The real entry-level jobs are disappearing

At least for us when hiring over 30 years that I ran my company, we never had a job where a degree was your sole ticket to an entry level job. I always looked for some practical experience: summer job, some independent research project, or just something they did on the side. I want to see the kid had done something other than coasting through college.

I think in all the years I only ever had to let one college new hire go (and that was during a piece of expansion where I didn't bother to screen all the new hires).
 
We keep stacking up regulations and costs for business here in the USA. Many are very happy to continue to do so, they don't see the consequences or don't care.
 
If you create your own entry level job(s) you will begin training yourself for creating higher level jobs.

Knock on doors, you can find opportunity in neighborhoods, industrial parks, retail locations, construction sites, recreational facilities, ...etc.

Sometimes instead of applying for an existing job you need to identify an unfulfilled need and solicit your services.
 
I would try and find a future proof job, with some protection in the form of trade licensing and/or experience requirements. If I was going to work for entry level wages, I'd make sure it leads to something. The lineman example was a great one and likely to remain an excellent career for the foreseeable future. Or how about being a plumber? When that sewer line breaks, or you have no hot water, you will pay. Both examples require years of apprenticeship and licensing, protecting you from some low baller coming in off the street. It's also infrastructure, can't be outsourced to China.
 
How many times can you overhaul an engine?
 
Alexb2000 said:
One could say that your job is maintaining the machines that cost many people their jobs. No more rooms full of secretaries typing every correspondence, mail rooms, etc. Of course the goal now is to make the technology more and more like an appliance to reduce the amount of support the systems require. It never ends, people are becoming obsolete. I can't think of a single industry that isn't focused on eliminating people.
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Or that we freed up tons of people to go do better things than be telephone operators for a living. I spent a couple of years doing that for the place, back then. Seems a hell of a lot simpler to dial a passcode these days to get into them, and a lot less error prone.

When I started, conference bridges could only conference 48 people max, we're all connected via POTS type circuits with hybrids, and sounded like ass. Nowadays any decent PC can do the job via SIP and handle hundreds, if not a couple of thousand callers.

Tech marches on. Those who decided that being a conference operator was a career choice instead of a stop off along the way, are probably still working as highly scripted and thoughtless customer service reps at places that still want humans answering the phones. Most of that was outsourced to India until cultural bias and aversion to listening to accents forced companies back to the States for such things.

The previous employer was happily building the patented infrastructure to handle tens of thousands of such workers at completely virtualized work from home based call centers, which wasn't possible when I started. They had thousands of work at home moms and dads who loved it. That tech infrastructure was maintained by 15 people. It took roughly double that to maintain the human training and management side of it.

They were bought by a company that took a different tactic. They built massive brick and mortar call centers in depressed and rural areas where folks appreciated the jobs. They had a huge facility in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, as one example. Not exactly a tech job hotbed before they came along.

Tech done right, has always been a force multiplier for business. I'm sure the folks who ran Linotype and mimeograph machines found new jobs doing something else. The whole point of tech is to make or save the company money. If the overhead of running the tech is higher than paying manual labor to do the work, the tech fails.

In the conference call biz, we used to pay high school kids to connect phone lines to investor relations conference calls (two of them for redundancy) and press record on cassette tape recorders and flip the tapes if the conference call went long. Nowadays that's all handled by simply recording a SIP stream. I wouldn't call that anything but smart. Can't count how many times a kid forgot to hit the record button and an incident report had to be filed that meant a big customer was very unhappy they couldn't get their conference call tapes sent out for dictation services.

Even all the way back then, when most things were operators answering conference calls and tapes recording them, FAA and DoD wanted full automation and touch screens. They paid thru the nose for private conference systems that were fully automated to connect TRACONs and command structures. NASA had a nifty box. It was integrated in the analog domain to 48 STU phones for encrypted conference calls.

All stuff, again, easily handled by free software (Asterisk) and a decent sized PC today. And done better with more features, faster automation, higher call density, higher encryption, and better audio quality.

I don't think anyone really wants to go back to having operators.
 
"The real entry-level jobs are disappearing" People were saying that 40 years ago too, with the tag line "You can't get a job w/o experience, and you can't get experience w/o a job." Not as much has changed as some people here would have you believe.
 
denverpilot said:
Or that we freed up tons of people to go do better things than be telephone operators for a living. I spent a couple of years doing that for the place, back then. Seems a hell of a lot simpler to dial a passcode these days to get into them, and a lot less error prone.

When I started, conference bridges could only conference 48 people max, we're all connected via POTS type circuits with hybrids, and sounded like ass. Nowadays any decent PC can do the job via SIP and handle hundreds, if not a couple of thousand callers.

Tech marches on. Those who decided that being a conference operator was a career choice instead of a stop off along the way, are probably still working as highly scripted and thoughtless customer service reps at places that still want humans answering the phones. Most of that was outsourced to India until cultural bias and aversion to listening to accents forced companies back to the States for such things.

The previous employer was happily building the patented infrastructure to handle tens of thousands of such workers at completely virtualized work from home based call centers, which wasn't possible when I started. They had thousands of work at home moms and dads who loved it. That tech infrastructure was maintained by 15 people. It took roughly double that to maintain the human training and management side of it.

They were bought by a company that took a different tactic. They built massive brick and mortar call centers in depressed and rural areas where folks appreciated the jobs. They had a huge facility in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, as one example. Not exactly a tech job hotbed before they came along.

Tech done right, has always been a force multiplier for business. I'm sure the folks who ran Linotype and mimeograph machines found new jobs doing something else. The whole point of tech is to make or save the company money. If the overhead of running the tech is higher than paying manual labor to do the work, the tech fails.

In the conference call biz, we used to pay high school kids to connect phone lines to investor relations conference calls (two of them for redundancy) and press record on cassette tape recorders and flip the tapes if the conference call went long. Nowadays that's all handled by simply recording a SIP stream. I wouldn't call that anything but smart. Can't count how many times a kid forgot to hit the record button and an incident report had to be filed that meant a big customer was very unhappy they couldn't get their conference call tapes sent out for dictation services.

Even all the way back then, when most things were operators answering conference calls and tapes recording them, FAA and DoD wanted full automation and touch screens. They paid thru the nose for private conference systems that were fully automated to connect TRACONs and command structures. NASA had a nifty box. It was integrated in the analog domain to 48 STU phones for encrypted conference calls.

All stuff, again, easily handled by free software (Asterisk) and a decent sized PC today. And done better with more features, faster automation, higher call density, higher encryption, and better audio quality.

I don't think anyone really wants to go back to having operators.
Click to expand...

I don't disagree for a minute that things are better now with technology. Still freeing up a bunch of people to do something more productive assumes they can. The most challenging thing is finding living wage jobs for Laverne and Shirley types.
 
Alexb2000 said:
I don't disagree for a minute that things are better now with technology. Still freeing up a bunch of people to do something more productive assumes they can. The most challenging thing is finding living wage jobs for Laverne and Shirley types.
Click to expand...


They'll adapt. In fact the above was almost twenty years ago so they already have. Haven't heard any stories from the old crew that anyone starved to death.
 
Henning said:
Most people my age got their entry level job and work experience while still in high school. I started working for a car dealer when I was 11, added a welding fabrication job when I was 12, and added an engine machine shop job when I was 15. I graduated High School working three jobs, most of my friends had one or two. School is not there to prepare you for life, you have to do that on your own. Nobody is going to hand you jack ****, you have to get out there, bust ass and hustle.
Click to expand...

Nice story, but hiring kids to do welding at 12 is illegal in this country. Unless your Dad, or Uncle owns the shop, no shop is going to "hire" a 12 year old. Neat up by the boot strap story, but it is not realistic for kids even back in my day and today it's even worse.

I got my first real job in a machine shop too at age 16. Today that machine shop no longer exists. They are becoming quite scarce in many towns. However, this thread isn't about first jobs and high school. It's about people doing what they were always told to do. Go to collage, get a degree and then get a good job. This path is somewhat broken now.

In the old days, companies would hire college grads with no work experience in the field. College grads today are finding they won't. The way in seems to be internships and sometimes temp agencies. There is more and more competition for less and less jobs. Bottom line is, the college degree is now just a sorting mechanism. It is a means to separate resumes before they are even read. No degree? In the trash.

To be considered for an actual interview, you need real experience. The college degree just gets somebody to read your resume. If it shows no experience in the field outside of college courses, in the trash it goes. It's an employers market and they can be very picky.

Many years ago, I realized that I was going to have to buy my own job if I wanted to make any good money, so I went deep into debt and bought my first business. So far it's worked out well enough. No more debt and a good mount of cash, so I'm currently looking to buy my next job.
 
And is any of the above (more competition, less jobs) any surprise considering the macroeconomic reality of a large wave of workers retiring? How about is any of it a surprise that same generation's owners are cashing out in any way they can, even if it means selling the company to overseas investors?

No one paying any attention hasn't seen this coming for a long long time.
 
denverpilot said:
...snip...

All stuff, again, easily handled by free software (Asterisk) and a decent sized PC today. And done better with more features, faster automation, higher call density, higher encryption, and better audio quality.
Click to expand...

Without a properly architected and well-performing network between all the endpoints, VoIP performance and reliability goes to hell in a handbag quickly. All that Asterisk (or UCM, etc) does is broker & set up the initial call session(s) between endpoints, then it's up to the endpoints themselves to talk directly to each other over whatever network linkages exist between them. Then all the saturated WAN links, cpu-bound routers with too many packet filtering ACLs, switches with poorly set up QoS policy and class maps... or lack thereof... and overall point-to-point packet loss and high latency all add together to make it sound like crap :devil:

I've been trying to train a recently hired person (well they've been with us 2 years anyway now) about how networking really works, and so far this person still cannot even grok basic stuff like subnetting and the difference between a protocol number and a port number.
 
Neal Howard said:
I've been trying to train a recently hired person (well they've been with us 2 years anyway now) about how networking really works, and so far this person still cannot even grok basic stuff like subnetting and the difference between a protocol number and a port number.
Click to expand...

I think, generally that you either have the skills (and/or can "self-teach" off the internet) or you don't.
 
Henning said:
Most people my age got their entry level job and work experience while still in high school. I started working for a car dealer when I was 11, added a welding fabrication job when I was 12, and added an engine machine shop job when I was 15. I graduated High School working three jobs, most of my friends had one or two. School is not there to prepare you for life, you have to do that on your own. Nobody is going to hand you jack ****, you have to get out there, bust ass and hustle.
Click to expand...

MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o'clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, out Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!

TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o'clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day at the mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing "Hallelujah."

MP: But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.

ALL: Nope, nope..
:rofl:
----

But seriously, when I was in junior high, i was learning how to fix electronics in my father's radio & TV repair shop and got quite good at it. Working as an electronics tech job while going thru college Also taught myself how to overhaul car engines in my early teens and built myself a nice 390 Ford big block for my '69 Cougar XR7 at age 16 and a 429CJ in a Torino Cobra at age 18 (which is probably a miracle I survived the few years ownership of that car, it was stupid fast and way too powerful for a kid to own)
 
Gerhardt said:
"The real entry-level jobs are disappearing" People were saying that 40 years ago too, with the tag line "You can't get a job w/o experience, and you can't get experience w/o a job." Not as much has changed as some people here would have you believe.
Click to expand...

Exactly. Beth steel used to have what were called "loopers" , or a person who attended college in the winter, , worked at Beth steel in summer, went on , in many cases, to work full time at Beth. Steel. This still goes on, but on a reduced scale. A buddy's nephew worked summers for an engineering firm, went to college in winter, grad. With degree in civil engineering , was immed. Hired this summer, by same company full time at excellent salary. With less education one can always make beds or flip burgers.( His sister attends military academy, plans to fly in navy cadets next year. Straight A student, honor roll high school. Etc.
 
And any HS or college experience / skills that aren't in the exact field the boss is looking for is discounted...

I grew up in the family business(es) that is in a trade distinct from what I'm doing now, but often crossed on the jobsite. I also was expected to fully understand and help with the business/management.

It's frustrating attempting to explain to many people and bosses these days: "I'm smart, work hard, have great client/customer service skills, and whatever you need I either know or can catch on real quick". Add in people who think their core work or problems are "totally unique", and :mad2::mad2::mad2:.
 
warthog1984 said:
And any HS or college experience / skills that aren't in the exact field the boss is looking for is discounted...

I grew up in the family business(es) that is in a trade distinct from what I'm doing now, but often crossed on the jobsite. I also was expected to fully understand and help with the business/management.

It's frustrating attempting to explain to many people and bosses these days: "I'm smart, work hard, have great client/customer service skills, and whatever you need I either know or can catch on real quick". Add in people who think their core work or problems are "totally unique", and :mad2::mad2::mad2:.
Click to expand...

Unless your someone like kevin plank , who sold flowers while in college, played football, went on to start under armour, and in about ten years is a billionaire. Tell him about "too many regulations". Much of that talk is really more about lack of skill and brain power. ( I worked , early on, for ten years in a family business. Nepotism is truly a night mare and watching a good company slowly come apart was very sad. )
 
Jimmy cooper said:
Unless your someone like kevin plank , who sold flowers while in college, played football, went on to start under armour, and in about ten years is a billionaire. Tell him about "too many regulations". Much of that talk is really more about lack of skill and brain power. ( I worked , early on, for ten years in a family business. Nepotism is truly a night mare and watching a good company slowly come apart was very sad. )
Click to expand...

:confused::confused::dunno:
 
Dav8or said:
Nice story, but hiring kids to do welding at 12 is illegal in this country. Unless your Dad, or Uncle owns the shop, no shop is going to "hire" a 12 year old. Neat up by the boot strap story, but it is not realistic for kids even back in my day and today it's even worse.

I got my first real job in a machine shop too at age 16. Today that machine shop no longer exists. They are becoming quite scarce in many towns. However, this thread isn't about first jobs and high school. It's about people doing what they were always told to do. Go to collage, get a degree and then get a good job. This path is somewhat broken now.

In the old days, companies would hire college grads with no work experience in the field. College grads today are finding they won't. The way in seems to be internships and sometimes temp agencies. There is more and more competition for less and less jobs. Bottom line is, the college degree is now just a sorting mechanism. It is a means to separate resumes before they are even read. No degree? In the trash.

To be considered for an actual interview, you need real experience. The college degree just gets somebody to read your resume. If it shows no experience in the field outside of college courses, in the trash it goes. It's an employers market and they can be very picky.

Many years ago, I realized that I was going to have to buy my own job if I wanted to make any good money, so I went deep into debt and bought my first business. So far it's worked out well enough. No more debt and a good mount of cash, so I'm currently looking to buy my next job.
Click to expand...


Well, the guys down the street with the carlot had a race car I followed home after it blew by my house on a quick test, the driver basically adopted me as a little brother and is still a friend today. Their friend had the fabrication, welding, and machine-shop in his garage, and that was where we built a lot of thing for their toys, and he used to hire me to do work for him, and I worked along side his daughter who became my first girlfriend. After few years doing our race engines at S&K, they started hiring me to work there during pre race rushes since I was good and a hard worker.

The great thing about America is the opportunity to do anything you want exists if you have the right attitude. All my life whenever I wanted to learn to do something, I found the best person in their field locally and talked them into giving me a job. Having a mechanical background has always been helpful as I can fix or modify whatever machines the tasks require. The main attribute I have found that stands me in good stead is a permagrin and sense of humor. People like keeping someone around that is a non complainer when it comes to getting a job done and can make even the worst boss laugh when times are tough.

Success in life is all about attitude.
 
We've got a cartoon on the wall at work, showing a prospective hire being interviewed. The HR guy is saying:

"We want to hire someone with the maturity of a 50-year-old, the life experience of a 40-year-old, the health of a 30-year-old, the energy of a 20-year-old, and the gullibility of a 10-year old...."

Ron Wanttaja
 
wanttaja said:
We've got a cartoon on the wall at work, showing a prospective hire being interviewed. The HR guy is saying:

"We want to hire someone with the maturity of a 50-year-old, the life experience of a 40-year-old, the health of a 30-year-old, the energy of a 20-year-old, and the gullibility of a 10-year old...."

Ron Wanttaja
Click to expand...
:yes:

Got passed up on another job application yesterday in airport ops. 150 other applicants is what the lady said...so I don't feel too bad.

The search continues. Where's that job cannon at?
 
Neal Howard said:
Without a properly architected and well-performing network between all the endpoints, VoIP performance and reliability goes to hell in a handbag quickly. All that Asterisk (or UCM, etc) does is broker & set up the initial call session(s) between endpoints, then it's up to the endpoints themselves to talk directly to each other over whatever network linkages exist between them. Then all the saturated WAN links, cpu-bound routers with too many packet filtering ACLs, switches with poorly set up QoS policy and class maps... or lack thereof... and overall point-to-point packet loss and high latency all add together to make it sound like crap :devil:

I've been trying to train a recently hired person (well they've been with us 2 years anyway now) about how networking really works, and so far this person still cannot even grok basic stuff like subnetting and the difference between a protocol number and a port number.
Click to expand...


Only one nitpick, Asterisk (and other things) can proxy SIP. It doesn't have to route directly. There's also other protocols (like IAX) that were better designed for proxy/NAT behavior that can also be proxied.

SIP is not the word I used. I said VoIP. It's a much broader term than just the implementations of it yesterday, today, or in the future. Anything from encapsulation into UDP frames of raw digitized audio all the way to modern VoLTE is encompassed by "VoIP". And there will be more implementations, going forward.

SIP is popular, but it isn't the only protocol for transporting audio over IP. ;)
 
overdrive148 said:
:yes:

Got passed up on another job application yesterday in airport ops. 150 other applicants is what the lady said...so I don't feel too bad.

The search continues. Where's that job cannon at?
Click to expand...


That's a bummer. Airports aren't exactly a growth industry right now.
 
denverpilot said:
That's a bummer. Airports aren't exactly a growth industry right now.
Click to expand...

True, but it would've been a great job to get. I was fairly sure I'd at least get an interview considering my experience compared to what they were looking for, much less what they preferred, but I guess not.

Off topic but still curious, how long did you spend learning what you use now for work, and would you recommend a career in tech? Can't say that I have as much of a passion for it as much as I do for aviation but I haven't actually done much in the way of coding or programming or etc but I do think that kind of stuff is neat. And apparently a lot of places are trying to hire IT or tech people in general.
 
My personal experience has been recounted so I will focus on today. I have a hard time hiring entry level people who are willing to actually work. Sure, I can find a ditz to sit and answer a phone but for real work paying real money, people don't last more than a few months. I pay decent wage but still have to hire PT all the time because most of the job seekers are flakes.

Comparing it to my two kids who just graduated, both had excellent jobs in hand before they got the pigskin. I will pay reliable entry job people but even when I raise the pay, they don't last more than 3 months, then they start coming in late or not at all. So I dock their pay and pffft! They take it personal! Like they are due for the 1.5 hours they skipped. WTF?

As long as we have an immigration problem in this country, entry jobs are not the problem willing workers is the problem. You don't start as CEO unless you start your own business like I did. If you do, be prepared to work harder for yourself that any payroll job ever.
 
docmirror said:
My personal experience has been recounted so I will focus on today. I have a hard time hiring entry level people who are willing to actually work. Sure, I can find a ditz to sit and answer a phone but for real work paying real money, people don't last more than a few months. I pay decent wage but still have to hire PT all the time because most of the job seekers are flakes.

Comparing it to my two kids who just graduated, both had excellent jobs in hand before they got the pigskin. I will pay reliable entry job people but even when I raise the pay, they don't last more than 3 months, then they start coming in late or not at all. So I dock their pay and pffft! They take it personal! Like they are due for the 1.5 hours they skipped. WTF?

As long as we have an immigration problem in this country, entry jobs are not the problem willing workers is the problem. You don't start as CEO unless you start your own business like I did. If you do, be prepared to work harder for yourself that any payroll job ever.
Click to expand...
What field do you work in?
 
overdrive148 said:
Off topic but still curious, how long did you spend learning what you use now for work, and would you recommend a career in tech? Can't say that I have as much of a passion for it as much as I do for aviation but I haven't actually done much in the way of coding or programming or etc but I do think that kind of stuff is neat. And apparently a lot of places are trying to hire IT or tech people in general.
Click to expand...


A lifetime, almost literally. First computer at 12 years old, and a passion for electronics and gadgets from before that. I was the kid who disassembled things I wasn't supposed to.

That said, I don't believe that background is necessary for tech work. Attention to detail and a pretty good memory serve better than just about anything else.

Everything in the biz is generally documented and someone willing to do grunt work can learn fast with a mentor to avoid the non-obvious mistakes.

I cut my chops traveling to customer sites as a "field engineer" (which I learned later is better described as "appeasement engineer") fixing and installing stuff that I often had never seen before. A lot of late night book and manual cracking, sometimes in the hotel room, back then... because the older guys didn't want to travel.
 
If you don't have a passion for tech, I'd avoid trying to do it just for the money ...
 
docmirror said:
As long as we have an immigration problem in this country, entry jobs are not the problem willing workers is the problem.
Click to expand...

I don't get it. What does an immigration problem have to do with people's willingness to work hard??:confused::dunno:
 
I have no idea if he is still alive, but I remember friends of mine who lived in Beverly Hils, telling me that the richest man in Bevery Hills (you know, 90210) owned a company that cleaned offices.

I keep hearing how we much legalize those 32 million illegal aliens because no one wants to do the scut work, but find it to be almost as big a lie as claiming that abortion is healthcare.
 
Of the four businesses I've owned, most of the jobs I've hired have been "entry level". Back in the day, it was newspaper distribution, and hundreds of adult delivery drivers. For the last 13 years, it's been housekeepers and desk staff at our aviation themed hotels.

Every summer, we bring over two or three foreign workers. These are college kids from all over the world, who compete to come to the U.S. to work. They are often grad students.

They pay their own way to get here. We provide them with a job that pays $9/hour. They pay for their own housing. They arrive at the start of the peak season (June) and go home at the end of the peak season (September).

Why would a grad student from Russia want to work as a housekeeper on an island in the Gulf of Mexico? Because it's GOLD on their resumes. To say "Worked in the United States" opens doors that nothing else can -- even if it was just swamping out toilets.

In the last five years we have had Mongolians, Russians, Poles, and Chinese. The Poles have been far and away the best employees we've ever had, followed closely by the Russians. They easily do TWICE the work of our American employees, show up for work on time, sober (!), and never, ever, EVER call in sick.

After working all day for us, they all take second jobs in one of the restaurants, busing tables or washing dishes. They are incredible, working machines, with a work ethic that would make my dad proud.

Training? We show these kids how we want the rooms to look, and BAM! -- they've got it, perfectly, every time, from that point on. We can train American workers for days, weeks -- sometimes forever -- and never get that level of consistency.

Why? Because they just don't care. No one ever expected them to care, from grade school until today.

Frankly, it's embarrassing to socialize with the foreign kids. When they're all together in large groups (as happens here -- there are hundreds, maybe thousands of these kids here every summer) they openly make fun of their American co-workers. And who can blame them? I find myself making excuses for Americans and their laziness. :(

The entry level jobs are here -- but no one wants to do them. Except for the grad students who will PAY THEIR WAY FROM HALF WAY AROUND THE WORLD.

:mad2: :mad2: :mad2: :mad2:
 
That's because Americans believe they have the RIGHT to do whatever they want regardless, and they have the RIGHT to never have to think about anything but themselves.
 
Henning said:
That's because Americans believe they have the RIGHT to do whatever they want regardless, and they have the RIGHT to never have to think about anything but themselves.
Click to expand...


We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. We claim we're all about freedom as we make the list of infractions bigger and bigger and bigger each year.

Freedom left for parts unknown a long long time ago.
 
denverpilot said:
We incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. We claim we're all about freedom as we make the list of infractions bigger and bigger and bigger each year.

Freedom left for parts unknown a long long time ago.
Click to expand...

What people believe and reality are rarely coinciding.
 
My folks were baby boomers, and they (both) were the first generation to go to college back when it was a novel goal that one had to strive towards. Their careers were a night and day comparison to those of my grandparents, not in terms of stability or pride, but definitely in terms of money. I think their experience has over the years, embedded itself into the collective mind of parents and children at least since generation X. College is almost a given for most folks. And that, combined with our labor workforce migrating abroad, has resulted in nearly 100% chiefs, 0% Indians in this modern age. There is literally no demand for a college grad from an average school with an average GPA in an average major. Why would there be? That describes 85% of kids 22 years old and above. And there is a lot of hate for millenials. By some measures, I am one myself (at least for those who define one as anyone born after 1980)...........and while I have a hard time seeing much in common with a kid in high school or college right now (at least from a shared childhood experiences perspective), I think I do understand the culture. But what people discount is that humans haven't changed or evolved. There were still ****ty narcissistic boomers or *gasp* greatest gens, just like there are now. And just like there were fantastically creative, inventive, and driven characters from my folks and grandfolks time, there too will be the kelly johnsons of the millenials. In any cross section of humanity, there will be a minority of wolves, and a majority of sheep. I think what is getting so much attention in the millenials is that their "sheep" so readily document their idiocy on social media. /rant :)
 
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