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Comment by eximius | Hacker News Reader

I am a 20 something who was hired for a salaried position shortly after graduation with a bachelors degree in math. I bought a house less than a year later (granted, with an FHA loan and less than the traditional 20% down).

Most of my friends in a major field of engineering or computer science are just fine as well (IT-degrees and almost comp sci degrees don't fair as well).

The world is not as dismal as it may seem for millenials. It's just that demand for STEM +CS continues to grow while the demand for other fields is stagnant, relying on people leaving the workforce to create new openings.

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> I am a 20 something who was hired for a salaried position shortly after graduation with a bachelors degree in math. ... The world is not as dismal as it may seem for millenials. It's just that demand for STEM + CS continues to grow while the demand for other fields is stagnant, relying on people leaving the workforce to create new openings.

That means you weren't around for the dot-com bust in 2001 or so. Yes, things are good right now but the situation can go south very suddenly and with very little warning and stay bad for several years.

I work at a finance company so I'm not too worried.

EDIT: In hindsight, I see the irony of that statement. But I also know we don't get involved with the sort of schenanigans that hurt firms in the last crisis.

We're getting paid high dollar amounts while Silicon Valley is in boom, but the fact that they're contingent on appearing daily in Bay Area offices means the long-term stability of home ownership is off the table for us. And with booms come busts: many of us work for companies that hemorrhage investor cash.

Even if your present employer is stable, it seems likely that tens of thousands of us will be competing with you for your next job, and bidding down its wages.

In making high-dollar salaries, we're doing better than most, but don't confuse $150k Senior Engineer positions for 25-year-olds at 5-year-old companies with long-term stability.

Similar situation here. I'm a 20-something with a Bachelors in MIS. I make $80,000 in the Dallas area, and consider myself stable.

I also took out a sizable chunk of student loan debt for my degree, and have paid it off already, so now I'm debt-free and employed. Nearly every one of my friends and peers are in a similar boat. No apocalypse here, yet.

I also grew up in a non-nuclear family with a single mother and 2 siblings.

Just curious, did you have a stable upbringing, two parents and did you and your friends belong to the middle class?

Yes. Not sure what precisely defines middle class, we might have been at the upper end of it. Private schools, we lived overseas for a while.

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