a cup of coffee or tea together, *talk* to them. In my experience the people without a drive to do it *as good as possible* are the ones who don't see the necessity to ask other people. They expect that just *getting it done somehow* is as good as *getting it done*.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:4, Insightful)
If they didn't want to code, why are they computer science majors? By now they've had three years to change majors if they couldn't hack (pun intended) it.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the alternative to capitalism. The only one.
Hahaha
"Everything has a price" is a consequence of scarcity economics and greed.
Really? You have access to an infinite energy machine? No? Well then.. I suppose scarcity exists and isn't an invention of evil capitalists to put down the proletariat. Since scarcity exists then that means there is a price to produce anything, and that fact is where "everything has a price" comes from. To seriously believe otherwise is to not only deny basic economics, but our current understanding of physics. TANSTAAFL
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes - earn an MBA and presto! Instant NPD!
Re:What's really missing from new grads (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd be far more suspicious of any new grad coming in to their first job and thinking it'll be their whole career. That would signal a major lack of motivation. (there are exceptions of course, but even if they get a fantastic first job, they should still be casually looking for new opportunities)
Re:Obligatory (Score:2, Insightful)
-- Assyrian stone table 2800 BC,
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:5, Insightful)
You sound a lot like I did when I was nearing graduation over a decade ago (the things you describe really haven't really changed all that much). And while you might think you know a lot, trust me that you have a lot to learn, the first of which is probably a little humility. It goes a long way.
Reported all over the place (Score:5, Insightful)
This is being reported all over the place. In fact, my wife read an article in Macleans (I think) years ago about this very thing. Overall, the false self-esteem forced upon these kids by our so called "education system" in North America has brought about a new horror in education. As in, most students today are what is commonly referred to as "mark mercenaries." They also have a gross tendency to lie or twist words or ... to get what they want. I've seen it used time and time again in attempts to screw over profs, TAs, etc because of a perceived wrong. That perceived wrong typically being not paying enough attention to the student or giving them a bad grade (that they earned). In fact, a recent example is a TA got questioned for not giving help to a student. What actually happened is that this student didn't even as for help. Likely in some twisted reality in this students head, the TA should have constantly come up to this student asking him/her if (s)he needed help. Because, that's what happens in highschool right?
And what makes it worse? TV programs that, including reality TV, that glorify people getting a free ride. So, now with the delusional aspect to the general mentality of todays youth added to there false self-esteem, they actually honestly believe that they deserve what they think they deserve. Regardless of the reality of the situation.
And what makes that worse? Universities/Colleges/etc are indirectly encouraging that. Because, if they did anything to stop that, then the students wouldn't take there (service) courses and the departments would be in big trouble. Both through the lower grades and the complaints that admin would surely get and the lower enrolment rates.
Right now, what we should expect is for this to get worse for a long time to come. Because, the Universities/etc (because they are now run like businesses and NOT educational institutions) have a vested interest in caving to these power drunk students. And those students are the *vast* majority of the student population.
I quake for our future...
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm nothing special, I've just been using computers and programming for a long time. I learned BASIC when I was 7.
Yes, actually you are something special. Starting that early gave you a bunch of stuff: better specialized brain wiring (you're still very plastic at that age), your ten thousand hours (see other recent news) of experience years ahead of time, and some crucial slack to be a nerd but also develop the social confidence to run your own business quite early. You're who the TV shows are talking about, but they fail to show the early years of dedication that brought the incredible talent.
Also, you're lucky. You had the computing resources (not everybody does, even today). You clearly had absorbed enough fundamentals from school, which indicates you were of good stock to begin with, and had parents and/or school system that really cared. You had a really supportive parent who gave you important assignments. He didn't have to, he could have bought boxed solutions to his problems. You had at least enough help to learn that you wanted to learn BASIC. That doesn't come out of the clear blue sky for a seven year old, there has to be some knowledge that this is available and might be fun. And . . . does a little math . . . you had the internet. An internet that was decent at showing you how to do technical stuff. Not many years earlier, it was a lot less available and a lot less newbie-friendly.
So there, you're not normal and you're lucky. You are hot stuff, the average CS student isn't, and our society doesn't do nearly as much as it claims to do toward giving all kids such amazing opportunities. Thank you for your rant. I will try to do as well for my (yet to be born) kids as your parents did for you.
Not one intern has heeded my advice (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had to deal with interns coming into the technology field after being coddled at college for a few years. I've tried to be friendly, polite and honest. Mostly that's been appreciated after a few months in 'the real workplace'.
I also took the time to talk to these interns at the end of their internship to go over how they would represent their work on their resumes. Invariably they didn't see what they really did. What they saw as a series of menial tasks was really "Performed X with minimal supervision" and "Completed project Y using blah blah blah". They weren't prepared to comprehend what a real project was.
One of the truly sad things was their lack of ability to troubleshoot. I know I've said this in the past but I feel it bears repeating. Everything these kids have done has been multiple choice. Their tests, their games, everything has presented them with a list of choices. Our games gave us a problem and then we were on our own to come up with what might work as a solution. Does anyone remember "You're in a maze of twisty passages, all alike." and a command prompt? Not a lot of pre-chosen answers there. I spent quite a bit of time helping them learn how to solve problems.
Lastly, here's the advice I have yet to see an intern use. "Find the job that no one wants to do, do it well, and you'll be employed for life." Seriously, everyone wants the fun and happy jobs. But someone has to clean the crap out of the corners and keep the place running. Fun and happy candidates are lined up out the door and around the corner. The one who is willing to do the jobs that require doing is going to stand out.
Now get off my intarwebz.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:solution: (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently douchebag-syndrome runs rampant in colleges where students
The words college and student are highly relevant in your nonsense.
The educational system is not keeping up with the complexity of the world. Even though so much can be achieved now by a few simple gestures of the arm-a simple point and click can start a factory on the other side of the earth-the technology required a long and dedicated effort to implement.
I was talking to someone working on cell-phone software. A cell phone is just a little thing held in the hand so how big can the software be? Hundreds of millions of lines. Try writing that in time to catch the next market cycle, which is coming up in only a few months-it's hard work and high risk. Teamwork is required. Most of the procedures are standardized so the whole thing is doable, but no one is going to really stand out. If they need someone to stand out, it could be too risky-what if that person missed a few days or weeks?
Maybe ten years ago this complexity would be cutting edge, but now it's run-of-the-mill, yet schools have their hands full just getting people to learn basic concepts. Only a few students may have an opportunity to see how work is done in the real world-the seemingly endless calculations and the long lists of tiny functions to implement.
On the other hand, the high tech industry makes it easy for a nondescript insider to take advantage of the perks. There are so many people and the pay for designers versus third world assembly people is so vastly different that it is understandable for a mentality of get it while you can. So let people set their own compensation targets, and see if they can justify them.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:3, Insightful)
No, it's never deserved; it's justified. At times, some people's work is worth a lot of money. For instance, if someone needs to close a deal in the next day, that's worth millions, then their time up to closing the deal is vastly more expensive than at other times. Every hour spent travelling is sales pitch preparation time lost. If they miss the deal altogether due to flight delays or similar issues, then their current travel method literally costs the company millions.
In those cases, a rented (or even owned, dedicated) jet makes sense, as the relatively low cost to save that worker a few precious hours is easily justified. When you're a president, a pope, or a dalai lama, then your travel time by car or even waiting on public air transport issues is pretty much always going to cost you more than the use of a jet, making a full-time jet a bargain really.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:2, Insightful)
What I'm confused about is how you were lying awake and having either dreams or nightmares.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm with tyleroze: Your entire post can be summed up like this
OH MY GOD I'M SO FREAKING AWESOME (psst young people suck).
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of bosses have Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
How can I get this? Are there courses I can go on?
Lesson one: Never let your boss know you might be as smart as him - don't even allow the possibility that you might be smarter.
Lesson two: Suck up - whatever they want to hear, tell them that. Never forget lesson one.
Lesson three: As you begin to rise through the organization, mold yourself in the image of those who control your promotions. Play golf if they do, wear the same style of clothes, etc. but always maintain a respectful deference to their superior position, don't have the same or better clubs, play at cheaper courses (allow them to do you the favor of inviting you to their "better" club), tone the clothes down just a notch to reflect your lower salary, if they drive a BMW 7, you buy a used 3, you can still talk BMWs... if this is sounding a lot like lesson 2, it is - and never forget lesson 1.
Lesson 4: if you still have a soul, lose it. Anyone you have power over who might possibly compete with you in the future must be repressed or eliminated, discretely.
If you've gotten this far, I'm sure you can figure out the rest for yourself. It doesn't hurt to job hop 4 or 5 times so you can have an impressive resume story to tell on introductions, nothing is as boring as someone who left school, started as a mid-level tech and worked their way up to Vice President at the same company after 8 years - what could this person possibly have to offer, they've never "been" anywhere else....
Its relative (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't consider myself a narcissistic student, but I wonder, what's the point of going through years of education, if not to use it?
I too want to do cool stuff, but the reality is that there is cool stuff and stuff that will make the company money. You may be lucky and be able to land a job at a company that does both, but don't expect it. The companies I worked for, that did cool stuff didn't last long because it was too cutting and the market wasn't ready for it.
Often you aren't in management because you were forced there, but because you wanted more pay (pay usually corresponds to responsibility) or you were fed up of being a lab rat or equivalent.
I am still hoping I will get my dream job, but I realise that it is all down to luck and hard work.
Re:Yeah, well, you know what? (Score:1, Insightful)
He made that comment before it got to +5 Funny. His point is that it is a quality comment and should be modded appropriately. You should slap yourself for being so silly.
Unfortunately, a lot of quality posts get passed over, or repeated later by a "favored child", who suddenly gets recognition for it.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:2, Insightful)
We got that safely covered when he blabbered about being on the top 5% of his class except for... well, the grades.
Nothing to see here, really. It's just another idiot college grad who believes he is all that, so far above everyone else and so entitled that it's unbelievable how everyone in the world isn't so awesome as him.
The original funny mod was more appropriate.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:3, Insightful)
Fly from Paris to Munich for a meeting and you can probably be home for dinner. Fly from Los Angeles to Munich for a meeting and you burn two days on travel alone.
then the companies need to offer more money (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason schools are making their engineering programs do more interesting-sounding things are because engineering and CS enrollments, especially among US citizens, are dropping rapidly. So schools are trying to find creative ways to interest people in majoring in those areas; "training for boring cubicle job", funnily enough, doesn't entice people.
The only other solution, really, is the capitalist one: offer so much money that people will go into the field even if it does sound boring. But you need to offer a lot more than current going rates for that.
Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay (Score:4, Insightful)
Nope, sorry. Operational experience trumps specs every time, especially in networking. I'm naturally inclined to side with the oldster and join in the kid-bashing, but I've seen too many cases where following the spec instead of actual current practice was a colossal mistake. Without knowing more of the details, I'd go with the kid in most cases like this.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:2, Insightful)
I also suspect some managers hire the inept out of fear of being replaced.
I recall one very promising candidate who actually wrote a book on the technology we needed. Having interviewed him, I can think of no other reason than fear why the manager nixed the hire.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately (or fortunately,) many people do not work in the field they majored in. That's reality. Even if you do get to work in the field you studied for, it might not be as great as you thought it was going to be in college.
However, you might be lucky and avoid this - but that's most likely luck. Thinking that "I'm better than everyone else - I'll prove them all wrong and work in my dream job" is probably an example of narcissism (I'm not suggesting that you're thinking this way.)
I always advise people to not be too, too picky about finding a job; more than likely, even the "greatest" job will disappoint you over time. I sometimes think the best you should hope for is that the job is interesting. And in the current economy - "at least it's a job" is probably good enough. Anyway, don't be too surprised if your first few jobs are a little disappointing; that's reality.
much less than previously, though (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much any mainstream economist will tell you that productivity has increased enormously over the past century, due to a combination of factors, technology probably being the biggest. Productivity increases decrease the level of scarcity for any fixed basket of goods to which they apply, because more stuff is produced than previously without an increase in resources.
Of course, you can take that "productivity dividend" in various forms. One way to maintain the illusion of scarcity is to increase your baseline of what you "need", so you always need the things that have just barely become affordable. Then scarcity is definitionally constant, because what you're really doing is holding scarcity fixed and varying your basket of goods accordingly.
The netbook trend shows the opposite way you can take the productivity dividend: hold fixed the things you "need", and enjoy the ever-decreasing scarcity by having to give fewer resources (i.e. hours of work) to get those same goods. Applied to other areas, it's quite possible to reduce the amount of work people have to do on average, as long as you increase the "need" baseline slower than the gains from better productivity decrease scarcity. Typically people haven't done that: do Americans use the productivity increases of the past 50 years to work fewer hours? No, they generally use them to increase material consumption; e.g. the average house size has nearly doubled. But that isn't entirely necessary.
Of course, Bertrand Russell went over all of this in 1932 [zpub.com], so it's not particularly novel.
It's the parents (Score:2, Insightful)
As someone who's watched this generation growing up (I'm 43), and who's friends all have kids, and who has been partnered with someone for several years with kids, I can say the fault lies with how we parent today (we meaning the American middle class). I'm definitely way over on the left and liberal, but am stunned that parents universally no longer punish their children *at all* (can't scar the kids now, can we?). Nor do schools (wouldn't want a lawsuit). No no no - you have to *encourage* them to behave appropriately. Which amounts in effect to beating them with the proverbial Carrot.
It's really a major shift in our culture, and kids now expect to be rewarded for merely appropriate behavior, and have no idea what responsibility even means. I realize I start to sound like a cranky old man, but I don't think this is an age issue - I mean, up until the modern generation, punishment (often physical) was how parents kept kids in line, but we've shifted to a different paradigm, and well, now we have the problems this post is talking about.
The really interesting question is what will happen over the next 30 years, as this same Gen-MEMEME group actually has to suffer through real life, and becomes the leaders and bosses of tomorrow, and whether they'll be psychologically equipped to handle it.
I suppose it's a perfect irony - we trash the planet, then guarantee the generation left to inherit it can't possibly cope.
Stop the world, I want to get off.
$.02
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
because it's a dirt simple CS 101 exercise. You need a loop, array indexing, swapping values. If a candidate can't bang that out on the whiteboard with his eyes closed, there should be major red flags in hiring him. And trust me, people with nice looking resumes will actually have trouble with it.
Re:solution: (Score:3, Insightful)
How did this get modded troll?
The points made are perfectly valid, although the conclusions are somewhat misguided.
The reasons schools are not keeping up with the industry complexity is because the complexity is out of control.
We are losing the ability to build these things (complex buildings, software projects, networks,etc) with the entry level help that was usable in the past.
Its not a fault of the schools. Its a fault of the constant piling on of complexity while continuing to write/build everything from the ground up.
This is why projects like Linux and Android are so important.
Its going to be necessary to either standardize building blocks and automate large subprocesses, or stretch college to age 30.
I've hired CS grads. It takes a year to un-teach them so that the can be come useful enough to find and fix a simple bug.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
And someone who did graduate, and today manages an IT company, I have some sad news for you. All that knowledge you acquired on college ? That is just the BASE of that you need at corporate . When you get hired, you are green. Not only in terms of knowledge, but in terms of company practices, market practices (many) and so on. Think of it as continued education. You went to junior, high school, college and now you are getting educated on the corporate environment.
You don't expect to jump from junior school to high-tech R&D. You know you have other steps before that.
When you finish college you are not ready. You are just closer. Keep that in mind, and make the most of your time when you join a company to LEARN. Learn from your tasks, learn from your co-workers, learn from your manager. As much as we like to joke about managers, they are making more money then you, so they gotta know something you don't (not necessarily technical).
You also need to faction in that, when you join a company, you are an unknown. The company will only invest so much money on you until they know they will have a good return.
This things are only natural. Unfortunately, most schools fail to teach this to their students, and the only source of "knowledge" they have are TV shows and such. This is not a fail of the students, but a fail of the schools.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
"Unfortunately, many bosses are equally out of touch with reality. Some even a bit more.
Anyway, you get what you teach. Many are taught that capitalism is all and that anything comes at a price."
I don't see colleges teaching capitalism--far from it. But what schools ARE teaching are how SPECIAL they (the kids) are and that equal outcomes are more important than equal opportunity. It starts with dumbing down competitive sports and giving every person, whether they win or lose, a trophy. It's holding graduation ceremonies every time they pass a grade. It's not wanting to recognize valedictorians because someone's feelings might get hurt. We award the outcome, not the effort. And the parents all go along with this. So is it no wonder when they become "adults" they don't think they HAVE to put in any effort and they should get a bonus whether they earned it or not.
What we should be praising the child for is hard work, and letting them learn to lose gracefully. They need to learn that no one OWES them anything and they need to work hard and do their best.
But I'll go one further regarding the hiring--they get what the PAY for. Why don't you (employers) try hiring some of us older workers out there, looking for work, who not only have the skills, but whom you won't have to remind to not wear flip-flops or tube tops to work? And by "older" I mean over 40! I get really high ratings when I work contract, but I'll be damned if I can get a permanent gig. There's a lot of us who would be HAPPY to work for your company, even at a lessor wage, just to have some benefits and vacation time. We know what we're doing and you wouldn't have to babysit us or make sure we weren't goofing off. We get our projects done professionally and on-time. And contrary to popular belief, we LIKE getting to learn new things or upgrading our skills. And we're not likely to be running off to your competitors in a couple of years.
As you can see this is a personal sore spot with me. I have had supervisors go to bat for me and try to get me employed with their company. Unfortunately they weren't the decision makers and those in charge don't want to have to hire on an IT person if they can get away with a contractor. For those companies who are looking (usually for someone with 1-2 years experience)--well, if I don't get an interview I never get to show them what I can do to help them or their business. (And I do know the tactics of only putting the last 10 years of meaningful employment and not putting down a date of graduation.) But all they have to do is ask for a transcript or force the entry graduation dates on an online form and they can do the math pretty quick. (I've become very tempted to put in a "accidental typo" of 1991 instead of 1981.)
Re:much less than previously, though (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:5, Insightful)
And even then, that just got me in the door at a big company. I was doing QA and tools work for a couple of years. I had free reign to explore new and interesting ideas, but I was still shackled to QA. There were a lot of times toward the end where I just got depressed, doing the same repetitive testing, over and over again, feeling my talent wasting away.
Eventually, I found a problem that was plaguing the company's product that I could latch on to and designed and implemented a solution during a down period in our QA cycle. And even then, I had to get it in front of the right people, that is, people interested in hiring me to work on interesting problems. And even then, I had great timing on my side. They just happened to need someone to take over a major project whose previous maintainer had moved on.
But I managed to get my project into a shipping product. And from that point, it was a (relatively) short jump to moving to the right organization within the company. And now I work on a great project within a great product. I go to work every day without worrying about whether I'll be interested in what I'm doing. I just always am. But I didn't get that overnight, without proving to other people that I was worth the time of day. It's true that some graduates do go straight into working on interesting problems and shipping code, but if you're not fortunate enough to be one of them, you have to make your own career path.
The whole process of making that jump was (for me) incredibly long, arduous and stressful, full of insecurity and doubt. When I wasn't implementing my solution, I was busy worrying about whether I was wasting my time or whether anyone would take me seriously. And when I had a demo-able implementation, I had to design presentations, set up meetings, and justify my design choices in front of people who were way the hell more experienced than me. But it was an incredibly rewarding experience.
Bottom line, my education didn't prepare me for any of that. The fact that I wasn't entitled to work on the exciting stuff, that I had to do the non-engineering grunt work of selling my solution
Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:3, Insightful)
Allowing people access to the documentation simply filters by people who are "good at using documentation".
I think the OP's point was somewhat missed. It doesn't matter what the useful one-liner is in PHP, Perl, Java or whatever. Any fool can memorize a function name / syntax, likewise any fool can look up the function in the documentation. Unfortunately most of those fools ALSO have the ability to use the function in completely the WRONG context.
The point of the exercise is to say to the candidate, IF you had to code this function manually, what steps would be necessary to achieve the SAME as "print reverse $string". And that is where the men are separated from the boys so to speak, as I'd like to bet half of them have never thought about it.
The skill is NOT how many different languages you know. Once you can apply the core fundamentals of programming, any new language you need is just a matter of learning syntax and symantics. But if you can't even manage the code to reverse a string, you are NOT a programmer, you are a cut and paste script kiddy.
And about 5 centuries later... (Score:1, Insightful)
"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."
- Plato, attributed to Socrates
("cross their legs"?)
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:3, Insightful)
As a clinically diagnosed narcissist, I find this list to be pretty inaccurate.
True. The list describes someone with histrionic personality disorder, not a narcissist. The two are often confused, but work fairly differently. Both types make interesting conversation partners and horrible relatives. :P
universities also have a different goal (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at least, they traditionally did, and we haven't really figured out as a whole what we want to transition to.
Historically, only a small percentage of people got university degrees. Professors were (and in many places still are) first and foremost researchers; their real job is not teaching, but advancing their field and publishing their results. A secondary job is research mentorship: they advise and supervise graduate students as the next generation of researchers. A tertiary job is teaching of undergraduate material, to historically only a small percentage of the population that had a need to learn advanced-level stuff from an expert in the field. Those people were generally expected, furthermore, to be interested in and to benefit from a well-rounded education rather than only training in their specific area, e.g. to become scientists who also had an understanding of ethics and history.
Today, it's more or less expected in many areas that you have a college degree. As a result, a lot of people go to university mainly as a sort of certification that qualifies them for jobs. They don't necessarily want the traditional liberal education, even the science version of it; they want vocational training. But universities were not really set up to provide that, and their staff are entirely the wrong ones to provide it: the people publishing CS research papers and the people who would be good at teaching a vocational programming class that prepares one for a role as C++ programmer in industry are only occasionally the same.
That's why we historically had separate trade schools and vocational schools, which did focus on practical skills, and had teachers who were focused on teaching such skills. But there's been a sort of prestige treadmill so companies want you to have a University Degree for a job that actually need vocational training, not a well-rounded liberal-arts education with mentorship from a PhD researcher.
There's a lot of possible solutions, of course. One is to go back to the old model, where universities do research and teach a small percentage of the population, and vocationally focused institutions teach most people. The most likely, though, is probably a gradual morphing of universities into a superset of the two kinds of institutions. Already it's becoming common to hire lecturers to teach introductory classes, and some schools are offering variations on degrees to let students opt between more traditional university majors or more applied vocational majors; often this also leads to a parallel split between staff who are mainly "teaching faculty" versus "research faculty".
Re:More than just kids-these-days (Score:1, Insightful)
I've been teaching rarely at a major university in Texas. I cross several disciplines, which means I see a broader cross-section of kids than a lot of my colleagues. Most recently, I was asked to teach a senior-level operating systems class when in summer school, when a colleague was hospitalized at the last minute.
With three kids in the class who had to have it to graduate, and two more who weren't graduating that summer, I was pleasantly surprised that they showed up every day. I was less than happy with interaction, or interest in doing homework, outside work, etc. I'm not even sure any of them actually opened the book, although the fact that they all passed the open-book tests suggests they might have.
All, including those who were not graduating that August, did have jobs lined up, although how two of them justified a Computer Engineering degree made them qualified web programmers (and that was their aspiration) is beyond me. That said, I've seen it before, and I've been counseled that once they get the degree, they can do anything they want.
One thing we see on our campus that supports the snowflake hypothesis is the 'helicopter parent' syndrome. A bad test score, and mommy (and/) or daddy comes rushing to my office to see why I'm not teaching Precious appropriately. It's obviously my fault that a bad test score... with a normal distribution and a reasonable number of A's... is indicative of my inability to teach. I've also had a senior level class where I intentionally removed the mysticism of calculus from the subject matter, but left in a reasonable expectation they'd know algebra and a bit of geometry, and the result was revolt: How dare I require seniors to remember any of that nasty old math, anyway.
I do think we're seeing a lot of kids whose preparation for college, and later life, was hampered by their secondary education where A's and B's were awarded for mediocre work, and they've come to expect more of the same. My grading is designed to reward those who master the limited scope of material I can cover in a one-semester class, but that's not enough anymore.
Did I mention that our university just instituted bonuses for faculty who have the highest student-based popularity scores?
Narcissism? (Score:3, Insightful)
What you're describing is naivete. So what if they have a misleading picture of the working world? That's a property of youth in general, and will be corrected soon enough. The question is how they deal with the resulting disappointment: do they chalk it up to a learning experience, or do they whine and moan about how unfair it is? Only the latter is arguably narcissism.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:2, Insightful)
Several years later and after two years of unimpressive and uninteresting work sitting in a glorified cubicle (just because the walls go all the way to the ceiling and there's a door) customizing form letters, I said screw it and... oh wait, I'm still here.
The difference now is that I am grateful for my job. I was very arrogant coming out of college and into my first job. I expected the world, which, of course, wasn't delivered. Sometimes you need beat down a little to get a more accurate perception on life.
Re:The real issue: "seniority" based pay (Score:2, Insightful)
Nope, sorry. Operational experience trumps specs every time, especially in networking. I'm naturally inclined to side with the oldster and join in the kid-bashing, but I've seen too many cases where following the spec instead of actual current practice was a colossal mistake. Without knowing more of the details, I'd go with the kid in most cases like this.
To be fair, the young developer was very smart, and I would have trusted him to figure things out. What I was trying to point out was that the young developer had observed the network environment and come up with his own conclusions about how it worked. His conclusions were accurate *for his one observed network*. However, he did not know the underlying reasons for his conclusions, and thus had assumed that all networking environments worked the same. The senior developer had indeed co-authored the original RFC, and was still very up to date on the related technologies and implementations. The senior developer presented the underlying details of the design that the young developer did not know.
Ultimately, everyone is different. Some senior developers are dusty old relics who don't keep up with the modern times. Some are still rockstars and will be the backbone of any company smart enough to employee them. Many are probably in the middle of those two extremes.
Some young developers are often under trained in practical application, quick to spout off terms and general knowledge but without regard to all the potential problems and ramifications. Some young developers are also rockstars. Many are probably in the middle of those two extremes.
Re:Obligatory (Score:1, Insightful)
It's amazing how articulate Hesiod was considering English wasn't a language in his time.
Re:Precious Snowflakes (Score:3, Insightful)
Heck, fly from LA to New York City for a meeting and you'll burn 1.5 days for travel.
Lots of foreigners don't grasp just how big the USA is. An American could spend two weeks vacation in a different state every year and only get minimal exposure to the country as a whole. And the US isn't the largest country out there by far. A friend spent a week in Austrailia and commented that they were amazed at how much ocean-front property is completely uninhabited - in the US you couldn't find an inch of coastline that doesn't have some kind of house on it. The interior might as well be Mars for the most part.
You can travel across three countries in Europe in the time it takes to drive across a larger state in the US. And let's not even talk about Canada, China, or the Ukraine.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, believe me, I know what's going on. What's going on is discrimination and it's illegal, but difficult to prove. First of all I'd like to pit older workers as far as sick time and health insurance use compared to a young family man or woman. I would wager the idea that older workers, on average, are sicker or use more insurance is bogus. That may have been the case when insurance only covered major medical, but that makes no sense now that insurance covers everything, including doctor's visits. The young have the children, become injured and often have to take off time for not only themselves, but their children. I have yet to see larger companies as self-insured. Every company I've worked for uses an insurance company. And keep in mind that employees are paying increasing costs.
Older workers are not going to job-jump after 6 months. There's enough of us having to take jobs at Wal-Mart or other lower paying jobs just to GET work. But younger workers will because they have the mistaken belief they'll always be employable.
Contractors are also not included in the "headcount" like employees are. So a manager can make brownie points for hiring a series of contractors instead of increasing their headcount even if there is a need for a full-time employee.
And they may be paying a hefty premium to the agency. But trust me, the worker is getting, on average, the same amount they'd get paid if they were on the job. There are no benefits save a few days holiday pay (usually less than average full-time employee) after working several hundred hours and a week's pay in lieu of vacation day after about 9 months of solid work. If I was making such a windfall, I'd be able to afford my own insurance. And I actually wouldn't MIND working contract if I could have similar benefits.
I suspect that discrimination is more than just actual costs. I would love to see a study in Canada to see if older workers are more employable because the company isn't paying their health insurance. I'll bet they have the same problems because they are due more to stereotypes. It just pisses me off when employers then whine how their young prodigies have unrealistic expectations, can't dress properly and how they have to run over and wipe their nose every five minutes. You (the employer) get what you paid for. You've got inexperienced kids who think they're going to reinvent business just so you can offer them less. When you want someone who can get the job done, give me a call.
Re:Oh they'll crash all right (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm confused. Do you only bill your clients for the "actual hours of production"?
I would assume not. If a coder spends an eight hour day tasked to Client Project X, I'm guessing you bill the entire eight hours, even if he took bathroom breaks, even if he's taking longer to accomplish than he would with a couple of years under his belt.
Also, given that your n00b employees are inherently less valuable, isn't that all the more reason to throw them at interesting, experimental things that may not pan out?
IOW, it sounds to me like you're inflating your figures so you can come up with a big number to throw at any employee with the temerity to come to you, Oliver Twist-like, and say, "Please sir, may I have something more interesting?"
Honestly, I mean no disrespect here. But it sounds to me like your operating premise is that work is supposed to be drudgery, and that fun, interesting work is a product of "stupid money". Now, that's certainly a valid way to run a business, but it's definitely one that will turn off quite a few potential employees, some of whom would be great hires.