Slightly off topic, but I'm reading A song of Ice and Fire and one of the main characters is named Tyrion. I didn't know how to say that shit and he is pretty gangster, so whenever I read I just go with Tyrone.
I feel like the opposite of all the other college grads. I just graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering from a very good school and I'm convinced that I'm unemployable.
I'll raise you (the awesomeness starts at 0:35): Oh in other news, we decided to go with a neutral name: Lomax.
This fucking boggles my mind. I thought you people were being gobbled up by the military industrial complex like cinnamon rolls on Sunday morning. If the smart, educated, qualified people can't get jobs the rest of us are really fucked.
Not to infect the WDT with seriousness, but this book kind of hits on what it means these days to be "qualified" and "employable." It's well worth a read. I've mentioned it on here before, and I rather enjoy it. tl;dr: it's not necessarily about how smart or educated you are. It's about having job skills that, you know, society actually fucking needs. That's why I never feel sorry for people who end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt to get liberal arts degrees.
Playstation Network was overloaded with people changing their passwords, so they had to shut it down for 30 minutes to get things caught up. That might've been what happened. Ours hasn't given us any issues, and my wife has been on Netflix all day.
Quad Cities... whaaaa? In some hole called Rock Island, IL. After hours in the car I actually smiled when I saw that there's a Bennigan's attached to the hotel. Beer time.
Looong weekend. Travelled down to DC for my sister's law school graduation. Say what you want about the value of a law degree, she wanted one and got one. Plus there were some pretty nice pictures. Maybe I'll post one when my aunt sends them out. That couldn't backfire, right? Posting a picture of my sister here? Anyway, she went to an HBCU, so it was basically fancy black folk Olympics in there. I wish I had bought a bunch of stock in pinstriped suits that are just slightly too big.
I think there's been a shift recently from credentialism back closer to a true meritocracy. If you talk to older people who have any role in hiring for big companies, it's mostly a game of check the box. Do you have the right degree with the minimum GPA, and can you claim enough years of experience? If so, you get the job. I think that's why so many Boomer parents pushed their kids into getting useless degrees. Who cares? All you needed was to be able to honestly say you were a college grad and you'd get a job! Now though, it seems like there's a lot more emphasis on actually being able to do something. It's good for our society at large, but really screws a lot of college kids who made the dumb mistake of listening to the message repeated by everyone around them.
So I am sitting here listening to John Denver, and I will admit it, I am happier than a pig in shit. He is my guilty pleasure. Though it is a bit weird that I can look out my window and see where he died.
This sort of happened to me. Thank god I didn't have to go into debt to do it. Living in a state that will pay all of your tuition kicked major ass.
And the 800-pound gorilla in that corner is that it is both more difficult and less profitable to actually create value than it is to legally steal the value someone else creates, through various forms of rent-seeking (financial chicanery, regulatory arbitrage, buying Congressman, etc. etc.)* Back on focus: I'm now switching to Kirkland-brand bourbon and vodka. Delicious and cost-effective. The Franzia boxed wine, however, has been judged an experiment not to be repeated. More focus: *Shamelessly borrowed from Scott Adams on sales: It is easier and more profitable to fool ten idiots than to persuade one informed and logical customer (or something like that).
Having been in the role of hiring grads for big companies - I have some experience with this. When graduation season comes around, as an employer for a nationally recognised name and grad resume maker, you list a role on whatever job listing resource you use. You get applications from 80% of the grads in the current pool, and a huge number of other random wahoo's who for whatever reason want a grad entry position. You look at the eleventy million resumes and need some way to sort them. You just apply filters until you get the list down to a managable number. You throw all the resumes into some recruiters package that smart filters them and you look for GPA, role specific key words, experience indications, names that sound like they might be hot, and if they have a facebook page that you can look at. Basically, you find any bullshit you can to justify picking a dozen basically interchangable candidates out of eleventy million basically interchangable resumes. And you turn into more of an asshole as the list goes on. Half the time it's completely random - if they don't have a facebook profile that makes them look fun at parties, they get discarded, if they haven't throught to secure their facebook profile like a responsible professional, they get discarded, etc. Eventually you get the list down to a managable size, and you start calling them in for interviews. The interviews are excrutiating - as the best resumes usually belong to the worst candidates. You feel undescribably old when you interview grads for their first grown up job - even if you've only been out of school for a couple of years yourself. You resist the overwhelming urge to shake them and tell them to find their passion, and just suicide now if their passion is contract law or accounting, or white collar IT. You hire the ones you like, usually based on personal feeling in the interview, but backed up with some self justifying bullshit so you can justify the decision to your boss if the new hire turns out to be incompetent, and you file the other resumes in a directory that you'll never look at again. This makes me sound cynical - but every white collar type who's been dumped with doing the new entrant selection process does it exactly the same way, most of them just won't admit it. HR Drones and professional recruiters occasionally have marginally less cynicism about the process - but since they usually don't know a fucking thing about the job they're hiring for, the end up doing it exactly the same way. Recruiting entry level positions is a crap shoot - all you ever do is try and reduce the number of hopeless losers who slip through, and cover your ass for when you accidentally hire someone dangerously incompetent. The thing is, in large scale white collar roles, the person doing the recruiting just needs to cover their ass enough to not get fired, or in some cases needs to hire well enough to get the new employee through a three month trial - and they get whatever money they're going to get for doing the job. And it's really fucking hard to reasonably judge how good an employee a recent grad is going to be. If I actually care - I'm much more likely to hire someone if they've worked with someone I know in the past. An informal reference given off the record, from someone I know - is a vastly superior indicator as to how good an employee someone will be. But that's hard enough for senior roles, it's just not possible for grad/entry level gigs.
That's what I read anyway. Also the reason I have a job. You people that are unemployed better make some connections.
First, let me point out the book I linked to earlier isn't about finding economic value in various industries; that's merely a secondary point. As the back of the book says, it "seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing." His appearance on The Colbert Report explains it better than I can. Also, the beginning of this video touches on the book's premise as well.
The thing is, when I hire say a junior database administrator as a grad - I expect that that graduate will have a bachelors degree in something to do with IT, and will have taken some classes in databases, in which he got a reasonable grade - otherwise I wouldn't bother interviewing him. The first layer of filters when discarding resumes is just about ditching people who don't have some indication of having the basic pool of knowledge. But I also expect that an IT grad will have fuck all applicable knowledge to a workplace. I've never met an IT grad who didn't have work place experience already - who actually knew what the fuck actually happens in an IT department for a major enterprise - much less how a Microsoft DBA in an enterprise environment does his job. Even if that IT grad did the Microsoft DBA certification - they might know a bit more about the tools than the average IT grad - but still probably clueless about the real world. So their resume just exists to demonstrate that they know enough to make them trainable. They have enough of a clue that we'll be training them in how to work in the real world, not in how to find the any key. You get the interview from your degree and your major and your grades. You get the job from your personality.
What's interesting to me is that kids don't seem to understand that job hunting is like a dutch auction. It's a competition. Not a direct winner-takes-all competition like American Idol, but a competition nonetheless. There are N jobs available and M candidates, where M > N. It's not as important that you're in the #1 or #2 slot; what matters is that you're in the top N. And you do this by distinguishing yourself from the other candidates. There are a dozen different things you could do to distinguish yourself. Greater education. Greater experience. Some special skill-set. By getting personal recommendations. By getting personal references within your professional network. Publications. A portfolio of outside work. "What you know" is an element of many of these. "What you've done" is another. "Who you know" is another. It's not any one of those things, it's any combination of the above that puts you above the line compared to your peers. Greater education is worth less and less when finding a job not necessarily because of inherent flaws in education, but because everybody else has a Bachelor's degree and everybody else is getting a Masters. A lot of things that make a good employee are very, very hard to tell without working with the person. This is why recommendations matter so much. We got a crop of interns last year. All were academically very strong but a good number of them were from rock-star institutions. The guy I got was from a good school, but the thing that distinguished him is that he could figure shit out on his own. He absolutely rocked ass on the project I gave him, not because he was some technical genius (though he was good) but because he would stick with a problem and if whatever he was doing didn't work, he'd come up with and try something else until it worked. At the end of the summer, the consensus was that I had won the "intern lottery." Sadly there is no way for me to really tell, looking at a resume, whether a person can figure shit out on their own. It's nearly impossible. There are secondary indicators, but ultimately you just have to work with somebody. A personal recommendation is worth so much because you can find out about these oft-hidden abilities directly. On a related note, resumes have to be nearly the worst way to understand people ever. It is far, far too easy to stretch the truth, and you're penalized for not doing it. I don't put shit on my resume that I can't back up 100%, and if I do I put it there with a caveat (Foo technology - a couple projects many years ago). A buddy of mine is looking for jobs and his resume makes him look better than me in some respects, even though he's got about 1/5th the experience. He has a list of projects on there as long as my arm. It doesn't matter that he did a low-complexity non-critical path 1% of that project, he's got it on there and can legitimately claim that he worked that project. I can't bring myself to do that sort of thing. Sure, he might get called out on it in an interview, but if he can describe what the overall project was in detail, I bet he can pass muster there, also. Thankfully I have not had to rely on a resume for many years and would like to keep it that way. But anyway, if you want a job, figure out what your peers don't have, and work on that. Just getting internships or working part-time in college is a major discriminator. Having a portfolio of non-classwork to point to helps also. All those things are secondary indicators to me that a person did not just do the minimum - that they actually acted somewhat proactively. In a world of identical resumes, that can be the difference that makes a difference.