The Rise and Rise of the Cognitive Elite 671
hessian writes "As technology advances, the rewards to cleverness increase. Computers have hugely increased the availability of information, raising the demand for those sharp enough to make sense of it. In 1991 the average wage for a male American worker with a bachelor's degree was 2.5 times that of a high-school drop-out; now the ratio is 3. Cognitive skills are at a premium, and they are unevenly distributed."
The More Young College Grads I Meet... (Score:4, Interesting)
...the more I look to hire high school drop-outs and illegal immigrants.
Seriously, don't Kids These Days want to put in a full day's work and pay some dues any more?
huh (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Class Difference (Score:2, Interesting)
There are a lot of not-so-smart people with degrees.
Claim: Statistically speaking, the difference in intelligence between those with and without college degrees is large. Do you deny this claim? Because if not, your statement quoted above seems meaningless.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Interesting)
I strongly suspect that the gap is widening not because "smart" people are more in demand, but because "not so smart" people are becoming less in demand.
Take one economy. Remove the manufacturing jobs. Watch as the percentage of jobs held by people with college degrees goes up, and the wages on the rest of them go down due to the oversupply of people without.
Re:I call BS (Score:2, Interesting)
A good coder might produce a few times his salary in profit for the company. (a great coder even more) but a really fantastic salesman who can get the really big projects or negotiate a 10% better price on a big contract can make the company more money in a day than the coders can in a year.
now of course without the coders he doesn't have anything to sell but it's basically a matter of being in a position where your actions have an immediate and massive effect on the bottom line.
Someone who can schmooze with the best of them and make the other guy tipsy enough to sign up for something really really expensive can be worth his weight in gold.... or even platinum.
Re:Class Difference (Score:5, Interesting)
But the big problem with HR departments is all the unqualified people who do apply for a job.
I just filled a position for a telecom tech. Our simple requirements were that they had to have at least 5 years experience with voice, 1 year of data, and not a convicted felon.
I got > 300 resumes. I think it was closer to 400 actually. But what it all boils down to is, when you get me your resume, you have 30 seconds to impress me -- for it go to into the "I'll look at this one more closely" pile. Not having a college degree makes you much less impressive when I have a stack of 200 people who do. Unless there is something else extremely impressive about you, you won't get a second look.
For me, a person who has finished college tends to be a much more rounded individual. Sure, the guy who dropped out of high-school may be the brightest guy on the block, but I don't know that, and I don't have the time to find out. Espically in my field, education is very important (not just higher learning, but simply learning new technologies), and if you don't seem willing to even learn anything past the basics, it makes you a much less qualified applicant.
Re:The More Young College Grads I Meet... (Score:4, Interesting)
The story goes, as I've heard, that one day a work consultant came to my company and offered to analyze their work practices to see if they could discover any positive or negative patterns. One thing they noted in their survey of the staff was that the more productive employees, the ones who had stayed on with the company for a decade, were the ones that had been referred to the company by a current employee. Since then, the company has offered a generous referral bonus for signing up friends.
Re:Money helps. A lot. [Re:Class Difference] (Score:4, Interesting)
I want employees that can do hard things.
Or at well off layabouts, which was the point being made.
Sure, the poor can get through college with a lot of work.
Thus rendering them almost equal to the rich who can coast through college on the family dime.
I say 'almost' because the poor still won't have connections, and can't wait around months looking for a job. They'll get a job working for someone who just graduated from a 'good school' by doing half the work.
Assuming, of course, they don't get killed or maimed during their military service, fighting whatever war the rich want Or there's stop loss and they can't leave.
Just because things are 'possible' for the poor doesn't mean we don't have a class system.
Re:Class Difference (Score:4, Interesting)
Urban legend or not, it's not far off the truth when you have hundreds of resumes to sort. I've done this. I worked as senior systems administrator for a small high tech firm. We decided we needed a help desk guy, and I was asked to be the primary decision maker. I wasn't actually the hiring manager, but I was basically told that the hiring manager would take whatever I recommended. Then they dumped a hundred-plus resumes on my desk.
Let me tell you that it's all but impossible to make an intelligent and informed decision on hiring from a hundred 1-2 page documents. First pass I went through and tossed all the blatantly illiterate or unqualified. Second pass I kept anyone with a degree or 3 years of experience (completely arbitrary, but I was getting desperate). Third pass I looked at the relevance of the degree/experience more closely. By the fourth pass I still had 10 resumes. Basically you wound up getting an interview if you had a degree *and* relevant experience (assuming that your resume wasn't written in crayon or leet speak). It was the best I could do. For an entry level job there's just not that much to really judge people on.
I'm a hundred percent certain that somewhere in that pile of ~95 discarded resumes was at least one person better than at least one of the five I chose for interviews, but I had to draw lines somewhere. It's not like I knew these people.